The Security Line Isn't the Problem
Last Tuesday I watched a line at Reagan National stretch past the D concourse and double back on itself. Families with kids. Business travelers checking watches. An older couple who clearly hadn't anticipated needing forty-five minutes of buffer they didn't have. The TSA officers at the checkpoint were working. They just didn't have enough of them.
The question making the rounds this week — are TSA PreCheck and CLEAR affected by the DHS funding shutdown? — is the wrong question. A better one: why is the Department of Homeland Security, responsible for screening every person who boards a commercial flight in the United States, operating under the kind of funding uncertainty that would get a private company's management team fired?
PreCheck and CLEAR are fine, mostly. They're structured differently. CLEAR is a private company — no federal appropriations involved. PreCheck is TSA-administered but the bottleneck during a partial shutdown isn't at the PreCheck lane, it's in the staffing level that determines whether the lane is even open. When staff is short, PreCheck lanes close. You've got the credential but nowhere to use it.
What the Shutdown Actually Does to Airport Security
When DHS funding lapses, TSA officers become essential personnel required to report to work without pay. This is not a hypothetical — it happened in 2019 during the 35-day government shutdown. Call-out rates among TSA screeners spiked. Lines lengthened. Checkpoint processing times at major hubs jumped to two and three hours. LaGuardia had a runway briefly shut down due to staffing problems in the air traffic control system — a related, though separate, agency.
The people running through that gauntlet were not bureaucrats arguing about funding formulas. They were ordinary Americans trying to get home, get to a job, see a sick parent. The shutdown is a Washington fight that lands in the airport concourse.
I've talked to TSA officers. Not as a journalist with a credential — just as someone who travels constantly for work and occasionally makes conversation. These are working people. Most of them have mortgages. Some of them work second jobs. The idea that they should absorb the cost of a congressional failure to pass a budget — in the form of missed paychecks — while remaining legally required to show up and screen your luggage is one of the more unseemly features of how the federal government operates.
The Broader Failure of Bipartisan Incompetence
Here's what I won't do: pretend this is purely a Republican or purely a Democratic failure. The government shutdown cycle is a product of a budget process that has been completely dysfunctional for decades. Congress hasn't passed all twelve appropriations bills on time since 1997. Not once in twenty-seven years. Both parties have presided over shutdowns, both parties have used them as leverage, both parties have watched DHS — the agency notionally protecting the American homeland — lurch from continuing resolution to continuing resolution like a drunk trying to find his car.
That said: the current moment has a specific shape. Republicans control both chambers and the White House. If a deal doesn't get done, that's primarily a failure of the governing coalition to govern. That's not partisan commentary. That's just how majority responsibility works.
The military analogy is useful here. If you were running a forward operating base and your supply lines were uncertain every three months based on whether your command structure had agreed on a budget, you'd be considered operationally compromised. That's what we're doing with airport security. We're running the nation's transportation security apparatus on a contingency funding model and then asking why it's fragile.
PreCheck Is Worth Keeping — The System Around It Needs to Work
TSA PreCheck is genuinely good policy. Risk-based screening — expediting known, vetted travelers while concentrating scrutiny on unknowns — is exactly the kind of intelligent prioritization that security systems should do. CLEAR adds biometric verification that makes the process faster and more accurate. These are wins. They should be expanded.
But they operate within a system that depends on funded, staffed checkpoints. No amount of credential sophistication compensates for a checkpoint that's operating at 60 percent staff because the political class couldn't get a spending bill done before a deadline.
Fix the funding. Staff the checkpoints. Then argue about policy. Americans who just want to get on a plane without a two-hour ordeal aren't asking for much. They're asking for baseline governmental competence. That bar is not high. We keep failing to clear it.
