Even as its budget is the centerpiece of a classic Capitol Hill impasse, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deployed hundreds of its officers to John F. Kennedy International Airport to relieve the lines created by Senate Democrats blocking the Homeland Security Department budget.
The ICE officers are directing traffic at lines and supporting lane management—not screening bags or performing TSA-specialized tasks.
Homeland Security, the parent agency for ICE, Border Patrol, Secret Service, Coast Guard, and the Transportation Security Administration, ran out of congressionally appropriated funds Feb. 13 after Congress separated DHS from the rest of the bill that funded the federal government.
No one at DHS, except for ICE and Border Patrol, is getting paid, but the impact on the public is playing out at the airports, where TSA sick-outs are creating out-the-door lines, leading to missed flights and, most importantly, lost tempers among passengers.
Problems at one airport led to problems at other airports because the country has roughly 30 hub-and-spoke airports, which is why you cannot get a non-stop flight.
JFK is a hub for Delta, American Airlines, and JetBlue, and the nation’s busiest airport for international travel—and its sick-out rate is running roughly 25 percent every day. JFK has the fifth-highest sick-out rate.
That is bad, but consider the 40 percent rate at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the five-runway airport that is often the busiest in the country. It is the reigning sick-out champion.
The other three making up the top five are Houston-Bush at 38 percent, and Baltimore-Washington International and Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, both at 33 percent. LaGuardia seems like an oasis at a very comfortable 16 percent sick-out rate, which might be indiscernible to its regulars.
While the SAVE America Act twists in the wind—there are not enough votes to pass it and no one wants to kill it—Senate Democrats have pounced on the TSA crisis as a new line of attack.
Saturday, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer offered a bill to strip TSA from the Homeland Security funding bill. “Vote yes if you want to pay TSA. Vote yes if you want to bring down those lines at airports,” said the Brooklyn senator. “Our TSA workers cannot be taken hostage for political games.”
The cloture vote to bring the Schumer bill to the floor needed 60 votes, but it failed 41-49, with no Republicans crossing the aisle. It speaks to the absurdity of the Schumer messaging bill that seven Democrats and four Republicans blew off the vote altogether.
Majority Leader John R. Thune signaled over the weekend a willingness to sell out ICE funding to fund the rest of DHS, but there are media reports that President Donald J. Trump dismissed Thune’s offramp.
Schumer focused on TSA agents rather than passengers as a function of listening to the signal from the tower. TSA agents are overwhelmingly supporters of the Democratic Party and its candidates, so they are acting in tandem with Democrats to exacerbate the crisis.
We saw the same dynamic with the air traffic controllers. Somehow, we have put our commercial aviation economy in the hands of Democratic operatives, fully willing and able to leverage their control against regular Americans.
There is another way. Almost by accident, there are 20 mostly regional airports with contract screeners doing the job TSA agents do for the rest of the system. Airports like Great Falls International, Sarasota Bradenton International, and Yellowstone Airport. These airports are functioning normally without organized sick-outs or the need for ICE officers to play hall monitor.
Consider that among the 20 regional airports is San Francisco International, a hub with more than 25 million passengers annually. The contract companies are secure in the knowledge they will get paid eventually, so they just march on, immune to the Capitol Hill gamesmanship.
When it is all over, it is worth the effort to explore extricating ourselves from the grips of TSA and the budget battles with contract screeners for the rest of us.