What Was Behind the T.S.A. Meltdown?

The pleasing part of an airport is its frictionlessness. The experienced traveller might make it from taxi to gate in a tight twenty-five, passed from station to station as seamlessly as an electron in a circuit. The place is in the hands of the security state, but the touch is generally light and the thanking is relentless—for your patronage, for having your I.D. ready, for your participation at the silver level in the airline-rewards program that, financially, keeps everything afloat. An airport offers, if not exactly an equitable experience (there are Clear lines, lounge archipelagos), then at least a perceptible simulacrum of equality, in that everyone rides the same people movers past the same Cinnabons. Certain European airports still project a mid-century grandeur. The domestic versions don’t ever really manage that, but on good days they can convey a spirit of efficiency, graced with free pretzels and Wi-Fi.

This whole apparatus came shuddering to a stop last week in a pretty spectacular and ominous way, as thousands of T.S.A. agents, who were unpaid because of a budget impasse over how to fund the Department of Homeland Security, had stopped showing up to work. Americans were experiencing, the T.S.A.’s acting administrator told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, “the highest wait times in T.S.A. history.” By Thursday morning, people were arriving for their flights six or seven hours early, so that LaGuardia was packed at 3 a.m., and by 9 a.m. at J.F.K. the security lines stretched out to the curb. (“There was no water, no food. It was horrible. That’s not human,” a traveller in Houston told the Times.) That evening, President Donald Trump, perhaps eager to declare a victory somewhere, announced on Truth Social that he would issue “an Order” to pay the agents. The Senate then passed (by voice vote, at 2 a.m.) a bill that restored D.H.S. funding—but not for ICE or Customs and Border Protection—and left town for recess. On Friday, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, tersely rejected the bill, calling it a joke. Trump’s order, a Presidential memorandum, soon appeared, instructing D.H.S. to use existing funds to pay T.S.A. workers—a decision he could have made at any point.

The road to the very long lines began in February, when Congress, in resolving a broader government shutdown (the second in four months, impressively), could not agree on how to keep funding Homeland Security. As of Friday, T.S.A. agents—who turn out to be the essential element in the frictionless airport experience—had not been paid for about six weeks. They make in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars a year, and bills do not stop just because paychecks do. There were some gothic stories (a union leader reported that some members were selling their blood plasma for cash), and nearly five hundred agents quit, but many more simply called in sick: more than a third of the workforce in Houston, Atlanta, and New Orleans was absent on a single day. Spring break loomed, then the summer travel season, this year punctuated by the World Cup. Testily, the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, said, “This is a pox on everybody’s house.”