With help from Lauren Gardner, Kathryn A. Wolfe, Jennifer Scholtes, Tanya Snyder and Doug Palmer

YAKETY YAK: DOT finally issued its proposed rule on in-flight voice calls on Thursday — nearly three years after transportation regulators first indicated they were weighing using their power to ban them, in light of the FCC considering the opposite. But the department isn’t going so far as to propose an outright ban on voice calls that could be made over Wi-Fi, instead suggesting a requirement for airlines and ticket agents to disclose if calls are allowed on a flight before consumers purchase tickets.

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Don’t talk back? The department is seeking comment on whether it should ban gabbing on the phone in midair completely, but as our Lauren Gardner and Kathryn A. Wolfe write, “unless the incoming Donald Trump DOT takes up that battle, the matter now effectively rests with the FCC and, eventually, individual airlines.” MT rounded up some reactions to DOT’s proposal Thursday night:

— Jean Medina, a spokeswoman for Airlines for America, said the industry trade group doesn’t believe the government needs to get involved in the issue of banning calls. “We have long held that this was not a matter for DOT to regulate, and we believe airlines should be able to determine what services can be safely offered in flight and make those decisions based on what is in the best interests of their passengers and crewmembers,” she said.

— Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said the airline has “no plans to allow voice calls onboard” its flights. “In the past, our customers have expressed concerns regarding the potentially disruptive nature of in-flight voice calls,” Parrish said. American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein referred a request for comment to A4A, but noted that the carrier prohibits voice calls in flight. Luke Punzenberger, a spokesman for United, said the company is “reviewing the proposal and will carefully evaluate the views of our customers and crew members on this topic.” In 2013, then-CEO of Delta Richard Anderson wrote in a memo that research and feedback showed the airline’s frequent flyers thought voice calls “would be a disruption” and airline employees said “definitively that they are not in favor of voice calls onboard.”

— Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International President Sara Nelson blasted the proposal in a statement, calling anything short of a total ban “reckless.” “It threatens aviation security and increases the likelihood of conflict in the skies,” she said. “It threatens safety for crews and passengers.”

HAPPY FRIDAY: Thanks for tuning in to POLITICO’s Morning Transportation, your daily tipsheet on all things trains, planes, automobiles and ports. Please send tips, feedback and, of course, song lyrics to bgurciullo@politico.com or @brigurciullo.

“I was on standby, catching the redeye. I missed by flight. She didn't mind.”

Want to keep up with MT’s song picks? Follow our Spotify playlist.

SPECTER OF A SHUTDOWN: Democrats in the Senate are putting up a fight against the Republicans’ continuing resolution because of an issue over coal miner health care benefits, which is threatening to briefly shut down the government, POLITICO’s Burgess Everett, Seung Min Kim and Ben Weyl report. The House on Thursday approved the CR, which would fund the federal government through April 28, in a 326-96 vote and left for the year. The government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday unless Congress acts.

There’s more: “Further scrambling the situation, Democrats are trying to amend water infrastructure legislation passed by the House to include permanent ‘Buy America’ language. The fights are becoming intertwined because the spending bill and water bill are the last two major pieces of legislation in Congress this year,” the POLITICO trio reports. The House passed that water infrastructure bill — WIIN, formerly WRDA — by a vote of 360-61 on Thursday. Pro Energy’s Annie Snider reports that “lawmakers from both parties were upset that a so-called Buy America provision mandating that federally funded drinking water projects use U.S.-produced steel and iron was not made permanent in the bill.”

ON TO THE NEXT ONE: Elaine Chao has continued her rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting with Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.), both members of the Senate Commerce Committee, which will hold her confirmation hearing for Transportation secretary. “After speaking with Secretary Chao, I am excited to support her confirmation and look forward to working with her to empower states to create new construction and manufacturing jobs,” Daines said in a statement Thursday. In a statement from his office, Gardner called Chao “a proven leader who knows how to get the job done.” Chao has now met with at least six Republican members of the committee, including Chairman John Thune.

RENDELL: ‘REVENUE-NEUTRAL’ INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN ‘NOT GONNA HAPPEN’: Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell has doubts about whether an infrastructure plan potentially coming next year will be “revenue neutral.” “You know, I’d like to comb my hair in a pompadour tomorrow. It’s not gonna happen,” Rendell said at an event held by The Atlantic on Thursday. As yours truly reports: “Rendell said the group he co-chairs, Building America’s Future, has some ideas that are ‘basically revenue neutral’ for investing billions of dollars in infrastructure: restoring Build America Bonds, ending the prohibition on tolling federally accredited highways, reversing the changes made to TIFIA in the FAST Act and [creating] a national infrastructure bank.”

Pros can read more about what Rendell had to say at the Atlantic summit, during which he referred to lawmakers as “wusses” and Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, as “the Wizard of Oz.”

First in MT: Rendell and fellow BAF co-chair Ray LaHood sent a letter this week to Donald Trump, which asks the president-elect to also consider how the government can invest in infrastructure in the long term. They suggest establishing a team now to “develop a long-term infrastructure revitalization plan that includes sustainable funding.” Rendell and LaHood also call on Trump to start considering certain sources for that funding. They recommend hiking the gas tax by 10 cents and indexing it to inflation as well as creating a federal capital budget.

“As former elected officials, we understand the difficulty of raising revenue,” they write. “But we believe that with a well-crafted plan and message, backed by strong leadership and a willingness to expend political capital, such a revenue source is possible.” A copy of the entire letter is here.

BOWSER WON'T GIVE MANY DETAILS ABOUT TRUMP MEETING: At the same Atlantic event on Thursday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was asked about her meeting with Trump in New York this week. When asked if she came to the meeting with certain requests for Trump, Bowser said: “Well, it was a private meeting and part of having a new relationship and a new dialogue is to build a level of trust, so I won’t say all of the things that we talked about.” Bowser did say that she wanted Trump “to understand what the federal interest in Metro is” and pointed out that many Metro riders are federal government employees. She said among transit systems across the country, “the federal government has a different responsibility” when it comes to WMATA.

Penciled in with Chao: The mayor said her office and Chao have scheduled a meeting. “And then we’ll get down into the nitty-gritty of what we need,” Bowser said, later calling for more federal investment in the financially struggling Metro. “I think that we have a very good shot at talking with the Department of Transportation and having all of the jurisdictions get together with the federal government,” she said. But when asked about the idea of a federal takeover of the system, Bowser brushed it off. “I don’t have any reason to believe that the federal government knows how to run a transportation system,” she said, though Metro could use federal help with its unfunded pension liability.

PENCE MEETS WITH NAM: Mike Pence spoke Thursday with National Association of Manufacturers executive committee members at the group’s headquarters in D.C., mentioning “domestic manufacturing, tax reform, infrastructure, deregulation, health care and energy,” our friends at POLITICO Influence report. The vice president-elect asked NAM to weigh in on which regulations the Trump administration should prioritize for consideration for repeal.

JOHNSON LEARNS A PARTISAN LESSON? Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused to comment Thursday on retired Gen. John Kelly’s possible nomination to take over the position. As our Jennifer Scholtes reports for Pros: “Johnson, who served as general counsel at the Department of Defense from 2009 to 2012, is said to be friends with Kelly, who was commander of U.S. Southern Command from late 2012 until early this year. But a friendly endorsement from the sitting secretary could actually prove detrimental to Kelly's chances at getting Senate confirmation.” Last week, Johnson said he didn’t know another lawmaker who’s “stronger on border security” than House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul. Later that day, Breitbart reported that Johnson’s comment was viewed as a “kiss of death” for McCaul’s DHS bid.

DHS’ RELATIVELY SMALL LANDING TEAM: The landing team for DHS is one of the Trump transition’s smallest compared to the ones for other agencies that handle matters of national security, our friends at Pro Transition 2017 report. They write: “Despite DHS’ key role in implementing the president-elect's vows on immigration and border security (remember the wall?), the Trump transition team has only announced two landing team members for DHS: Thomas DiNanno, a senior fellow for homeland security and critical infrastructure protection at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, and Katharine Gorka, president and co-founder of the Council on Global Security. Our colleague, Josh Gerstein, found a third one: Hugo Teufel, a former Bush-era FOIA expert.”

SULLIVAN SHOWS INTEREST IN LEADING AVIATION SUBCOMMITTEE: With Sen. Kelly Ayotte leaving Congress, Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska told our Tanya Snyder on Thursday that he’s interested in taking her gavel on the Senate Commerce Aviation Subcommittee. “We have a really big aviation community in Alaska,” Sullivan said. “We also have a big fisheries community in Alaska — so those are two that I'd be interested in, and I've talked to the chairman about it.” The Aviation Subcommittee will be responsible for drafting a bill to reauthorize the FAA in 2017.

