TSA officers describe tears, tough choices, and dwindling savings from working without pay
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A woman in Indiana who put off dental surgery because she doesn’t know if she can afford the copay. A Florida couple with young children who are depleting their savings. A grandmother in Idaho plans to sell her car to pay the rent.
They are among the tens of thousands of Transportation Security Administration officers set to receive another $0 paycheck this week. A dispute in Congress over funding the Department of Homeland Security has held up their salaries since mid-February. With monthly bills coming due, many of these federal employees, who screen passengers and luggage at airports across the U.S., are making difficult choices about how to make ends meet.
High absentee rates at some major airports have produced long lines and frustrated passengers at understaffed security checkpoints. Union leaders and federal officials say empty gas tanks, childcare expenses, and the threat of eviction keep more screeners from showing up the longer the shutdown continues. At last count, more than 455 had quit instead of weathering the ongoing uncertainty, according to DHS.
“Stop asking me about the long lines. Ask me if somebody’s gonna eat today,” Hydrick Thomas, president of the national American Federation of Government Employees union council that represents TSA employees, told reporters Tuesday.
Indiana TSA agent turns to food pantry for groceries
Before starting her shift at Indianapolis International Airport on Monday, Taylor Desert stopped at a food bank for meat, eggs, vegetables, and dairy products.
“I never thought I would be in a position where, working for the federal government, I would need to go to a food bank to supplement my groceries,” she said as she loaded bags into her car.
Desert, who has been a TSA officer for seven years, said her last full paycheck came on Feb. 14, the day the shutdown started.
She had some savings to draw on despite a record 43-day shutdown last fall, but put some personal plans on pause.
For example, Desert needs to get her wisdom teeth removed, but says the TSA isn’t approving time off during the shutdown. She also worries about the costs of the surgery not being covered by insurance.
Wednesday was the 39th day of the DHS funding lapse. If it goes another 21 days, Desert said she would seek another job.
“I don’t want to have to spend my entire savings just to afford to keep living,” she said.
Florida couple worries about their young children
Oksana Kelly, 38, and her husband, Deron, 37, both work as TSA agents at Orlando International Airport. They have two young children and don’t know how they will keep supporting their family without any income coming in.
Kelly said they’re dipping into savings for now, but it’s running dry. If the shutdown persists, they will ask relatives for help or take out a loan, which she worries would put them deeper in debt.
Her husband has worked as a DoorDash delivery driver in his spare time since the shutdown in October and November. He’s considering resigning from the TSA to put the couple on a more stable financial footing.
“It’s very mentally exhausting,” said Kelly, who is an organizer for the labor union representing TSA workers across central and northern Florida. “How do we even decide between being able to feed our kids or come to work?”
Kelly said strangers might criticize the couple for “putting all eggs in one basket” since both have chosen to work for the TSA for the past decade.
“All we want is to pay our bills and get the pay we deserve,” she said.
A veteran officer in Idaho fears homelessness
Rebecca Wolf cries every day. She tries to hide it from her grandchildren, ages 11 and 6.
“They don’t understand why grandma’s crying,” Wolf said. “I try not to cry in front of them, but sometimes it’s just too much.”
The 53-year-old TSA officer and union leader in Boise, Idaho, joined the agency soon after its creation in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. She was homeless at the time, but turned her situation around with steady work and the benefits of federal employment.
Now, Wolf can’t help but dwell on where she was 24 years ago. “I don’t want to be in that position again,” she said.
Her Feb. 28 paycheck amounted to $13.53, sending her “into a spiral right away.”
With no savings to fall back on, she is preparing to sell her car to cover her rent due in a week. She calls nonprofits daily seeking rental assistance, but hasn’t had any luck.
Supporting six family members — four children and two grandchildren — has always been challenging, but the repeated shutdowns have made it nearly unsustainable.
Wolf, who serves as president of AFGE TSA Local 1127, is hesitant to walk away from both the job that turned her life around and her role advocating for fellow officers.
“I worked hard to get to where I am now, and the thought I might lose it all scares me,” she said, her voice breaking as she tried to stifle the sound of weeping.
Massachusetts agent digs into savings to get by
Mike Gayzagian, a TSA officer at Boston’s Logan International Airport, says long stretches without pay have become enough of a “new normal” that he’s prepared for them.
The 56-year-old says he has a financial cushion of about six months to tap but that his situation is “an exception to the rule.”
“The majority live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have those kinds of reserves available,” said Gayzagian, who is president of his local TSA union chapter.
It shouldn’t be this way for federal workers, he said.
