Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting head of the Transportation Security Administration, testified before Congress on Wednesday with a warning that landed somewhere between a policy briefing and a distress signal. TSA, she said, was experiencing “the highest wait times in TSA history.” At some airports, security lines are stretching past four and a half hours. At Houston Hobby International Airport, the call-out rate among TSA officers hit 55 percent on a single day last week, meaning more than half of the people scheduled to staff security checkpoints simply did not show up.
It is Day 40 of the DHS shutdown. Congress has no deal. Spring break is in full swing. And the agency responsible for keeping American air travel safe is bleeding officers faster than it can replace them.
How We Got Here
Funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsed on February 14, triggering a shutdown that has now stretched longer than any previous DHS funding gap in modern history. The stalemate has its roots in a fight that is really about immigration: Democrats in the Senate have insisted on guardrails limiting ICE enforcement activities as a condition of any funding deal. Republicans, backed by the White House, have refused any constraints on immigration enforcement authority. The result is that the agency housing the TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service has been running on fumes for nearly six weeks.
The immediate and visible consequence is what you see at airports. Nearly 500 TSA officers have resigned since the shutdown began, according to agency data presented to Congress. These are people who were already among the lowest-paid federal security workers in the country, earning starting salaries well below comparable private sector security positions, and who are now being asked to work indefinitely without a paycheck while their agency threatens closure. The call-out rates, which ran at about 4 percent before the shutdown, now average 11 percent nationally, with multiple major hubs running far higher.
ICE at Airport Security Checkpoints
In a decision that cut straight to the heart of the immigration standoff that caused the shutdown in the first place, President Trump ordered ICE agents deployed to at least 11 major U.S. airports to help alleviate security checkpoint backlogs. The optics were immediately combustible. The same agency at the center of the political fight over DHS funding was being drafted as the solution to the crisis that fight created.
ICE Director Tom Homan complicated the picture further by saying publicly that ICE officers would not perform the same screening functions as TSA agents, citing a lack of specialized training for the role. That clarification, which effectively acknowledged the deployment was more symbolic than operational, did not stop Democrats from denouncing the move. Critics pointed out that placing ICE agents in airports during a period of heightened immigration enforcement activity would deter undocumented travelers from flying even on domestic routes, adding a chilling effect to the logistical chaos.
The practical effect on wait times has been, by most accounts, minimal. Lines at Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago O’Hare, and Houston remain historically long. George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston is reported to be running one-third to one-half its normal number of checkpoint lanes. Travelers this week are being advised to arrive four hours before domestic departures at affected airports, a recommendation that would have seemed like satire eighteen months ago.
The Political Math, and Why It’s Not Adding Up
There is a version of this shutdown story that is about money and bureaucracy. That version is real. But the version that explains why it has lasted 40 days is about power. Senate Democrats, having lost the presidency and the House, have landed on DHS funding as one of the few remaining leverage points for extracting commitments on immigration enforcement limits. The White House, which campaigned explicitly on maximum enforcement authority, has no political incentive to concede those limits. Both sides are playing to their bases. The 61,000 TSA workers about to miss their second paycheck are, in this calculation, unfortunate collateral.
McNeill’s warning that TSA may have to make “very difficult choices as to which airports we might try to keep open” is not a hypothetical. It is a planning scenario that the agency is actively modeling. If call-out rates continue rising and officers continue resigning, the math at smaller regional airports tips from difficult to impossible. A shutdown of a regional airport security checkpoint would likely go unannounced until the morning it happens. That scenario would test the political will of both parties far more acutely than four-hour lines at O’Hare.
What’s At Stake Beyond The Lines
The airport chaos is the visible face of a DHS shutdown that has also degraded cybersecurity operations, slowed FEMA’s disaster preparedness work ahead of hurricane season, and stretched Coast Guard operations to the breaking point. DHS is not just an airport agency. It is the institutional backbone of domestic security. Forty days without funding has not broken that backbone, but it has bent it in ways that will take months to straighten out even after a deal is eventually struck.
The political pressure is building from an unlikely direction: the travel industry. Airlines, airports, hotel chains, and tourism businesses are now loudly lobbying both parties, warning that spring break revenue losses are mounting and that the summer travel season is directly threatened if a deal is not reached within weeks. Corporate America, which has generally been quiet about this administration’s governance style, is finding its voice on an issue with an unmistakable bottom-line impact.
Day 40 ends the same way Days 1 through 39 ended: with no deal, no clear timeline, and lines at the airport that are, by any historical standard, a national embarrassment. The TSA officers still showing up are doing so out of something that looks a lot like professional duty in the face of institutional abandonment. The officers who have quit already made their own calculation. At this rate, the airport closures McNeill warned about are not a worst-case scenario. They are a schedule.