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.

When someone in Washington tells you that everyone is suffering from the political pressure equally, that’s often a sign that he, specifically, is feeling it the most. The present mess has roots in two entangled, defining White House projects. The first was doge, which congressional Republicans hoped would, among other goals, ease the nation’s deficit, but which succeeded only in dismantling vital programs and antagonizing federal workers (who do things like making sure that no one is carrying liquid explosives onto planes). The second was the mind-bending expansion of ice—last year, Congress separately approved seventy-five billion dollars for the agency, effectively almost tripling its budget—which has colonized virtually every sector of Trump’s domestic agenda.

Congress’s February efforts to resolve the shutdown were complicated by the lawless ice campaign in Minneapolis, where federal agents killed two American citizens during a brutal crackdown on protests. As a condition of agreeing to fund D.H.S., congressional Democrats demanded certain reforms: no masked ice agents, no roving sweeps, no arrests in churches or schools. But the White House and its allies refused, even though ice’s methods of immigration enforcement are increasingly unpopular and few new migrants are coming into the country. By the end of last week, the Democrats had not won any reforms to ice, though the episode provided a very public demonstration of how much dysfunction Trump and the G.O.P. are creating in the agency’s name.

The deeper trouble for Trump is that he has not offered the public much else in his second term. His Administration took office convinced that it had a mandate for big changes, but with few substantive ideas about what those changes should be. The tariff program has petered out and doge is done. The President is distrusted on the economy and has, per Fox News, a disapproval rating of an astonishing fifty-nine per cent. Since the campaign, Trump has remained relentlessly focussed on immigration enforcement.

So it was predictable that his response to the delays at the airports was to send ice agents. They didn’t help much with wait times; it takes four to six months to properly train a T.S.A. agent in screening protocol. In Philadelphia, a union official told the Inquirer that the ice agents (who were being paid, while T.S.A. employees were not) stood by the windows and did “nothing.” In a concession, they did not wear masks. Just before the deployment, there was an ugly scene at San Francisco International Airport after agents carried away a passenger, originally from Guatemala, who was waiting to board a domestic flight with her daughter. ice agents are involved with so many different federal activities that it can be hard to understand the evolving scope of their role. Are the violent, militarized, Minneapolis-style sweeps that so enthused the President a few months ago now a thing of the past, as some Administration officials have suggested, and as Trump himself seemed to be signalling when he fired the D.H.S. Secretary, Kristi Noem, and replaced her with Senator Markwayne Mullin? If so, what is such a large and extravagantly funded force meant to do?

Some of the degradations of the government that Trump has overseen are hard to illustrate in real time, but any local-news cameraman can shoot a long line of bored and frustrated people. The addition of ice agents into the frame made for an elegant encapsulation of the political situation. The President has, in ice, a quasi-authoritarian force at his disposal. But the trains are very much not running on time.