TSA officer. Photo: Shutterstock "Long airport wait times. TSA officers working without pay. Potential chaos for World Cup travel." This is what the TSA had to say in its latest post on X (former Twitter), followed by Acting Deputy Administrator Adam Stahl's comments on the "challening environment" faced by American airports.
"The state of our airports is a challenging environment. We are seeing long wait times and this is only going to get worse until it gets better. It means longer wait time, more folks particularly calling out sick or not being able to afford to come in to work or folks quitting altogether, so we will continue to make difficult choices," explained Stahl.
"We are grateful for our brothers and sisters at ICE who are coming to help alleviate some of the pressure, especially on the non-specialized screening side. As folks don't get paid, as they continue to miss paychecks, they are not going to be able to pay for rent, for food, they are going to be sleeping in their cars, it's going to get more and more difficult for them to come to work."
Asked how close we are to smaller airports being shut down, the Acting Deputy Administrator answered that it is "hard to put a timetable" given the unpredictability of callouts. "With some of these airports with fewer lanes and fewer people, if two or three individuals call out sick or are unable to come in, we may have to temporarily suspend operations."
"We will continue to see things get worse, we have 440 airports across the States and it's a challenging environment."
Stahl also addressed the issue of newly hired officers who might not be able to work on the checkpoint until well after the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a “dire situation” that could cause a "perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers at airports for the World Cup games".
"There are ramifications, knock-on ramifications of attrition when the shutdown ends, so, for example, in the first shutdown, we saw a 25% uptick in attrition immediately following that first shutdown, so there is a reverberation and knock-on impact not only when the shutdown ends but after the shutdown. Second, the recruiting pipeline is another challenge, with folks considering going in joining the workforce will being dissuaded because of the lack of job security. Lastly, if there's a four to six-month lag in training a recruiter, those individuals will not be trained ahead of the World Cup."