Air travel in America is expected to hit new turbulence this week as transportation hubs around the nation experience further delays from a government shutdown, foreshadowing gridlock ahead of America’s peak travel day of the year — Thanksgiving eve.

A ground stop at Newark early Sunday — in response to a shortage of air traffic controllers — set off a wave of rolling delays at Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. 

Flight Aware’s Misery Map showed more than 17,000 delays and more than 500 cancellations of flights by Sunday evening. Aviation officials said the delays and cancellations are expected to last into Monday afternoon. 

“Delays at EWR often spread to JFK and LaGuardia so travelers flying to, from, or through NYC should expect schedule changes, gate holds, and missed connections. Anyone flying today should check flight status before heading to the airport and expect longer waits,” New York City’s Emergency Management Agency reported Sunday.

The head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Sean Duffy, said  the slowdown in air travel is not a safety threat, but the shortage of air traffic controllers slowing departures and arrivals is creating ongoing logjams that will last as long as the shutdown continues. He said without paychecks, young controllers don’t have a lot of options. 

“As I have traveled around the country and talked to air traffic controllers, they’ve told me that a lot of them can navigate missing one paycheck. None of them can manage missing two paychecks. And they’re like every American family,” Mr. Duffy said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Air travel delays are not the only symptom of the standoff in Washington; other transportation networks are also feeling the pinch.

“I have train inspectors who are working to keep our trains running, and running safely. They’re working without pay. I have pipeline inspectors, same thing. Across the system, we have a number of people who are working without pay. We talk about the air traffic controllers but I have thousands of employees who are showing up, doing the work, and trying to keep this system safe for the American people. All the while, they don’t get paid to do it,” Mr. Duffy said.

Last week, the White House released a video of the heads of the Teamsters, Air Traffic Controllers, Transportation Workers, and other unions urging Congress to make a deal so that their members in the federal workforce could get paid.

“We want to make sure that no family is left behind and that Congress gets back in that room and makes the deal that they should have made a long time ago,” said the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Sean O’Brien. 

While transportation routes face slowdowns, the weekend’s cut-off of food stamp benefits — the result of empty administrative offices responsible for transferring federal largesse to state coffers — has also raised the specter that Thanksgiving could be a bust for millions of households.

The Department of Agriculture forecasts that average store-bought grocery prices for 2025 will rise 2.4 percent in 2025, less than the 20-year average. However, the American Farm Bureau Federation reports that this year’s turkey is expected to cost an average $1.32 per pound, or 38 cents more than last year, primarily because fewer turkeys have hatched since an avian flu outbreak this year culled flocks by 600,000. 

While the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said last month that Thanksgiving will go on, though perhaps not with federal funding for millions of SNAP beneficiaries, Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday one way to ensure a happy Thanksgiving is to end the shutdown.

“The best way for SNAP benefits to get paid is for five Democrats to cross the aisle and reopen the government,” he told CNN.