“The financial situation adds an additional burden to what is already a stressful job,” Gayzagian said. “I didn’t go into public service to make a lot of money. I went into public service because it has a certain stability, reliability, and predictability that other jobs don’t have.”
A father in Utah leaves the TSA
Robert Echeverria quit his job as a TSA agent at Utah’s Salt Lake City International Airport about two weeks into the current shutdown.
The 45-year-old, who has a wife and three children, counted five government shutdowns in the nine years he worked for the agency. The toughest was last year’s record shutdown that ended in mid-November around the start of the holiday season.
Echeverria said his family skipped Christmas and took months to recover financially. He began looking for a new job in February when it became clear Congress was headed for another budget battle.
“Emotionally, I was already distraught,” Echeverria said last week. “We were barely recovering from the last shutdown.”
He now works for the department that manages the airports in Utah’s capital. Leaving federal service “was a hard decision for me,” Echeverria said.
“I really believed in the mission of the TSA,” he said. “We took an oath, and it was a way for me to give back to the country that gave me so much.”
He’s still based at Salt Lake City International, where his 20-year-old daughter works as a TSA agent, and says that seeing his former colleagues struggling is difficult.
“They all feel betrayed by their government because they’re showing up to work,” Echeverria said. “They’re there, but they feel that the government doesn’t care for them,” he said.
The jump in gas prices stemming from the war in Iran has had another impact that may also affect many Americans’ finances: Higher interest rates.
Longer-term interest rates have risen quickly since the war began Feb. 28, pushing up the cost of mortgage loans, auto loans, and business borrowing. And with inflation measures likely to rise in the coming months, the prospect of interest rate cuts this year by the Federal Reserve is fading. Wall Street investors instead see the odds rising of an actual rate hike instead.
The fact that a rate hike has become a plausible scenario — even as most economists still see it as unlikely — represents a sharp turnaround from early this year, when the debate was more focused on how many times the Fed would reduce its key rate, rather than whether it would do so at all.
“We think cuts are delayed, not derailed,” Krishna Guha, head of economics at Evercore ISI, an investment bank, wrote Tuesday. “The question is, delayed to September, delayed to December, or delayed more indefinitely” into 2027?
Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday that if inflation were to rise while the unemployment rate remained stable, and Americans showed signs of anticipating higher inflation in the future, “then there is an obvious playbook, which is rate increases have to be on the table.” Goolsbee participates in meetings of the Fed’s rate-setting committee, but is not one of the 12 voters this year.
Wall Street investors no longer foresee any rate reductions this year, according to futures pricing tracked by CME Fedwatch. And the odds of a rate hike by October have risen to nearly 25%, up from zero just a week ago.
Late Monday, Mary Daly, president of the San Francisco Fed, said in a written statement that the uncertainty created by the Iran war means “there is no single most-likely path” for the Fed’s key interest rate, suggesting the Fed could move up, down, or stay unchanged in the months ahead.
The war has created a tricky dilemma for the Fed. Most economists expect that the conflict could worsen inflation by lifting gas prices. But when gas prices rise very high — say $5 a gallon for an extended period — they could force consumers to cut back on spending elsewhere to offset the higher gas costs, slowing the economy and potentially pushing up unemployment.
“On net more inflation means probably higher rates,” said Jonathan Pingle, an economist at UBS. “On the other hand, that energy price shock is going to be a headwind to growth.”
The Fed typically raises rates — or keeps them unchanged — to combat inflation, while they often cut rates to spur the economy and lower unemployment.
When gas prices spike, the standard response for a central bank is to look past the increase in inflation that results because it is often a temporary phenomenon. In that case, the Fed could even cut rates if it began to worry that unemployment was worsening.
Yet Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, at a news conference last week, said that assuming the impact would be temporary is more challenging now because inflation has been above its 2% target for five years, souring many Americans on the economy.
For now, many Fed officials are more focused on the threat of higher inflation, suggesting the Fed will keep its key rate unchanged in the coming months. Economists at UBS expect inflation, according to the Fed’s preferred measure, will jump to 3.4% this month and end the year at 3%, above the Fed’s target of 2%.
The unemployment rate “is kind of low and stable,” Goolsbee said. “So that isn’t as far from the target as inflation is right now. And now to pile on a second inflation shock makes me a bit more concerned on the inflation side than on the unemployment side right now.”
When investors expect the Fed to keep its key short-term rate higher for longer, longer-term rates rise. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note has moved up from just below 4% on Feb. 27, the day before the Iran war began, to nearly 4.4% on Wednesday.
Mortgage rates closely track the 10-year, and 30-year fixed rate mortgages are now averaging 6.22%, according to mortgage giant Freddie Mac, up from just below 6% before the war.