The Chaotic Timeline That Led to America’s Great Airport Meltdown
What the hell is going on with U.S. airports? The answer is 70 years in the making.
Let’s say you’re a wildly unpopular president facing record disapproval and a shrinking base of support even within your own party. Let’s say that you’ve led the United States into a military conflict a majority of Americans don’t want, that you’ve bungled the execution of this conflict so badly that you’ve accidentally handed your adversary control over a large slice of the global energy economy, and that your unsuccessful strong-arming of your allies has revealed that even as a bully, you’re probably washed. Let’s say your vanity, your cruelty, and your incompetence have alienated so many people that more than 8 million protesters turned out on a single day to oppose you, while one of your most passionate defenders has been Rob Schneider.
If you were Donald Trump, how would you fix this situation? What would you do to win the American people back to your side? Would you act to get rising prices under control? Try to fix health care? Take steps to alleviate poverty, so people can live in peace and security?
Of course not. That’s amateur shit. I’ll tell you what you’d do: You’d make it so that people had to wake up at 2 a.m. and stand in line for six hours to get through security at the airport.
Trust me: There is nothing American voters—and particularly the middle-aged white men who form the core of the MAGA movement—love more than endless, slow-moving lines, especially when they’re accompanied by the mounting threat of missing a plane. But you wouldn’t stop there. No, you’re too skilled a politician for that. You’d also try to blame the lines on the sinister machinations of the Democrats. (The Democrats control zero branches of government, and I am beating them at chess with my left hand while I type this.)
By now, you’ve probably seen footage of the recent chaos at American airports. You’ve heard about the March 22 crash at LaGuardia. You know that there aren’t enough air traffic controllers. You know there’s a shortage of TSA agents, and you’re aware this is a result of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown triggered by a funding dispute. You’re definitely aware that Trump sent ICE agents into airports to—and please imagine scare quotes around each individual letter of the next two words—help out. ICE has mostly stood around doing nothing, which, in fairness, is the most helpful thing that ICE can possibly do.
But what’s actually behind the recent breakdown in air travel? What is this funding battle about, and how did the system become so overstrained that a short-term political disagreement could push it to the brink of institutional collapse? When will you be able to travel again without enduring so much stress that you snap, drop out of society, and form a renegade sect in the mountains? (I do this every time I travel.)
The answers, it turns out, involve Ronald Reagan, 9/11, Elon Musk, DOGE, and an ICE budget so out of control you’re going to need an airport massage and a trip to the smoking lounge in Concourse C after you learn about it. The easiest way to understand this story is to look at a chronology of the events leading up to it, beginning 70 years ago (sorry) with an explosion over the Grand Canyon (don’t get excited; it’s a sad explosion). With that in mind, here’s a quick timeline of the Great Airport Drama that led to the Great Airport Meltdown of 2026, Which Is Definitely the Fault of My Enemies, Though I Am in Charge of All Things.
I want to say “Let’s dive in,” but that’s the wrong language for this topic. Let’s … soar out.
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1956: A deadly crash over the Grand Canyon leads to the creation of the Federal Aviation Administration.
On June 30, 1956, a United Air Lines Douglas DC-7 and a TWA Lockheed Super Constellation collided in midair over the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 people aboard both planes. At the time, there was no coordinated system to tell pilots things like, “Hey, you’re on a collision course with another large aircraft,” or “Sweet lord, Larry, PULL UP.” Air safety mostly consisted of a general feeling that pilots should try their best. After the Grand Canyon crash and a couple of other midair collisions, policymakers put their heads together and decided that more could be done. The Federal Aviation Act, signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958, led to the creation of the FAA, which was empowered to regulate flight safety. Flight recorders became standard equipment, and the modern system of air traffic control came into being.
1969: A wave of hijackings leads to the first passenger screenings at airports.
Until the late 1960s, boarding a plane was as easy as attending a screening of The Devil Wears Prada 2. You just showed your ticket and sat down. Yet after a string of hijackings throughout that decade—including more than 50 flights commandeered to fly to or away from Cuba, and one unsuccessful attempt to kidnap future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—the FAA started suggesting that airlines screen passengers with metal detectors before they board their planes. Eastern Air Lines was the first to adopt the system; others slowly followed suit. This wasn’t initially a requirement, just a sort of friendly recommendation for airlines that didn’t want their planes to end up in Havana. You didn’t need a ticket to pass through the security screening, however, and you definitely didn’t have to take off your shoes.
