The lines are back. Not the post-pandemic revenge-travel lines or the holiday-weekend surges that airports have weathered for decades. These are different — slower, longer, and driven not by a spike in travelers but by a shortage of the people paid to screen them.
Across the United States, Transportation Security Administration checkpoints have become bottlenecks of frustration, with staffing shortages tied to federal workforce reductions creating unpredictable and sometimes hours-long wait times. The situation has deteriorated markedly since early 2025, and by March 2026, travelers and airline executives alike describe an airport security apparatus under visible strain.
As Business Insider reported, mass TSA absences have made the flying experience “unpredictable,” with some passengers encountering wait times exceeding two hours at major hubs. The absences aren’t random. They’re the downstream consequence of the Department of Government Efficiency’s push to shrink the federal payroll, a campaign that has included buyout offers, early retirement incentives, and what many TSA employees describe as a climate of uncertainty about their future employment.
The numbers tell a stark story. TSA employs roughly 50,000 transportation security officers nationwide — or it did. Attrition has accelerated sharply. According to reporting by Business Insider, unplanned absences at some airports have reached levels not seen since the 2018-2019 government shutdown, when TSA agents — among the lowest-paid federal employees — called in sick rather than work without pay. This time, they’re not missing paychecks. They’re leaving altogether, or they’re demoralized enough that showing up feels optional.
And the agency’s ability to backfill those positions has been hamstrung by a federal hiring freeze that, while subject to various exceptions, has created bureaucratic confusion about which roles can and cannot be filled.
For the airline industry, the checkpoint crisis represents something close to an existential operational threat. Airlines can optimize their own staffing, their gate assignments, their maintenance schedules — but they cannot control how quickly passengers move through security. When checkpoints slow down, passengers miss flights. When passengers miss flights, airlines rebook them, displacing other travelers, creating cascading delays that ripple through the entire system.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian addressed the issue during the airline’s most recent earnings call, noting that TSA throughput problems at key hubs including Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson had contributed to operational disruptions. “We can run a perfect operation on our side,” Bastian said, “and still have customers arriving at the gate after the door has closed because they spent ninety minutes in a security line they expected to take twenty.” United Airlines has similarly flagged the problem, with executives pointing to Newark Liberty and Chicago O’Hare as airports where TSA staffing has become a material concern.
The ripple effects extend beyond the airlines themselves. Airport concessionaires — the restaurants, shops, and lounges that generate significant revenue for airport authorities — report declining sales as passengers spend more of their pre-flight time standing in line rather than browsing or dining. Some airport operators have begun posting real-time TSA wait estimates more prominently, a tacit acknowledgment that the screening process has become the primary variable in the travel experience.
So how did we get here?
The story begins with DOGE’s broader campaign to reduce the size of the federal government. TSA, housed within the Department of Homeland Security, was never explicitly targeted for mass layoffs. But the combination of government-wide hiring freezes, “Fork in the Road” resignation offers modeled on the approach taken at other agencies, and a general atmosphere of hostility toward federal workers created conditions ripe for attrition. TSA officers, who start at salaries significantly below the federal average and whose pay was only recently brought closer to parity with other DHS components, were particularly susceptible.
The pay issue matters enormously. In 2022, the TSA administrator at the time secured a pay raise for officers that brought many of them above $40,000 annually for the first time. That raise, combined with improved benefits, had begun to stabilize a workforce that historically suffered from turnover rates exceeding 20% per year. But the current administration’s posture toward federal employees — the public rhetoric about “bloated bureaucracy,” the mass firings at other agencies, the uncertainty about whether pay reforms would survive budget negotiations — eroded whatever goodwill that raise had purchased.
“People didn’t leave because of one thing,” a current TSA officer at a major East Coast airport told me, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “They left because every week there was a new reason to think your job might not exist in six months.”
The timing couldn’t be worse. Air travel demand in the United States remains near record levels. The TSA screened over 900 million passengers in the twelve months ending February 2026, a figure that reflects both population growth and a continued post-pandemic preference for experiences over goods. More passengers plus fewer screeners equals longer lines. Simple arithmetic with complex consequences.
