More Transportation Security Administration employees called out of work on Friday than any other day of the partial government shutdown, signaling that relief has yet to arrive for air travelers, even as the Trump administration moved to restore pay for airport security screeners who have already missed two full paychecks.
Conditions in airport security lines have deteriorated since Feb. 14, when Congress allowed funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees T.S.A., to lapse during an impasse over reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Since then, T.S.A. employees have been forced to work without pay, leading thousands of workers to call out and hundreds to quit altogether.
With staffing slashed, wait times for security have stretched on for hours at some airports. Lines have spilled outside terminals. Desperate travelers have missed flights. And that was before Friday set a new record.
More than 3,560 T.S.A. employees — above 12 percent of the agency’s work force — called out on Friday, the highest number since the partial government shutdown began, Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. Friday’s call outs broke the record of just under 12 percent that had been set the previous day.
“During this time, over 500 officers have quit, and thousands more have been forced to call out because they can’t afford basic necessities like gas, child care, food, or rent,” Ms. Bis said.
President Trump signed a memo late on Friday ordering D.H.S. to restore pay to T.S.A. employees. On Monday, the Trump administration deployed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who have not lost pay during the partial shutdown, to help carry out security functions at airports.
The standoff over D.H.S. funding in Congress has shown little sign of breaking. A compromise brokered by the Senate to restore funding was rejected by Republicans in the House of Representatives, who responded by offering up their own stopgap funding bill before taking a scheduled two-week break. That bill appeared unlikely to garner enough support from Democrats in the Senate to break the deadlock.
Conditions have become so dire at some airports that some people have sought out professional line sitters in an effort to avoid the multi-hour wait times caused by lack of staffing at the checkpoints. Such is the case in Houston, where both major commercial airports saw about 45 percent of their screening agents call out on Friday.
Steven Dial, who owns a support-services business in Spring, Texas, has already waited in lines for people at the motor vehicle department and other places. So last week, as security lines grew longer and longer, he had the idea to offer his services at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, where wait times have been as long as four and a half hours.
As soon as he posted on Facebook, his phone began to blow up with hundreds of messages, he said. On Friday, Mr. Dial said he was at the airport from 6:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. to help six clients. He charges $71 an hour, which includes parking.
The practice prompted the Houston Airport System to issue a statement warning travelers against turning to line sitters, noting that those who “choose to use unauthorized services do so at their own risk.”
Mr. Dial said he plans to offer the services until the lines wane. He already has several clients lined up for Monday, he said, adding that he does not hold anyone’s luggage as part of the line-sitting service.
“It’s just me, and I’m just holding the spot for them,” he said.
The scene at the airport in Baltimore on Saturday offered a glimpse of the bottleneck at airports across the country on Saturday. The line outside stretched the length of the airport early in the evening, looping three times from the Southwest check-in at the start of Terminal A to Terminal C and wrapping back around.
Hundreds of travelers, many of them leaving for spring break, arrived three to four hours ahead of their late-night departures. Most seemed resigned to the hourslong wait ahead.
Maia Delogu, a 35-year-old school librarian in Baltimore, had arrived with her mother and her two children to catch a flight to New Orleans, where they would embark on a cruise to Mexico. They had a little over three hours before their flight was scheduled to depart at 9:50 p.m.
“It’s ridiculous,” Ms. Delogu said. “It’s unfair to us, and it’s really unfair to the T.S.A. workers who are supposed to work when they’re unpaid and can’t feed their families or pay their bills.”
Eric Melin, a 49-year-old software engineer from Greenbelt, Md., was in line with his wife and two children, planning to fly to Orlando for a family vacation — a trip to Walt Disney World, with a planned detour to the Kennedy Space Center.
“Are we going to make it? I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head as the line snaked forward. It was 6:20 p.m., three hours before their scheduled departure. “It’s a risk right now.”
Chris Hippensteel is a reporter covering breaking news and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
The post Record Number of T.S.A. Employees Called Out on Friday appeared first on New York Times.