Members of PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, during a strike in New York City on August 7, 1981
1981: Ronald Reagan fires 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. (Because why would you need experienced professionals to tell jumbo jets when to land?)
In August 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the union representing over 13,000 air traffic controllers, went on strike in an attempt to win better pay and improved working conditions. The strike was technically illegal, since the controllers, like other federal workers who belong to unions, had no-strike clauses in their contracts. Newly elected President Ronald Reagan, who’d supported the controllers throughout his campaign, decided to fire almost all of them and issue lifetime bans on their rehiring. Eliminating almost the entire pool of trained air traffic controllers had several negative consequences that no one could possibly have foreseen, such as the entire country suddenly having no trained air traffic controllers. Whoops!
More or less from this moment on, the air traffic system in the U.S. has been perpetually overstretched. The mass firing eliminated a generation's worth of knowledge and experience from control towers. Staffing levels among air traffic controllers didn’t approach pre-Reagan levels for years, and because there are strict age requirements for when controllers can be hired (no one over 30) and when they have to retire (56), the necessity of hiring an entire workforce of controllers all at once created a cascading series of personnel crises. Everyone was hired at the same time, then everyone retired at the same time, creating the need to hire a whole new workforce all at once again. Even Grok says it’s a problem.
The PATCO strike is usually talked about in relation to the broader decline of the U.S. labor movement: Reagan’s strike-breaking tactics significantly weakened the power of unions nationwide. What isn’t talked about as much is how cosmically bonkers it was to just … fire all the air traffic controllers simultaneously and make it impossible to hire them again. These are people whose work is literally a matter of life and death!
I can’t think of an equally extreme example in recent American history. Imagine if Adam Silver reacted to an NBA contract dispute by firing all of the players—and even that wouldn’t be as unhinged, since no one would die as a result of bad basketball (except me, if the Thunder lost). I’m just glad Reagan was never offended by an oncologist.
A screener for TSA checks a passenger at a security checkpoint on November 18, 2002
2001: The TSA is formed in the wake of 9/11.
Before the September 11 attacks, airport security was largely handled by private companies under contract with the airlines. On November 19, 2001, two months after the fall of the World Trade Center, Congress created the Transportation Security Administration to place airport security under a central federal authority. The TSA was originally part of the Department of Transportation but moved to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 (see below). As part of this, airport security tightened dramatically.
A few years later, a rule requiring passengers to take off their shoes during security screening went into effect. The policy hung around for decades, though since shoes were never a particularly good place to carry a bomb, and since no one ever died as the result of a shoe bombing, the policy was criticized as ineffectual “security theater” by many experts (including me, under my breath, every time I had to do it).
2003: ICE, CBP, and DHS begin operations.
The post-9/11 expansion of the security state continued with the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which led to the creation of the Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security and two of its enforcement branches: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP, which many people know as “basically also ICE” or “ICE but maybe even worse?”). Some people react to calls to abolish ICE as though the idea is radical, almost unthinkable, so it’s worth remembering that both ICE and the entire federal department it belongs to are only 22 years old. I’m sorry, but it shouldn’t be that hard to imagine the end of an organization that's the same age as JoJo Siwa and younger than Attack of the Clones.
February 2025: DOGE fires hundreds of FAA employees, because shut up, it’s fine.
You remember DOGE, right? Elon Musk’s big project to save money by cutting waste from the federal government? You know, the one that actually cost taxpayers money while making the world crueler and more dangerous? Great stuff.
In February 2025, DOGE fired roughly 400 FAA employees, reportedly without doing any assessments to determine how the firings would impact aviation safety. It’s wild how often people in the government who presumably don’t want more planes to crash do stuff that’s optimized to make more planes crash. It’s almost as if they think there’s some higher authority that will protect them from the consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, that authority is supposed to be … the federal government.
DOGE didn’t fire any air traffic controllers, though reportedly it tried to. Instead, it cut workers who perform critical safety functions, including those who kept the agency’s charts and maps updated. The result: even more strain on an already strained system, and even more stress for air traffic controllers.
