GoKawiilKC Guidry usually gets to the airport two hours before a flight to give herself enough time to get through security. But she knew her flight on the morning of Monday, March 23, out of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport was going to be anything but routine.
“I heard the lines were long through TikTok and through the news,” she said. “The day before, I saw the wait time for the terminal I needed to leave from was 200 minutes. I saw they were not doing PreCheck or CLEAR, so I adjusted my schedule.”
She arrived at the airport at 12:30AM for a 7:20AM flight and joined a security line that was already looping around Houston’s Terminal E. She didn’t get through until 4:30AM. Others likely fared worse. By 9:30AM, the airport was already warning travelers that wait times could approach four hours. By the end of the day, they were averaging closer to five — and some security lines stretched all the way out of the terminal and into the underground parking garage.
Airport chaos has become the hallmark of the Trump era. Travelers already have to deal with skyrocketing oil prices, a crumbling safety system, and the war in Iran. And for the third time in six months, funding for the TSA has lapsed due to a budget impasse. Nearly 50,000 Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) who man the nation’s airport security checkpoints haven’t received a paycheck since late February.
As “essential workers,” TSOs are required by law to show up for work even if they’re not getting paid. But not all of them do. Although it’s illegal for TSA employees to organize an official strike, thousands are independently calling out sick. Two weeks ago, nearly 6 percent of them didn’t report to work — three times higher than normal. This week it’s closer to 10 percent nationwide. And call-out rates exceeded 33 percent at several of the country’s largest airports, including JFK in New York, Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental.
Despite the chaos, the Trump administration appears in no hurry to end the budget stalemate, even though a recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed broad disapproval of the shutdown in general, and the way Republicans were handling it. For weeks, President Trump himself has tied any deal to restore TSA funding to the passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which Democrats are prepared to filibuster. He even rejected a compromise negotiated by members of his own party that would have reopened the department on Monday.
(ICE did not respond to our request for more details about their deployment).
Like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, his position on the shutdown makes little sense on its face. But the strategy becomes clear when examined through the lens of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for the complete dismantling of the TSA.
“The Transportation Security Administration [should] be privatized,” the document says. “Until it is privatized, TSA should be treated as a national security provider, and its workforce should be deunionized immediately.”
Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem did accomplish the last of these goals, stripping TSA workers of many of their collective bargaining rights last December. But she spent the rest of her tenure glorying in her department’s power. She personally attended ICE raids in New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles in full hair and makeup. She used Coast Guard funds to purchase two private jets and authorized the TSA’s purchase of $1 billion in new security equipment. She even spent $220 million on an ad campaign starring herself that was apparently meant to scold undocumented migrants back across the border. This was not the behavior of someone ready to give DHS’s responsibilities — and its considerable budget — to the private sector.
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