For the past week, travelers flying across the country have waited in security lines that snaked through airports and parking lots as Transportation Security Agency officers called out of work because of a partial government shutdown.
Nowhere else has this effect been more palpable than at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, where people waited more than four hours to go through security checkpoints on Tuesday and similar wait times were expected on Wednesday.
As the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security reached 40 days, hundreds of T.S.A. officers have quit and many more have called out of work, straining resources during the spring break travel season. On Tuesday, Bush Airport reported that about 40 percent of its security work force did not show up — the highest such rate in the country.
“It’s a lack-of-pay issue, 100 percent,” said Johnny Jones, the secretary and treasurer of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 100, the union that represents about 4,500 T.S.A. officers in Texas. “When you have 40 percent of your work force not showing up, you’re in trouble. That’s a lot of people.”
This is the second government shutdown since October to affect T.S.A. officers, who will not be paid until Congress decides how to restore funding. D.H.S., the department T.S.A. is under, was removed from a spending package until Democrats and Republicans worked out a separate compromise with President Trump on the administration’s immigration crackdown after two Americans were shot and killed by ICE agents in Minnesota.
Mr. Jones said that he and many other T.S.A. officers had just dug themselves out of the costs of the previous shutdown, when officers sometimes incurred thousands of dollars in extra expenses to cover late fees, bank withdrawal fees and credit card interest.
The high rates of officer call-outs at Bush Airport are most likely tied to the logistics that T.S.A. officers have to go through to get to work. Many live on the outskirts of Houston, where it is less expensive, and they have long commutes.
The combination of not being paid and dealing with rising gas prices due to the war in the Middle East are probably playing a role, said John Pistole, a T.S.A. administrator in the Obama administration.
“My concern is that much longer term, what does that do recruiting new T.S.O.s looking for job stability?” Mr. Pistole said, using an abbreviation for transportation security officers. “That doesn’t seem to be the case now, and that may cause recruitment to go down.”
Mayor John Whitmire of Houston said on Tuesday that 50 additional officers had been sent from the agency’s National Deployment Office to help at Houston’s airports this week, a sign that the federal government was responding to the problem.
But those officers — who are sent around the country in order to help local airports with travel surges — were disproportionately assigned the smaller Houston airport, William P. Hobby. Forty of them were working there, while the other 10 were deployed to Bush.
“Why do we seem worse than the others? It’s strictly the allocation by the administration and T.S.A.” Mr. Whitmire said. “So it’s a mess.”
J. David Goodman and Shannon Sims contributed reporting.
Christina Morales is a national reporter for The Times.
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