President Donald Trump signs the Big Beautiful Bill from the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, 2025
July 2025: Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (sorry, sorry, I’m trying to delete it) gives ICE the largest budget of any federal law enforcement agency.
For years, ICE’s annual budget stood around $10 billion. Trump’s—and please imagine swarms of scare quotes buzzing around the next three words like enraged wasps—Big Beautiful Bill increased that number several times over, with total funding set to surpass $100 billion by 2029. To put that number in perspective, if ICE were a national military, a budget of $100 billion distributed over four years would make it one of the world’s 20 largest, falling somewhere around Canada’s and Spain’s. It’s the equivalent cost of 2,000 Jeff Bezos–Lauren Sánchez weddings.
This is, in other words, an astounding, ridiculous, frankly nauseating level of funding, and it’s enabled a gargantuan expansion for the agency: ICE has more than doubled its manpower since last fall. As the rest of the government, including the FAA, has been forced to contract, ICE has been hiring new agents faster than it knows what to do with them. Keep that in mind when you see dudes like this sauntering around the airport in 2026.
January 2026: Renee Good and Alex Pretti are killed in Minneapolis.
I’m assuming this one doesn’t require further explanation. The government killings of two U.S. citizens—an ICE agent shot Good; two CBP agents shot Pretti—during the Trump administration’s assault on Minnesota galvanized popular opinion against Trump’s anti-immigration campaign at the same time that the federal government was funding ICE like it’s a football program at an SEC school.
Early February 2026: Congress fights about funding for DHS.
After Pretti’s killing on January 24, Democrats in the Senate withdrew their support from the annual appropriations bill that funds DHS. The Democrats (whom I’ve now beaten 12 times in a row at chess without even glancing at the board) refused to approve any new money for DHS without first ensuring a frankly very underwhelming set of reforms to ICE: body cameras and no masks for agents, verifications that people aren’t U.S. citizens before they’re flown off to international torture prisons, etc. These reforms would certainly constitute a net improvement; it’s just that they stop a bit shy of my own personal proposal for reallocating ICE’s funding, which involves about $50 billion worth of wrecking balls and $50 billion worth of salt.
Republicans, staring down the barrel of mounting public fury and confronted with growing evidence that the president doesn’t know what he’s doing, sided with the president. It’s impossible to explain how these guys keep winning. (Unrelated, but I just checkmated Chuck Schumer twice in one game? How did that happen?) The government moved toward a partial shutdown.
February 14, 2026: The government partially shuts down.
Without an agreement over ICE reforms, the parts of the government that are funded by the disputed appropriations bill shut down—except ICE and CBP, whose funding is provided by the Big (ugh) Beautiful (stop) Bill (I hate it) for four years. Everything in the world makes so much sense these days. The TSA—which, remember, is part of Homeland Security, even if it’s treated less like SEC football and more like SEC intramural squash—was affected.
TSA agents, who make about $50,000 a year on average, stopped being paid. They were, however, expected to keep showing up for work, because their jobs are vital to the country. The best way to demonstrate to someone that their job is vital is, obviously, to stop paying them, ideally while continuing to lavishly pay their violent coworkers whom everyone hates.
Airline passengers wait in long lines to get through the TSA security screening at William P. Hobby Airport in Houston on March 8
Early March 2026: In a development absolutely no one saw coming, TSA agents, who, again, are not being paid, stop showing up to work.
By March 9, security lines at some U.S. airports, including those in Atlanta, Houston, and New Orleans, grew hours long. “SPRING BREAK UNDER SIEGE,” the official DHS X account tweeted, along with photos of some airport lines so long I would choose to ride my bike to France. DHS tried to blame Democrats for the shutdown, because it’s rude to expect an agency that supposedly exists for the protection of American citizens to reform simply because it happens to have killed multiple American citizens.
By March 24, more than 450 TSA agents had quit, and thousands more were calling in sick or refusing to come to work. Huge crowds were stuck at LaGuardia, BWI, and other airports. People were leaving for the airport eight to nine hours before their flights. Congress kept arguing, with few signs of progress.
