TSA Funding Chaos And How To Travel Prepared

TSA screeners working without pay isn’t just a headline, it changes the real safety and stress level of flying. When staffing drops and security lanes close, airports turn into choke points where five, six, even eight hour waits become normal, and that kind of crowding creates risks most travelers never think about. I share what I’m seeing, what the news is missing, and why the TSA funding shutdown is the kind of everyday disruption preppers should treat as a serious warning sign. 

We dig into where the TSA came from after 9-11, why rapid hiring and brutal turnover still matter today, and what happens when morale and staffing collapse at scale. I also talk about ICE stepping in to help with line management, and a point Sarah Adams raised that hit me hard: long airport lines can become soft targets. That’s not fearmongering, it’s realistic situational awareness in a public space that was never designed to hold thousands of stressed people for hours. 

Then I get personal with travel stories from flying right after the 2009 underwear bomber incident and what “extra security” actually looked like in practice. I compare it with Glasgow’s layered approach, including multiple checkpoints and a deep inspection of my camera gear and boots, plus a look at air marshals, hiring standards, and why frangible rounds matter on an aircraft. I even share my Newark “toothpaste is a liquid” lesson and how a smart comment can buy you a secondary screening. 

If you’re flying soon, I close with simple travel preparedness steps: food, water, meds, chargers, bathroom planning, and time buffers that keep a bad day from turning into a disaster. Subscribe, share this with a frequent flyer, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

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Transcript

Cold Open And Show Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You are listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper. My duct tape. The real duct tape. It fixes everything except that decision. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America. From border to border, coast to coast, and all ships at sea. Here is your host, Keith.