FEDEX HIRES LOBBYIST FOR NEXT FAA BILL: FedEx has hired Ogilvy Government Relations’ Timothy McGivern, former chief of staff for Sam Brownback when the Kansas governor was serving in Congress, on the FAA’s reauthorization, tax changes and “general transportation issues including trucking,” according to a disclosure report.

FEDEX CHIEF CHALLENGES TRUMP WORLDVIEW ON TRADE: The free-traders are fighting back. In a speech this morning at the National Competitiveness Forum, FedEx Chairman Fred Smith will extol the benefits of trade and free-trade agreements in optimistic terms that stand in stark contrast to Trump’s dark view of the pacts. “Trade has made America great, and expanding trade has been a bipartisan pursuit for over 80 years,” Smith plans to tell the Washington meeting, according to excerpts made available to our friends at Morning Trade. “The failure to continue to do so would be a severe mistake with enormous consequences for America and the world.”

The 72-year-old business leader warns that withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement, as Trump has threatened to do, “would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy” and expresses hope the 23-year-old pact will be “updated and strengthened” instead.

CEI HAS A PLAN FOR LAWMAKERS: The Competitive Enterprise Institute released its “agenda” for the next Congress this week. Among its transportation policy proposals, CEI calls for lawmakers to “corporatize” the nation’s air traffic control system, end discretionary grant programs like TIGER and conduct “hearings on NHTSA’s treatment of automated vehicle technology to ensure that the agency is not pursuing counterproductive precautionary approaches that could threaten innovation and lead to additional preventable traffic crashes, injuries, and fatalities.”

I’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS: An estimated 45.2 million people are expected to take domestic and international U.S. airline flights during the holidays, a 3.5 percent increase from last year, according to Airlines for America. The trade group defines the holiday period as Dec. 16 through Jan. 5. With more flights and larger aircraft, airline companies plan to increase capacity by 99,000 seats for each day of the holiday stretch. A4A expects Thursday, Dec. 22, and Friday, Dec. 23, to be the busiest days for flying.

EXAMINING TRUCK CRASH RISKS: A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, released Thursday, shows that truck brakes with severe enough defects to be deemed “out of service” tripled the risk of a crash. Having an out-of-service violation increased the risk of a truck causing a multiple-vehicle crash by 900 percent. Driver fatigue was also a major contributor to crashes. The short-haul exemption, which allows truckers to drive 16 hours straight under some conditions, is especially dangerous, nearly quadrupling the risk of a crash, the study found.

REMEMBERING JOHN GLENN: As tributes come in for astronaut and former Sen. John Glenn, MT would like to share this tidbit from The New York Times’ obituary: “In 2012, about a week before the 50th anniversary of the Friendship 7 flight, a reporter found the 90-year-old Mr. Glenn in full voice and clear mind, but regretting that he had sold his airplane the month before. Their aging knees had made it difficult for him and his wife to climb on the wing to get into the cabin of their twin-engine Beechcraft Baron. For years they had flown it on vacations and back and forth to Washington. Though his airplane was gone, Mr. Glenn was pleased to say several times that he still had a valid pilot’s license. Mr. Glenn was a flier, almost to the end.”

THE AUTOBAHN:

— "Worried auto industry braces for change under Trump." The New York Times.

— Trump meets with Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Ford, to discuss the economy and trade. POLITICO Pro.

— "VW’s lost, destroyed phones are 'a bright red flag,' FTC says." Bloomberg.

— "'Better food, better service': China’s airlines fly past U.S. rivals on Pacific routes." The Wall Street Journal.

— "Rollback of truck safety rules may be just the beginning." The Associated Press.

— "Contract workers at National, Dulles airports vote to strike." The Washington Post.

— "Governors agree on Port capital plan, but tempers continue to flare." POLITICO New Jersey.

— "EU throws book at seven countries over car emissions." POLITICO Europe.

— "Paris is so smoggy that the city will pay for your bus fare." The Washington Post.

THE COUNTDOWN: DOT appropriations run out today. The FAA reauthorization expires in 294 days. Highway and transit policy is up for renewal in 1,394 days.