More than 300 TSA officers have walked off the job since the government shutdown began on February 14, and the ones who stayed are calling out sick at staggering rates.
The New York Post reported that the result is exactly what you'd expect: security lines stretching for hours, missed flights, and travelers at airports across the country caught in the crossfire of a budget standoff that Senate Democrats chose.
The numbers tell the story. At Houston's Hobby Airport, 53% of TSA officers called out on March 8. The next day, 47% did the same. At JFK in New York City, 21% of TSA staff have called in sick in the past month.
Atlanta International sits at a 19% call-out rate. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport reported 14% of its officers not showing up.
These aren't abstractions. These are checkpoints with half their staff missing during spring break travel season.
On Sunday morning, photos from Chicago's O'Hare Airport showed massive security lines that had travelers questioning whether their flights were even catchable.
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida saw similar scenes. Both airports reportedly cleared up by the afternoon, but the damage was done: plans disrupted, connections missed, and patience burned through.
Last weekend brought the same disorder. Some airports advised travelers to arrive upwards of five hours before their flights. Five hours. To get through a security line. At one point, travelers at O'Hare were warned not to come to the airport "unless your life depends on it."
This chaos has now ground on for nearly a month.
The officers who have continued to show up deserve recognition. These are federal employees who missed their first paycheck last Friday and still reported for duty. DHS played a new video over airport security lines acknowledging as much:
"The TSA Officers you are interacting with have shown up to work despite having missed paychecks. Please take the opportunity to thank the dedicated men and women of the TSA when you fly today."
That's a reasonable ask. The men and women staffing those checkpoints didn't create this mess. They're absorbing the consequences of it, working without compensation while their colleagues quit or stay home.
The 300-plus who have already resigned, according to internal TSA statistics reported by CBS News, made a rational decision for their families. You can't fault someone for leaving a job that stops paying them.
But you can fault the people who made that calculus necessary.
Senate Democrats refused to fund a DHS budget without reforms to ICE and Border Patrol. Read that again. They held homeland security funding hostage to weaken immigration enforcement. Not to strengthen the border. Not to improve the agencies tasked with protecting American sovereignty. To gut them.
DHS has not been subtle about assigning blame. The department posted on X:
"The Democrats' DHS shutdown has led to HOURS long security lines at airports across the country, leading Americans to miss their spring break flights."
The video playing at airport security lines carried the same message:
"You may be experiencing longer-than-average wait times due to the ongoing Democrat shutdown of TSA and the Department of Homeland Security."
Some airports declined to play the video, calling it "partisan in nature." Factual statements about who blocked a funding bill are apparently too political for airport speakers. The squeamishness is telling. When the facts themselves sound partisan, perhaps the party responsible should reconsider its position rather than asking everyone else to stop pointing it out.
This is not the first time Americans have watched this play out. Last year, during a separate government shutdown, DHS put out similar statements and videos.
Those featured then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who has since departed the role after facing scrutiny over a $220 million advertisement campaign.
The revolving door of crises and shutdowns has a numbing effect, which is precisely what makes it dangerous. Each time, the public absorbs a little more dysfunction as normal. Each time, the political class faces fewer consequences for treating essential government functions as bargaining chips.
But the leverage Democrats think they're exercising here is working against actual people. Families trying to reach vacations they saved months for.
Business travelers with meetings they can't reschedule. TSA officers choosing between loyalty to their posts and the reality that their mortgage company doesn't accept patriotism as payment.
Strip away the procedural language and the Senate Democrats' position reduces to something simple: they would rather see airport security collapse than allow ICE and Border Patrol to operate with full funding. They would rather strand travelers at O'Hare and JFK than lose leverage on immigration enforcement.
This is the same party that calls border enforcement inhumane but has no problem watching TSA officers work for free. The same party that demands "worker protections" in every piece of legislation but will let federal employees miss paychecks to score a political point about weakening the agencies that enforce immigration law.
The contradiction is not subtle. It doesn't require editorial embellishment. It simply requires stating it plainly.
Every day this continues, more officers will quit. The 300 who have already left are not coming back when the shutdown ends.
They'll have found other work, other careers, other ways to feed their families. TSA will need to recruit, hire, vet, and train replacements. That takes months. The damage outlasts the shutdown itself.
Call-out rates above 50% at a major airport are not sustainable. If this drags on through the rest of March and into April, the numbers will only get worse. Spring break is here now. Summer travel follows close behind.
Senate Democrats have decided that the price of weakening immigration enforcement is worth whatever American travelers endure in the meantime.
The families circling O'Hare at five in the morning, the TSA officers working their shifts for nothing, the 300-plus who already walked away: none of them got a vote on that calculation.
They're just paying for it.
