The Democratic Party’s shutdown of the bulk of the Department of Homeland Security is now the second-longest funding gap in history. It’s delaying paychecks for millions of federal workers until there’s a resolution to the impasse, with congressional Democrats clamoring for restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation tactics, meeting resistance from President Donald Trump and Capitol Hill Republicans.
Democrats have managed to shut down the apparatus of government that the highest number of ordinary Americans deal with daily — the Transportation Security Administration, since airport workers, among others, are currently doing their jobs without pay. Yet Democratic demands don’t remotely affect the deportation operations lawmakers claim are at the core of their objection.
The theoretical target of this shutdown is ICE, but because Trump already anticipated the Democrats would try to defund his deportations in regular government spending negotiations, the president demanded that supersize funding for DHS in last year’s tax package. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Senate Republicans helped enact with a bare majority through special chamber rules allowing the usual 60-vote threshold to be dispensed with, granted $75 billion to ICE. The law also provides $68 billion for Customs and Border Protection, meaning that the current showdown has defunded every element of the DHS but those that ensure deportations.
The political concessions that Democrats want are too numerous, idiotic, and intentionally malicious to cover in the scope of this column. But the consequences of their gambit are economic, and they’re most directly harmful to commercial air travel, which drives 5% of the U.S. economy.
Over 100,000 DHS employees are currently missing paychecks, about half of whom work for the TSA. Because 90% of the department’s staff is considered essential, as are virtually all of the TSA’s employees, we can conclude that the overwhelming majority of these 100,000 employees are being compelled to work without pay. Again.
Again! Recall that this shutdown of over one month is less than half a year after another shutdown of a month and a half. TSA and other federal employees will be made whole on their salaries whenever this shutdown ends. But if you work for the TSA, you’ve temporarily worked without being paid on time for at least two and a half months of the last six. At this point, that would make you a liability to a landlord or a credit card lender who usually can’t accept late rent or credit card payments on the promise that “hopefully the Democrats don’t shut down the government again.”
Naturally, the TSA workers who are either unwilling or unable to work without pay are calling in sick, with some 12% nationwide bailing from the job on Monday, March 23. The day prior, TSA call-out rates were 38% in Baltimore, 39% in Houston, and 42% in Atlanta, leading to record-long wait times in security lines of over four hours in the latter.
The problem will extend long beyond the shutdown, even if Democrats defer and reopen DHS overnight.
Acting TSA administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill testified to Congress that, on top of the 1,110 agents who quit the agency during the 2025 shutdown, nearly 500 more have resigned since the start of this year’s spending stop. Considering that training new officers takes between four and six months, McNeill warns that airport security will not be fully equipped to handle the glut of summer travel that will be compounded by this year’s World Cup, hosted in the United States.
Although the White House has somewhat ameliorated the situation by deploying ICE agents to assist TSA, the fact that the historically boring process of appropriations has been gamified into a political weapon means that TSA workers would be correct to consider the U.S. government an unreliable employer, and American travelers should understand that federalized airport security is an unreliable service. The only solution to the partisan weaponization of airport security is to remove the responsibility from congressional control entirely and simply privatize it.
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Several airports, such as those in San Francisco and Kansas City, Missouri, already employ a quasi-private security system through the TSA Screening Partnership Program. This allows airports to hire private contractors who are overseen by the TSA instead of using TSA labor directly. The SPP not only performs better at screening for contraband than the TSA, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report, but private security is consistently cheaper, with the House transportation committee finding that SSP screening is 65% more efficient.
The TSA is generally bad at ensuring safety in transportation (consider that two decades of mandatory shoe removal cost $83 billion and foiled exactly zero terrorist attacks), abysmal at providing taxpayer value, and now downright deplorable at responsibly compensating its 65,000 employees. If Democrats want us to learn our lesson, it will be to deprive them of the opportunity to bring commercial travel to a standstill and terrorize airport security agents by weaponizing their paychecks: we can’t trust the government to secure airports, so let us leave it to the private sector at last.
Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.