The Department of Homeland Security has been partially shut down for nineteen days, the longest lapse in the department's funding history. Approximately 54,000 TSA agents are working without pay. Customs and Border Protection officers at ports of entry are working without pay. Secret Service agents protecting the president are working without pay. The Coast Guard — which is conducting active maritime operations in the Gulf of Oman as part of the Iran war effort — is working without pay. [1]

The president announced on Friday morning that he would sign an executive order directing the Treasury to issue emergency payments to TSA agents, a workaround that bypasses Congress and whose legality is already being questioned by the Government Accountability Office. The announcement came ninety minutes after footage of a two-hour security line at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport circulated on X, where it was viewed 14 million times in three hours. [1] [2]

The juxtaposition is the story. The administration has deployed approximately 8,000 ground-capable troops to the Persian Gulf without congressional authorization, at an estimated cost of $2.1 billion per week. The Pentagon's wartime procurement authority has been invoked three times since March 20. Munitions contracts worth $4.7 billion were signed on Tuesday. None of this spending required a congressional vote. The troops deploy under the president's Article II authority. The bombs are paid for with existing defense appropriations. [3]

Homeland security funding, by contrast, requires an act of Congress. And Congress cannot pass one. The House passed a DHS funding bill on March 14 that included provisions the Senate rejected — border wall funding, immigration enforcement mandates, and a rider that would have stripped TSA officers of collective bargaining rights. The Senate's clean funding bill died on a procedural vote. A continuing resolution failed on Tuesday. Neither chamber has scheduled another vote. [1]

The absurdity has a structural explanation: war spending lives in the executive branch's discretionary authority, while domestic security funding lives in the legislative appropriations process. The president can send Marines to the Gulf with a phone call. He cannot pay the people who screen bags at O'Hare without a bill that 218 House members and 60 senators agree on. The war has no budget constraint. The airport has one. [3]

TSA wait times at the twenty busiest airports averaged 47 minutes on Friday, up from 22 minutes before the shutdown. Three airports — Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Denver — reported waits exceeding 90 minutes. TSA officials said no security protocols have been relaxed, but staffing is down 12 percent as agents call out sick or resign. The union representing TSA officers filed an emergency petition with the Federal Labor Relations Authority on Thursday. [2]

The government is fighting a war it cannot pay for through normal channels and cannot stop through legislative ones, while simultaneously failing to fund the domestic security apparatus that was created, after September 11, to prevent exactly the kind of asymmetric threat the war has intensified.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington