Karin Demirjian

Well, in short, you can't shut down the Department of Homeland Security indefinitely without starting to see failures happen in the system.

And when it comes to the TSA, that's a workforce of 50,000 people who have been working unpaid for the last month and a half, basically.

They're really the front line of where we are seeing the effects of that shutdown play out.

And are having to survive this duration that has been going on for already a month and a half and have needed to start calling out of work because they have to find other sources of income to live in the interim.

And that means you don't have the same workforce doing the job that is really important to anybody who's trying to get on a plane.

Now, that breakdown is not just affecting the individual lay traveler citizen.

It's also started to affect other government functions.

You saw that in the response to the accident that happened at LaGuardia earlier this week, the National Transportation Safety Board investigates aviation incidents like this, and they couldn't actually get all their investigators to LaGuardia because they got stuck for hours in security lines and they had to try to wrangle them out of it.

Wow.

You've seen the administration, the Trump administration, deploy ICE officials, even though they are not really trained to be TSA screeners, to various airports around the country.

And then in places like Atlanta, I mean, we saw there was a viral social media clip of a electric violinist entertaining everybody standing in an interminably long line.

Which some might have found entertaining and others might have found that much more annoying.

But this is the scene that's playing out in both official and unofficial and comical ways at these airports across the country as they face these record long wait times.

Right.

Well, the shutdown started in mid-February, right?

And you're not going to feel the immediate effect of that because, you know, people don't get paid for every day's work.

People get paid every two weeks or so, right?

And so the workers for TSA are on a similar schedule.

They're going to start to feel the pain of it once the money isn't coming into their bank accounts.

And TSA workers, you're talking about salaries that are around $50,000-ish.