Early this morning, the Senate passed the bill they could have passed 40 days ago to fund DHS except for ICE and CBP. The House is taking it up this morning. This was preceded last night by Trump threatening to sign an EO to fund TSA, which raises the question of why he didn’t do that 39 days ago. I don’t think funding TSA is going to magically wave away the problems at the airports. And I’m glad that the Democratic leadership stuck to their guns and didn’t send another penny to ICE and CBP, even though their cave on the BBB left those agencies with plenty of cash to weather the shutdown.
First, funding TSA does nothing to address the mess at the FAA. As far as I’m concerned, the crash at LaGuardia is on DOGE and Trump, and it’s not a hard call. There was one controller manning ground and tower, and another who was working on getting clearances set up for planes on the ground. So LaGuardia was understaffed, and an emergency from one airliner overloaded the veteran controller, who mistakenly cleared a fire truck onto a runway where a plane was landing.
Safety experts talk about the Swiss Cheese Model — the idea that safeguards in a complex system are like slices of Swiss cheese lined up as in the picture above. If you take away too many safeguards, the holes in the cheese will line up, and people will die. People died at LaGuardia, anyone watching aviation knew it was going to happen, and yet another thing that the Dunning-Krugerites in charge didn’t understand and took for granted — our sterling aviation safety record — is in the dumpster.
In addition to aviation being less safe than it has been for years, because of the war and other noise, I don’t think Americans who didn’t have to travel in the last couple of weeks really grasped just how bad the airports were. Part of the reason that Trump finally caved on the shutdown was his stupid plan to put ICE into the airports. This interview with a TSA agent details just how dumb that move was:
How has it been working through your third government shutdown?
The sad thing is it’s tough but it’s not a surprise. We’ve been furloughed over 90 days. That’s ridiculous. Right now, I’m missing two and a half checks. Some people have taken out unemployment assistance. Some people have relied on predatory loans to get by. You have to pay off your car, you have to pay your mortgage. I had to apply for food stamps a couple weeks ago. It’s embarrassing as a federal employee for ten years. And I don’t even have children.
And fewer people are coming in to work.
We’re dwindling. You might be able to miss one paycheck and say, “Damn.” But missing two? TSA has given us nothing — no gas card, no donations. And now we have ICE coming in here.
What is ICE actually doing there?
They’re the reason that we’re not getting paid. And now I’m working next to that person. And they’re getting paid to do nothing. They’re not trained. It takes six months to train a Transportation Security Officer. They’ve received none of that. A tweet went out and the next day they’re at the airport walking around sipping coffees, holding on to their vest. They arrived on Monday, and now they’re hanging out in the break room doing nothing. They’re warming up their lunch. I don’t know what you’re hungry from — you didn’t do anything! We already have Federal Air Marshal police and Port Authority police, so there’s already ten armed officers at any given moment.
Are the ICE agents armed too?
Why do you need your vest and gun to move a line? That’s weird. If police said they were going to come in and help you move a bag or a tray, I don’t think they’d come in riot gear. It’s gonna make anybody feel uncomfortable. Don’t you guys have ICE T-shirts? Don’t they have ICE polos?
The Dunning-Kruger-guy-at-the-end-of-the-barstool Trump Administration is a bunch of rich morons whose constant refrain is “how hard could it be?” Well, pretty much every job is hard. Anyone who isn’t a rich idiot has that fact reinforced when they use the self-checkout at the grocery store. Putting ICE into airports did nothing to help the lines, and the tacticool ICE agents standing around did nothing to help ICE’s horrible reputation.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth in the DC media about who “won” this shutdown. Nobody won. Airports are degraded. It’s going to take a while for TSA to bounce back. No solution is in sight for overworked controllers, but I’m guessing the pace of landings and takeoffs at the big airports around NYC will be lessened due because of what happened at La Guardia. Like everything else Republicans ruined, it’s going to take a long time for the air travel experience to recover. Democrats need to make Republicans own this as much as they can.
Update: Welp, I sure called that wrong. I thought the House would go along with funding, but, nope, more pain at the airports. I don’t think this is gonna work as messaging given the facts of the shutdown:
“This gambit that was done last night is a joke,” he said of the Senate-passed bill that made its way to the House in the predawn hours. “It is unconscionable to me that the Democrats would force some sort of negotiation at three o’clock in the morning and try to hoist this upon the American people.”
Apparently the House has a bill that funds TSA (and probably calls for the summary execution of every trans person, or a new SAVE act where only Republican votes count) that they’re going to send over to the Senate next week. So airports will be miserable for the near future.
