Spring break has never meant time to take a trip. As a student and faculty member, it meant the semester was almost over. But who is counting? For millions of college students and families, this is a break before the summer – an opportunity to do something fun. Reset. Recharge.
The DHS shutdown has been in effect since February 14. TSA workers have not been the story. The disruption to travelers is.
The expendability test
If this were February — a quiet travel month, no school holidays, no family migrations — these same workers would be missing the same paychecks. The economic exposure would be the same, but the news coverage would likely be nonexistent.
The political negotiations tell you everything about how TSA officers are valued. TSA officers are essential, and others feel their absence. Their financial precarity is not, in itself, sufficient to attract policy attention.
This is not incidental. TSA workers were originally excluded from the collective bargaining rights that most other federal employees are covered under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. They won limited rights in 2011, and the Biden administration expanded those in a 2024 seven-year contract. The Trump administration has been trying to terminate that contract since March 2025. Courts have blocked the termination twice. As of today, the contract technically remains in effect — but the legal fight is ongoing, the agency is in a funding lapse, and the workers are classified as “excepted,” meaning required to work and get paid only after the government reopens.
The requirement that TSA workers absorb the cost of a political choice. On March 23, the Trump administration deployed ICE agents to airports to help manage the security lines. The agency triggering the shutdown, ICE, is fully funded, while checkpoint workers are not, yet they work side by side.
What the cost actually looks like
Since February 14, TSA workers have received one partial paycheck, missed two full paychecks, and are on track to miss a third on April 3. That is six weeks of disrupted pay.
The workers bearing that cost are not abstractions. Among single-parent women working as TSA Transportation Security Officers, the data are direct: Multiracial women earn a median family income of $30,000 for a family of four — 43% fall at or below the federal poverty threshold. Black women earn a median family income of $36,100 for a family of three — 34% are at or below the poverty line, and 47% fall at or below 138% of the federal poverty level, the Medicaid expansion threshold (see Table 1).
Table 1. TSA Transportation Security Officers: Economic Vulnerability of Single-Parent Women
Calculations by Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race. Source: 2025 American Community Survey. www.ipums.org
At the nation’s ten busiest airports, there are an estimated 8,183 Black single mothers and 2,865 Hispanic single mothers working as TSA screeners. Black single mothers earn a median family income of $35,390 for a family of three; 83% fall at or below twice the federal poverty level. Hispanic single mothers earn a median family income of $40,000 for a family of three; 69% fall at or below twice the federal poverty level. At JFK and Newark alone, 75% of Black single-mother TSA officers fall at or below the Medicaid expansion threshold. The data for White, Asian, Indigenous American, and Multiracial single mothers at named airports cannot be reported — sample sizes fall below the threshold for reliable estimates — not because those workers are not there, but because they are present in smaller numbers at the largest airports (see Table 2). The economic exposure documented here is concentrated among the groups large enough to measure.
For single mothers with little or no savings, six weeks without a full paycheck is more than an inconvenience—it is a financial crisis.
Table 2. TSA Transportation Security Officers: Economic Vulnerability of Single Mothers
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Weighing my options
Hundreds of TSA officers have resigned since February. Back pay is guaranteed by law once the shutdown ends — but a legal guarantee of future payment does not cover this month’s rent. Workers who resign lose the right to back pay. Workers who stay absorb the full financial cost, with no certainty about when it ends. These are options that feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. The workers most likely to stay are the ones with the fewest options — the single mothers in our tables.
Recent coverage wrongly frames TSA officer attrition as an airport wait-time problem. It is not. The wait times are a symptom of a workforce being asked to absorb a political cost it did not create and that many cannot afford.
Off-peak, these TSA officers are invisible. On-peak, TSA officers are still invisible. The traveler’s inconvenience is visible.
That gap — between who bears the cost and who is inconvenienced — drives the conversation and is precisely what the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race exists to close. Making the invisible visible, in the data and in the policies shaped by it, is not background work. It is the work. These workers deserve to be paid before they are standing in the lines of unemployment offices and food banks.
The Shutdown Fairness Act would guarantee all federal employees are paid on time during any funding lapse. Tell your senators to pass it.
Rhonda V. Sharpe is the president and founder of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race. Her research focuses on gender and racial inequality, the diversity of STEM, and the demography of higher education.