Tsa

The government kept TSA workers paid through accounting tricks. Congress called it breathing room. Economists should call it what it is: deferred reckoning.

The TSA pay standoff has Texas airports at the center of a federal dysfunction story. But the real story is simpler: Washington created a dependency, now Washington can't manage it, and Texans are paying the price.

The Senate funded DHS but left TSA workers in limbo. What looks like a budget fight is actually a test of whether Congress still controls the border — or whether it's outsourced that job to bureaucratic inertia.