At least 376 TSA officers have walked off the job since the partial government shutdown began on Valentine's Day, and the ones who remain are scraping by on food drives and side gigs while Congress heads for a two-week vacation.
The Department of Homeland Security shutdown, now 35 days and counting, has forced roughly 50,000 TSA employees to keep staffing airport checkpoints without pay. Officers missed their first full paycheck last weekend. The result is predictable: absentee rates are spiking, wait times are ballooning past two hours at major airports, and the agency's leadership is warning publicly that the situation will only deteriorate.
This is the third shutdown in less than six months. TSA officers have watched their paychecks get held up by politics for nearly half of the past 170 days.
The figures at some of the nation's busiest airports are staggering, Breitbart reports:
Nationwide on Thursday, about 10% of TSA agents missed work. That's the floor. Individual airports are far worse.
Travelers at Hartsfield-Jackson faced two-hour waits that briefly dropped to less than five minutes before climbing back to 90 minutes. Houston wait times exceeded two hours on Friday afternoon. These aren't minor inconveniences. They're a security infrastructure buckling under political paralysis.
TSA officers aren't exactly pulling down executive salaries in the best of times. Starting pay sits at about $34,500, with the average salary ranging from $46,000 to $55,000. That doesn't leave much of a financial cushion when Congress decides to stop funding your agency three times in six months.
Cameron Cochems, a local TSA union leader in Boise, Idaho, and vice president of his regional American Federation of Government Employees chapter, has worked as a TSA agent for more than four years. His wife was unexpectedly laid off two weeks ago. He works a seasonal side job screening college sports teams at airports to make ends meet.
"Every day I come to the airport and I look at the food drive, see what things I can get for my family."
Cochems told the Associated Press that the 376 resignations likely don't fully capture the personnel challenges the agency faces. Many officers who haven't quit have simply checked out mentally.
"I think more people are staying with the TSA that don't want to be here."
Aaron Barker, a local TSA union leader in Atlanta, spoke at a news conference outside the airport this week and painted an even grimmer picture of what officers are enduring.
"I've heard from officers who cannot afford copayments for cancer treatments or office visits for their sick children."
These are people who show up every day to a job that most Americans take for granted, doing work that is tedious and essential in equal measure. Conservative principles demand fiscal discipline from government, but they also demand that when government asks people to work, it pays them.
Acting Deputy TSA Administrator Adam Stahl laid out the trajectory in a Fox News interview this week, and it wasn't optimistic.
"We saw an uptick of 25% attrition after the last shutdown, and so this is going to continue and worsen — not get better, get worse — if we don't get a resumption of normal operations, DHS funded and money back into our TSA officers' pockets."
Stahl said the agency has exhausted its options, including deploying emergency manpower. Staff departures increased after the record shutdown last fall, which ran 43 days and was the longest government shutdown in history. Former TSA Administrator John Pistole has said that about 1,100 officers quit during that shutdown, which ended in November.
A 2024 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office had already flagged concerns about the agency's workforce stability. Three shutdowns in six months are the kind of stress test no workforce plan survives.
Here's where the politics get clarified. This shutdown affects only the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats have said the department won't get funded until new restrictions are placed on federal immigration operations, reportedly tied to the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis earlier this year.
Think about what that means. Democrats are withholding paychecks from 50,000 TSA officers, Coast Guard members, FEMA personnel, and other DHS employees to extract concessions that would hamstring immigration enforcement. They are using the financial desperation of airport screeners as leverage to weaken border security.
The same political faction that spent years insisting no one is above the law when it suited them now holds an entire department's workforce hostage to ensure that immigration law is enforced less aggressively. The contradiction isn't subtle. It's the strategy.
The House Committee on Homeland Security has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to review the shutdown's impact on TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, and other agencies within DHS. Whether that hearing produces anything beyond soundbites remains to be seen, given that both chambers of Congress are scheduled to be out of Washington the first two weeks of April.
Congress will be on recess. TSA officers will be at the checkpoint. One group will be getting paid.
Conservatives have long argued that the federal government is bloated, inefficient, and in desperate need of reform. That's true. But reform means making government work better, not periodically refusing to fund the parts of it that actually protect Americans while they travel.
Airport security is one of the few federal functions that virtually every American encounters directly. It is visible, tangible, and tied to genuine safety concerns. When the system degrades, people notice immediately. Two-hour lines at JFK and Houston aren't abstractions. They're missed flights, missed connections, and a creeping sense that nobody in Washington is minding the store.
The pattern is becoming its own crisis. A 43-day shutdown last fall. A four-day lapse earlier this year. Now 35 days and counting. Each cycle bleeds experienced officers who find jobs that actually pay on schedule, and each cycle makes it harder to recruit replacements willing to accept $34,500 a year for the privilege of maybe getting paid.
Democrats own this shutdown. They chose immigration restrictions over funding a department that secures airports, coastlines, and disaster response. Every TSA officer looking at a food drive to feed their family, every traveler standing in a two-hour line, every screener who finally decides the instability isn't worth it: that's the cost of using a workforce as a bargaining chip.
The lines will keep getting longer. The officers will keep leaving. And Congress will keep leaving town.