Some airports have fared better than others. Facilities with robust TSA PreCheck and Clear enrollment — typically larger airports serving business-heavy routes — have managed to keep their expedited lanes moving at reasonable speeds. But standard screening lanes, the ones used by the majority of leisure travelers, families, and infrequent flyers, have become choke points. At airports like Orlando International, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood, and Las Vegas’s Harry Reid, where leisure traffic dominates, the situation has been particularly acute.
Private screening is technically an option. A little-known provision of federal law allows airports to apply to replace TSA screeners with private contractors operating under TSA oversight, a program known as the Screening Partnership Program. San Francisco International and Kansas City International are among the roughly two dozen airports that currently use private screeners. But the application process is lengthy, the political dynamics are fraught, and most airport directors have been reluctant to take a step that could be perceived as a vote of no confidence in the federal government.
That reluctance is fading. According to reporting from Reuters, several major airport authorities have begun preliminary discussions about applying for the Screening Partnership Program, viewing it as a potential hedge against continued federal staffing instability. The Airport Council International-North America, the trade group representing airport operators, has publicly called on Congress to address TSA staffing levels and to provide the agency with expedited hiring authority.
Congress, for its part, has been characteristically slow to respond. A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation in late 2025 that would exempt TSA from the government-wide hiring freeze, but the bill has languished in committee. Republican leadership has been reluctant to carve out exceptions that could undermine DOGE’s broader workforce reduction goals, while Democrats have used the airport lines as a political cudgel, holding press conferences at security checkpoints and posting wait-time photos on social media.
The political theater obscures a genuine policy tension. There is a legitimate argument that the federal government employs more people than it needs in some areas. There is an equally legitimate argument that airport security screening — a function created in direct response to the September 11 attacks — is not the place to test that theory. The traveling public, stuck in line at 5:30 a.m. wondering whether they’ll make their 7:00 flight, is not particularly interested in the philosophical dimensions of the debate.
What they want is to get through the checkpoint.
The TSA has attempted to mitigate the staffing shortfall through several measures. It has redeployed officers from less busy airports to high-volume locations, a strategy that helps at the receiving end but creates new problems at the sending end. It has extended overtime opportunities, though budget constraints limit how much overtime it can offer. And it has accelerated the deployment of new screening technology — specifically, computed tomography scanners that produce three-dimensional images of carry-on bags and reduce the need for manual bag searches — in an effort to increase per-lane throughput.
But technology is not a substitute for people. Each screening lane requires a minimum number of officers to operate: someone to check IDs, someone to monitor the X-ray or CT screen, someone to conduct pat-downs and resolve alarms. You can make each of those individuals more efficient. You cannot eliminate them.
The airlines, meanwhile, have begun taking matters into their own hands in small but telling ways. Several carriers have adjusted their recommended arrival times, advising passengers to show up three hours before domestic flights at airports known for long TSA lines — a recommendation previously reserved for international travel. Some airlines have started sending push notifications to passengers with real-time checkpoint wait estimates, pulling data from the TSA’s own MyTSA app and supplementing it with their own observations.
American Airlines has gone further, stationing employees near security checkpoints at its busiest hubs to identify passengers on imminent departures and, where possible, expedite their passage to the front of the line. It’s a band-aid. Everyone involved knows it’s a band-aid.
The economic implications extend beyond the airport terminal. Business travel, which generates disproportionate revenue for airlines due to higher ticket prices, is sensitive to friction. Corporate travel managers report that some executives have shifted to private aviation or videoconferencing rather than endure the uncertainty of commercial airport security. That’s a small number in absolute terms but a meaningful one in revenue terms, and it represents exactly the kind of behavioral shift that airlines fear most.
Tourism-dependent economies are watching nervously. Orlando, Las Vegas, Honolulu — cities whose economic engines run on visitor spending — have a direct interest in ensuring that the airport experience doesn’t become a deterrent. The Orlando Economic Partnership recently cited TSA wait times as a factor in its revised tourism forecast for 2026, noting that social media posts about long lines at MCO had generated negative publicity that could influence travel decisions.
