Travelers around the U.s. are hit with weather, airline and security delays : NPR

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Heather Johnson and her husband arrived at the Chicago airport very early this morning — we’re talking 5 a.m. — with three kids and three suitcases in tow. And then she glanced at the lines to go through security.

HEATHER JOHNSON: My flight left at 7 a.m. and we weren’t going to get through security.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Yes, the airport was already packed with other travelers early in the morning, and in the midst of a partial government shutdown, security wait times are significantly increased across the United States. TSA agents are currently working without pay, and many more than usual are not showing up for work.

CHANG: With that in mind, Heather Johnson felt she had only one choice to bring her family from Chicago to Washington, D.C.: pay hundreds of dollars to buy the CLEAR pass for her family, a private security pass so they could get through those security lines.

JOHNSON: And that helped us get there on time, and we were able to eat something before we boarded, which was nice.

KELLY: Chris Sununu is among those calling for an end to the partial shutdown so TSA agents can get paid and airports can operate again. Sununu is the former Republican governor of New Hampshire and now chairman and CEO of the industry group Airlines for America. On Sunday, he sent an open letter to Congress, as well as nine airline and shipping executives, asking lawmakers to defund the Department of Homeland Security. He told me that these security backups are happening all over the country.

CHRIS SUNUNU: It’s JFK one day, Atlanta one day. We saw a three or four hour backup in Houston that day. You never really know what day or where it’s going to happen. The TSA itself, I think, has done a very good job of moving these types of emergency personnel. So when the problem hit Houston, they sent 20 or 30 people from other airports in the Texas area to Houston. The system is not in crisis mode. That’s the good news: it’s being mitigated. But damn, it’s a totally unnecessary problem for the American public and completely unfair and totally unnecessary to not pay your own employees on behalf of the federal government.

KELLY: What are you hearing from them, the TSA agents who aren’t getting paid?

SUNUNU: You know, God bless them. They’re – for the – overall, they always come to work. Now, as this progresses into weeks four, five and six, the pressure increases. And what I hear from them is, look, you know, we don’t wake up one morning and say, I guess we’re not going to come today. They look further and say, “Geez, if this lasts another five to ten days, I have to pay my bills one way or another.” I spoke to a GRT. She was a single mother and had continued to work, you know, for the first three weeks, and she said, “Look, I have to take two days off this week. I’m going to call because I have to drive an Uber. And I just have to make sure that I can put, you know, food on the table, and I think the rent was going to go up. And so she was going to Uber for a few days, earn the last few hundred dollars she needed to pay the rent. And the irony was that she would pick people up and take them to the airport. She felt like I should have worked there, but I just couldn’t.

KELLY: For those who aren’t continuing to come – and the Department of Homeland Security says more than 350 TSA agents have left the force in the last month or so during this latest shutdown – are these positions easy to fill or even at the end of this shutdown, how long will it take to fill these positions and return to full capacity?

SUNUNU: Yeah. No, they’re not easy to fill at all because of the message this whole thing sends – and again, it’s not the TSA’s fault, it’s the federal government’s. The message this sends is: why should I go into an industry where, several times a year, I may not be able to get paid two, three or four weeks in a row? This therefore discourages the hiring of new workers.

KELLY: Homeland Security, DHS, blamed Democrats for the shutdown. They are issuing increasingly direct and, I believe, partisan public statements on social media and so on. Does this kind of rhetoric make it more difficult to reach a deal that is in the best interests of passengers, of people who are trying to fly in the industry?

SUNUNU: You know, when – as a former governor, you have to come into a negotiation saying, what am I willing to give in to, right? Where am I willing to give up a little bit of ground, you know, to find that common ground? One of the main problems was that they didn’t like the leadership of Homeland Security. The Republicans gave up on it. They fired Kristi Noem. I think it was a big political concession to the Democrats. They said they wanted body cameras. These are coming. They said they wanted new leadership, calm and a better strategy toward Minnesota. All this turned out and calmed down. So I think what the Republicans are saying is: Look, we’ve given up a little bit here. So they say, “Democrats, what are you willing to give?” And so far, we haven’t really heard anything about it yet.

KELLY: Do you have any sympathy for the Democratic position on why the government is partially shut down? I mean, Democrats, as you know, have refused to support funding because they want policy changes as a result of what happened in Minnesota this year on immigration enforcement.

SUNUNU: Yeah. And they got some of it. But in the meantime, how about we just pay these people, right? It’s… the TSA has nothing to do with any of this.

KELLY: So what’s the long-term solution to ensure that this doesn’t happen every two months?

SUNUNU: Well, I love that you asked that. There are two bills out there, bipartisan support, the Aviation Funding Stability Act and the Aviation Funding Solvency Act, that say it’s an air traffic controller or a TSA agent or a TSO, whatever it is, if they’re – if it’s in the airspace and they’re asked to come and work, you have to pay them. And the money is already there. This does not require any additional credit. This does not require an additional cent from the American taxpayer. It’s just the power to pay them. So the solutions are there. We just need people to support them and hopefully take them home so that the American public – so that the discussion can happen, so that the policy can happen. But policy change can happen without paralyzing the entire government.

KELLY: A response from Congress to your letter?

SUNUNU: Well, there’s – I think in the last 48 hours we’ve heard a lot of movement. Unfortunately, you know, I don’t yet have the certainty that, you know, tomorrow morning we’re going to wake up and it’s all going to be over. It would be great if that were the case. But the good news is that after two weeks without any real discussions, it seems that things are moving a little, moving forward a little. And we just need people to be in a leadership position, because guess what? We have a record number of spring break trips. We have record bookings for the summer. We have the FIFA World Cup coming up. We face security issues – international and domestic – that are under a lot of pressure and tension. So not paying your security personnel right now is really an irresponsible thing to do, especially with what we’re seeing in Iran and all the different threats that are out there.

So there are 100 reasons to do it right, but very few reasons to do it this way. And so I hope that, whether it’s this letter or other pressures on the system, you know, everyone gets in a room. I’m still a big believer – it sounds cliché. You put everyone in a room, you lock the door, you say, well, you know, we’re going to order pizza. We’re not going out until we figure this thing out. We were doing this in New Hampshire, and it worked.

KELLY: This is an old-fashioned election squabble, Governor, that you’re describing. Yes.

SUNUNU: But it’s – it works.

KELLY: Yeah.

SUNUNU: It works. Sometimes old school is the best school, you know?

KELLY: Chris Sununu, former Republican governor of New Hampshire, now chairman and CEO of the airline industry group Airlines for America, thank you.

SUNUNU: Thank you.

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