For the first time in more than four years, the Tri-Cities Airport saw a decline in passengers leaving its gates in September compared to a year ago, a potential side effect of the year’s economic instability and turmoil in the federal government.

And the recent announcement the Federal Aviation Administration will curtail 10% of daily air traffic, or about 3,300 flights, to ease strain on unpaid air traffic controllers during a historic government shutdown is likely to further impact passenger counts.

The airport recorded 38,766 enplanements – people boarding a flight from Pasco to another destination – a decline of nearly 750 passengers, or 2%, compared to September 2024, according to airport statistics data. All told, 363,591 have flown out of the Tri-Cities Airport so far in 2025.

Airport director Buck Taft told Port of Pasco commissioners at one of its public meetings in September he anticipated passenger traffic would slow. He attributed the decline in air travel to the region’s federal agencies and contractors limiting expenses in response to uncertainty around the federal budget and then possible government shutdown.

Taft told the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business that he still thinks the airport can reach 500,000 enplanements by the end of 2025, even as the federal government shutdown stretched through the entirety of October and federal workers were furloughed or laid off.

But those comments came before the FAA began limiting air traffic. The Pasco airport is not on the list of 40 airports that will see the reductions, but nine of the 10 airports that have routes in and out of the Tri-Cities are. The only airport that doesn’t is the Phoenix-Mesa airport served by Allegiant. 

But which flights will be impacted is not known, and Taft said during a Nov. 6 press conference that travelers should regularly check the status of scheduled flights with their airline to determine if they will be affected by planned cancellations. 

“Unfortunately, we’re like the passenger. We find out the same time they find out,” Taft said.

Enplanements, which do not include those flying into the Tri-Cities, have grown steadily since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when the airport recorded just 188,959 passengers. And the Tri-Cities Airport has bucked the trend of many airports in recent years struggling to maintain passenger counts and flights.

The airport saw the most growth in passenger counts in the first three months of 2025, with between 10% and 13% per month. But that growth slowed quickly in April, which recorded just 3% growth in passengers compared to the same month in 2024. Outside of September’s decline, August had the least growth, at 2%, or 950 passengers, over August 2024.

If the airport sees flat growth in departures for each of the remaining three months of the year, it will just exceed 500,000 passengers for the year.

U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Washington, met with Tri-Cities air traffic controllers, Transportation Security Administration workers and other federally-funded aviation workers on Nov. 6 to understand how the federal shutdown is affecting them. 

“Outwardly it looks like it’s going very smooth, and, thankfully, inwardly it is going smoothly,” Newhouse said during the press conference. “How many people would do that for 37 days now, do their very important jobs without getting paid?” 

The congressman said the shutdown. was completely avoidable from the start. 

“I’m not proud of this at all. I think we should be in Washington, D.C. I think Congress should be doing its job,” he said.

As of Nov. 10, the Senate had advanced a continuing resolution that would reopen the government, though it still must pass through Senate procedural steps and then gain approval from the House.