There’s a historical parallel worth considering. During the 2018-2019 government shutdown, which lasted 35 days and left TSA officers working without pay, airports experienced similar checkpoint disruptions. The political pressure generated by those disruptions — by images of snaking lines and stories of missed flights — was widely credited as one of the factors that ultimately forced a resolution to the shutdown. The question now is whether a slower-burning staffing crisis, one without the dramatic narrative of a government shutdown, can generate the same political urgency.
Early signs suggest it can. Polling conducted by Morning Consult in February 2026 found that 67% of Americans who had flown in the previous three months rated their airport security experience as “somewhat” or “very” negative, up from 41% a year earlier. Among self-identified Republican voters — a constituency generally supportive of federal workforce reductions — the negative rating was 58%. Airports, it turns out, are one of the few places where abstract policy preferences collide with lived experience.
The TSA itself has been publicly measured in its response. Administrator David Pekoske, who has served in the role since 2017 across two administrations, has acknowledged the staffing challenges while avoiding direct criticism of DOGE or the White House. In testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee in February, Pekoske stated that the agency was “managing through a period of workforce transition” and expressed confidence that screening standards had not been compromised. He did not, however, promise that wait times would improve.
Behind the scenes, the picture is less sanguine. Current and former TSA officials describe an agency struggling to maintain morale and operational readiness. Training pipelines have slowed because the hiring freeze has reduced the number of new recruits entering the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Experienced officers who might have stayed another five or ten years are calculating that the uncertainty isn’t worth it, especially when private-sector security firms and law enforcement agencies are actively recruiting them with better pay and more predictable working conditions.
“You’re watching institutional knowledge walk out the door,” said a former senior TSA official who left the agency in late 2025. “These are people who know how to spot anomalies, who’ve been trained on the latest threat vectors, who understand how to manage a checkpoint during a surge. You don’t replace that with a new hire who’s been on the job for three weeks.”
The security implications are the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to say it directly, but the concern is there: does a smaller, less experienced, more demoralized TSA workforce create vulnerabilities that adversaries could exploit? The agency’s inspector general has historically found screening performance gaps even under normal staffing conditions. The classified details of those assessments aren’t public, but the general finding — that TSA screeners sometimes fail to detect prohibited items during covert testing — has been reported repeatedly over the years.
A thinner workforce doesn’t make those numbers better.
For now, the traveling public is adapting in the way Americans always adapt to institutional dysfunction: with workarounds, complaints, and grudging acceptance. TSA PreCheck enrollment has surged, with the agency reporting a 34% increase in new applications in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period a year earlier. Clear, the private biometric screening company, has similarly seen enrollment growth, though its service is available at only about 50 airports. Both programs effectively allow travelers to pay their way out of the standard screening line — a two-tiered system that critics argue penalizes those who can least afford the $78 (PreCheck) or $189 (Clear) annual fees.
But even PreCheck lanes aren’t immune. At several airports, TSA has been forced to close PreCheck lanes during off-peak hours due to staffing shortages, funneling enrolled travelers into standard lines and negating the benefit they paid for. That’s generated its own backlash, with PreCheck members flooding the TSA’s customer service channels with complaints and demanding refunds.
The situation is, by any measure, unsustainable. Either staffing levels will be restored — through exemptions from the hiring freeze, congressional action, or a reversal of the broader workforce reduction policy — or the system will continue to degrade. The Screening Partnership Program may absorb some of the demand, but privatizing screening at scale would take years and faces significant political and logistical hurdles. Technology improvements will help at the margins but cannot compensate for a fundamental shortage of human beings.
What’s happening at America’s airport checkpoints is, in miniature, a test case for the entire federal workforce reduction experiment. It’s the place where the theory of smaller government meets the practice of standing in line. And right now, the line is winning.
Growing up in the Midwest, I spent a lot of time in airports that felt manageable — places like Kansas City before the new terminal, or Indianapolis, where you could show up forty-five minutes before a flight and feel comfortable. Those days feel distant now, even at mid-size airports. The checkpoint experience has become the defining feature of air travel in 2026, and it’s not a feature anyone asked for.
The dogs, at least, are still doing their job. TSA’s explosive-detection canine teams remain fully operational and, by most accounts, effective. But a good dog can only sniff so many bags per hour. The rest falls to people. And there simply aren’t enough of them.
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