A country in descent - When America's skies grow emptier, paychecks stop coming, and Trump's economy revolves around artificial values

America’s skies are thinning. Planes take off later, some not at all. And down below, in the glow of radar screens, sit men and women who have not been paid for weeks. It is day 27 of the government shutdown, and the air traffic controllers - the invisible nervous system of aviation - are working at their limit: exhausted, overworked, unpaid. What at first looked like a bureaucratic dispute in Washington has become the anatomy of a creeping paralysis. On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration reported nationwide staffing shortages: 20-minute delays in Dallas, 40 in Newark, and just as many in Austin, where operations had to be halted entirely for a time. Even in Los Angeles, where planes normally take off by the minute, traffic stalled. Half an hour of standstill in the skies is enough to affect millions, because behind every flight stand supply chains, contracts, families, medical transports.

The country that once invented speed is forgetting how to move forward.

Since Donald Trump radically cut the number of government employees, more than 100,000 workers in infrastructure, air safety, energy regulation, and public service have been laid off. Among them are many who had been painstakingly rehired in the years after the pandemic. The effect is now visible: while billions flow into new AI projects, the people who keep real systems running are missing. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had tried to project optimism. But even he had to admit over the weekend that “more and more air traffic controllers are calling in sick” - a silent protest by those who no longer know how to pay rent or buy medicine. “That’s a sign the controllers are at the end,” Duffy said. His words sounded factual, but the sentence echoed like a diagnosis of the entire country.

Because America’s crisis is not one that only affects its airspace. It runs like a paralysis through everything that once signified movement. Construction sites stand still, government services are offline, scientists in federal labs wait for funding. The public sector, for decades the backbone of national stability, has been thinned out because an ideology believed the market would take care of it.

But the market, as it exists today, is no longer real.

The new growth no longer comes from labor, innovation, or production, but from data, speculation, and code. While real people lose their jobs, the government reports a “technological surplus” - fed by artificial intelligence and crypto-based financial architecture. The American economy, it seems, is staying afloat with something that exists only in algorithms. AI and crypto are replacing what no longer grows in the real world. Nowhere is the paradox clearer than in aviation: billions flow into the automation of control systems, while those who operate them can no longer pay their electric bills. The FAA is struggling with 3,000 missing air traffic controllers - “the lowest staffing level in decades,” warned NATCA President Nick Daniels. Many of his members have been working mandatory overtime for weeks, six days a week, without pay. Others are giving up.

At airports, union members are handing out flyers these days. They explain how the shutdown is eroding the system - but between the lines, one reads something else: a fatigue that has become a symbol. Responsibility for the ongoing shutdown lies squarely with the president. Donald Trump has turned it into a political weapon to pressure his own population. What began as a budget dispute has long since become an ideological battle against the country’s social foundation. Behind the closed doors of the White House, it is no longer about numbers but about principles: about the end of affordable health care, about cuts to food assistance, about the dismantling of programs that keep millions of Americans from falling into poverty. Trump’s policies are no longer aimed at political opponents, but at his own people - at those he claims to protect.

Trump is driving his own people into poverty and despair - a development that should be far more than just a warning for Germany. Because if parties like the AfD ever assume government responsibility, this madness toward one’s own citizens could easily repeat itself here.

Because the real shutdown is not happening in government offices but in the minds of those who keep the country running. When the state abandons its employees, it loses not only its workforce - it loses trust, meaning, and future. The planes will fly again, eventually. But the question remains how long there will still be people in the towers to guide them. When everything that counts exists only virtually, when artificial intelligence and artificial values replace human labor - what, then, remains real in a country that once united heaven and earth? America stands still now, looking up at a sky that grows ever emptier.