Meanwhile, the Senate confirmed Markwayne Mullin—whose name, and I cannot stress this enough, is “Markwayne”—as Kristi Noem’s replacement as secretary of Homeland Security. Mullin was a Republican senator from Oklahoma before getting his new job; I’m also from Oklahoma, and let me tell you: There has never been a stupid, angry, bad situation that Markwayne wasn’t able to make stupider, angrier, and worse.
March 22, 2026: An Air Canada flight crashes at LaGuardia, reminding everyone that the FAA is struggling, too.
On March 22, a United Airlines flight at New York’s LaGuardia Airport aborted takeoff and reported a strange odor coming from the back of the plane. Airport fire trucks were sent to investigate the odor. The fire trucks were crossing a runway when a regional Air Canada jet carrying 76 people from Montreal was cleared to land. The plane collided with one of the fire trucks, killing the pilot and copilot and injuring dozens of passengers. The incident wasn’t caused by the shutdown—FAA workers, who aren't employed by DHS, are still being paid—but it added to the chaos, delaying and canceling hundreds of flights.
The crash also underscored the fact that air travel comprises numerous interoperating systems, and more than one of them is stretched to the breaking point. The FAA is currently about 3,500 air traffic controllers short of its target levels, and LaGuardia is one of the airports that is understaffed.
ICE agents and travelers at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on March 28
March 23, 2026: Trump sends ICE into airports.
Remember how ICE is still fully funded during the government fight over reforming ICE? And how the TSA isn’t? And how ICE has hired thousands of new agents in the past six months, while thousands of TSA employees aren’t showing up for work? Well, on March 23, Trump ordered ICE agents to be sent into airports. In theory, this was intended to help with passenger screening, but since it takes four to six months to train a TSA screener and ICE agents haven’t been trained at all, they have not been especially useful, and they haven’t really seemed to try. Mostly, they’ve stood around in their little padded ICE vests, and if you think the presence of packs of loafing dudes in military costumes makes the scene at airports feel calmer, you are not correct.
Some TSA agents—who, and it is simply impossible for me to repeat this too often, were working without pay—found the presence of ICE annoying. A TSA officer at LaGuardia dropped this otherworldly burn in an interview with Curbed; I will spend the next week walking around humming it to myself like the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
They’re the reason that we’re not getting paid. And now I’m working next to that person. And they’re getting paid to do nothing. They’re not trained. It takes six months to train a Transportation Security Officer. They’ve received none of that. … They arrived on Monday, and now they’re hanging out in the break room doing nothing. They’re warming up their lunch. I don’t know what you’re hungry from—you didn’t do anything!
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks with the media alongside House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer on March 27
March 27, 2026: The Senate passes a bipartisan bill to end the chaos; House Republicans don’t want to talk about it.
At 2:20 a.m. ET on March 27, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to fund all of DHS except for ICE and CBP through May 22, a development that had the potential to end the TSA shutdown. The bill was supported by the Senate majority leader, South Dakota Republican John Thune. When it reached the House, however, Thune’s counterpart, Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson, who is one of the world’s most consummate Little Twerps, called it “a joke” and refused to support it. The shutdown continues!
March 27, 2026: Trump orders DHS to pay TSA agents.
There was still no funding bill, but on March 27, Trump said the Department of Homeland Security should start paying TSA agents anyway, with some unspecified money, from some unspecified source, somehow. This is probably constitutional? Or not? And apparently Trump could have done this all along? But just … didn’t? Because of … stuff?
April 2026: ?????
As of March 31, TSA agents are starting to receive paychecks—the only thing more fun than receiving a salary is receiving a mystery salary—and airport lines are reportedly getting shorter as more agents return to work. There is still no budget deal in place, however, and it’s unclear how long DHS can keep funding the TSA in the absence of one. My advice, if you have to fly somewhere, is to go, like, late this week, and then try to come back before mid-April. Identify and exploit the dystopian circadian rhythm; it’s the only way to get by.
Over the past 70 years, a system that was designed to ensure travelers’ safety has been strategically mismanaged, taken for granted, and used for political point-scoring; it’s become a logistical nightmare while slowly getting worse at its core task. It’s a small miracle that it still works as well as it does. Which is to say: The Great Airport Meltdown of 2026 is a story about what’s happening to so many of our institutions; it just has longer lines.
Good thing the U.S. isn’t two months away from hosting the biggest sporting event in the world!
