Top of Mind Thursday – March 26, 2026: This Budget Impasse Doesn’t Fly!

The standoff in Washington regarding funding the Department of Homeland Security has finally hit Americans hard.

TSA agents, who have now gone 5 weeks without a paycheck, have finally said enough is enough. This past week, they started walking off the job—either calling in sick in droves or outright quitting, as nearly 500 agents have done.

As a result, this past weekend, airport security devolved into near chaos. Security lines in major airports, including Atlanta, and New York, ran into the hours, and passengers in Houston had to wait as much as 6 to 7 hours to clear security—meaning many of them missed their flights.

Congress seems unable or unwilling to resolve this any time quickly. President Trump today said he would find a way to get the TSA paid, but it’s not clear how long that would take or if there’s still the possibility of more unpaid time ahead. Even if this is resolved tomorrow, it will take time to either rehire agents who’ve left (if they’ll actually come back!) or recruit, hire, and train new ones to take their place. In the meantime, ICE agents are roaming around a number of airports, not able to help with security screening because they’re not trained to use the systems.

We used to have a similar budget SNAFU in California. Every year like clockwork, the legislature would be unable to approve a budget by July 1st, the start of the fiscal year, and major programs would come to a screeching halt. But in 2010, the state approved a proposition that said if a budget was not approved by June 15th, legislators would forfeit their pay and that of their staffs until the budget was passed and there would be no retroactive back pay for that period. Ever.

Guess what happened! Ever since then, California budgets have been passed on time.

Can we get our elected representatives in Washington to do the same thing? It’s hard to get them to agree to something that’s against their personal interests, but this week Delta removed the program that allowed members of Congress to expedite security and move to the front of the TSA line. That’s a start.

It’s time to tell Washington this kind of petty bickering that impacts millions of ordinary Americans for no good reason just won’t fly.

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