The Review Request And Rankings

TSA Goes Unfunded And Understaffed

How TSA Was Built After 9-11

Eight Hour Lines And ICE Help

Crowded Airports As Soft Targets

Flying Right After Underwear Bomber

Glasgow Security Checks Done Right

Air Marshals Hiring And Frangible Rounds

The Toothpaste Secondary Screening Story

Prepping Tips For Airport Line Chaos

Final Thoughts And Ways To Support

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hey everybody, you're listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast. I am Keith, March 23rd, 2026. And before we get started, I need a favor. I know I've mentioned several times about liking, subscribing, and leaving a review for this podcast. So because of you and the increased downloads and listens in the last two to three months, this podcast is currently in the top 10 to 15% of indie podcasts with BuzzSprout. Prepping podcasts are kind of a niche podcast, and it's all about the algorithm. So if you would just take two minutes, please, the vast majority of you listen to this podcast via Apple Podcasts, approximately 60%, about 30% via Spotify, and then there's a bunch of onesies and twosies. It would really help the algorithm and it would really help the podcast get noticed and rise in the rankings. As you guys know, I do not necessarily monetize this podcast. The only type of commercial that I do run is the August and Farms affiliate link. I receive requests every single day to monetize the podcast by running third-party ads, and I am not about to do that. So please do a favor, leave a review. I really would appreciate it. It helps the podcast get noticed and it moves it higher in the rankings. All right, that is my shameless commercial plug. So let's get into tonight's podcast. I want to talk about the TSA, I want to talk about airport security, and I want to provide some real life examples that I have experienced firsthand when it comes to this. And trust me, I'll tie it into prepping like I always do. So as you know, we're going on almost a month that the TSA has not been funded. The TSA workers are working without a paycheck. Now, I believe in week two they got a partial paycheck, but these folks are working long hours without being paid. Now, several hundred TSA workers across the country have either resigned or have been calling off consistently because of the lack of pay. These folks have bills just like everybody else. So a little bit about the TSA. The TSA was started post-9-11 in November of 2001. It was kind of a rushed job to replace private screeners. Congress wanted, I guess, more oversight. They wanted to be involved more. And when the government wants to be involved more into something, you can imagine what happened. So they hired tens of thousands of people very, very quickly on very, very short notice. No college necessary, no elite skills, just 18 or older, GED, a clean criminal history, and pass a simple test. The pay, the entry pay was$40,000, roughly$19 an hour before shift differential, overtime, and other sorts of incentives. So with overtime, they'll be making about 65 to 75. Still way below average. Turnover is brutal. Standing there scanning bags, having people walk through the metal detectors, the full body scanners, putting up with a bunch of crap from the people who are tired of waiting in line, not a very glorious position, to say the least. Now, I will say this: there are some very hardworking TSA folks out there. Don't get me wrong, I've flown around the world, domestically international, the whole nine, and I've run into some very hardworking TSA folks. I've also run into the opposite, and we'll just leave it at that. So now let's talk about specifically what's going on at these airports. You've seen the news blips, people waiting five, six, sometimes eight hours in line just to get through security, just to get through TSA, because they don't have enough agents. A lot have resigned, a lot have called in sick, so they're having to close down several security lanes and only able to man the security lanes that they have TSA folks to staff. Today, the 23rd, apparently, ICE is now assisting with line management. In fact, some of them are being trained, doing some on-the-job training. When you greet the passenger, scan your passport, let me see your ID, look at the camera, thank you very much. Go here, go there. They're actually training some ICE agents to do this job so these folks can get some time off. Hopefully, that's gonna make a big enough difference to get these lines down to a manageable level. I'm not even gonna touch the fact that there is still an impasse on getting that department funded. Not gonna point fingers, it doesn't do any good to play the blame game. Sarah Adams, who I've spoken about several times, she's the former CIE targeter. She has a YouTube series called The Watch Floor. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, check her out on the watch floor. About 20, 30 minutes long, relatively short episodes, and she provides a lot of useful, timely information. Something I didn't think about until I saw one of her tweets on X the other day. Do you realize how big of a soft target thousands of people waiting in line at the airport can be? God forbid that someone decides to cause these people harm standing in line at these airports. It is a mass casualty situation waiting to happen. I pray that nothing even remotely close happens because the carnage would be on the scale that we haven't seen in quite some time. So let's talk about some experiences that I have had firsthand with TSA. Some are funny, some not so much. So on December 26, 2009, I flew international from Richmond to Newark and Newark to Glasgow, Scotland. And a quick shout out to our listener in Coat Bridge. We have a new listener in Coat Bridge, right outside of Glasgow. And I have some stories to tell about Glasgow, but that's a different podcast. So I flew December 26, 2009, one day after the underwear bomber with the inbound flight to Detroit. This was on Christmas Day, so December 25th. The news hit, folks weren't exactly tuned in, the government was closed, and as you can imagine, it hit the news cycle, but nobody was paying attention. So knowing that I was flying the next day in this flight, my flight's reservation was made months in advance. I'm saying to myself, and at this time I was still a police officer, holy cow, I better get to the airport because who knows how long the line's gonna be? Who knows how much extra security we're going to have to go through? As a rule of thumb, I try to get to the airport about two hours prior to my international flight, even though the first leg from Richmond to Newark is technically domestic. The TSA and the FAA and the airports see that as an international flight. If I start in Richmond, go to Newark, Newark to Glasgow, Richmond is the beginning leg of my international flight. So I tried to show up at least two hours ahead of time. I showed up two hours ahead of time. I was in a fairly small line with a ton of people going to Disneyland. There was no additional security, no local police, no anybody really, no extra TSA. Now I take that back. I was going down the jetway to get on the flight from Richmond to Newark. There were two TSA agents standing in the jetway, just standing there, hands in their pockets, watching people. Now, again, that was the only visible extra security that I saw. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that was probably the only additional security in that entire airport at the time. Again, I was flying 24 hours, a little less than 24 hours from the underwear bomber episode. For the most part, security had not ramped up. So I get to Newark. I notice a few extra police officers, but Newark's a very large airport, and especially in the international departure terminal, there's always extra law enforcement around. But again, it wasn't what I thought or what I assumed it would be, given what had just happened 24 hours previous. So I landed in Glasgow. I think that's early the next morning. I think that puts me in at two in the morning my body time, but it's really about 6:30 or 7 a.m. Glasgow time. Got out of the international arrivals into the main terminal, and I saw quite a few additional police officers, more than I would normally see in the main terminal there at Glasgow. So for the most part, your international airports, in my opinion, take security a little more serious than they do here in the States. That's just my opinion. So now the return leg. So approximately two weeks later, I'm coming back from Glasgow, Newark, Newark to Richmond, and I knew that I needed to arrive about three to three and a half hours before my flight from Glasgow to Newark. When I got to the terminal, the main terminal, there were police officers, full body armor, canine units, all of them had MP5s across their chests, and I probably saw six or eight pair of officers walking the airport just in the main terminal. I got in line, I went to the United counter, and like every international flight, when I leave that country coming back to the States, they quiz you. They're taking it very seriously. They're asking regular questions, but they're looking for hesitation, they're looking for cues that the person might not be telling the truth. And then you get sent to a secondary screening, if you will, if they're not satisfied with your answer. So once I checked my bags, I realized that I had two additional security checkpoints to go to before I even got to the gate. Again, no harm, no foul. I knew it was coming. In fact, I was relieved to know that Glasgow Airport, or Scotland in general, is taking aircraft security very seriously. Go through the first checkpoint, go through the second checkpoint, still plenty of time. I get to the gate, and I'm probably maybe the 10th or 15th person at the gate. So again, they're plenty of time. Because the last thing I want to do is be running through the airport trying to get to an international flight, and then something happened and I miss it. I sit down at the gate and I have my cameras with me. I'm also a professional photographer. So I have my pelican case, my two camera bodies, three lenses, and a bunch of little doodads, battery, battery chargers, the whole nine. I also was wearing hiking boots because it was obviously it was winter, so I was wearing hiking boots over in Glasgow. The gate agents and security asked me to step over to the side, and I brought my backpack, which was my carry-on. Well, bet my backpack was my personal item, and then my little pelican case that actually fit in the overhead was my carry-on. They asked what was in the pelican case. I told them they asked me to open it, and I did. I sat there, and while I sat there, they asked me to remove my boots. They went through my boots with a fine tooth comb. Again, I have no problem with this whatsoever. For my cameras, these are very nice cameras. At the time, they were probably top of the line. Canon 1D Mark IVs. I had two of them. They took them out of the pelican case out of the foam. They asked me to remove the battery pack, which I did. They asked me to take the lenses out of their little bags, which I did. I set them on the table, and then they examined each piece of glass. They took off the back cover, the front cover, looked through the lens, like held it up to the light to make sure there was actually glass in it that made sure something else was not in there instead of the glass. They examined both camera bodies. They asked me to put the battery pack back into the camera, switch it on, and then just hit the actuator and then rattle off about 10 different photos of basically nothing since the front cap was on. They wanted to make sure that both camera bodies were working camera bodies. And again, there wasn't some methyl ethyl bad stuff or something else jammed into that camera body. And if there was, if that camera had not clicked, there probably would have been an issue. They probably would have seized them and sent them off for some extra screening. I get it. Put everything back, they gave me my boots back, and I went ahead and set to the side. About 20, 30 minutes before we're getting ready to board, there were two members of the flight crew that were running a bit behind. And walking with them were two guys, 5'11 tactical pants, button-down shirts, and boots and sunglasses. Immediately screams air marshals. So they walk on and bypass security right onto the plane. No big secret there. So I was one of the first people to board coach. I was sitting at the very back. As soon as I got onto the plane, I was going down the aisle, my seat was near the very end, and there these two guys were chatting up the flight attendants. So much for being covert when it comes to being an air marshal, at least on that flight. But the flight was uneventful. Obviously, I'm here to tell you that story. And speaking of air marshals, when the air marshals were hiring after 9-11, again, it was a it was a situation where they needed to hire a lot of air marshals quickly. And I applied. I was a police officer at the time. And in my phone screen or my phone interview, they had my resume, basic information, police officer, all that good stuff. And they asked if I had any military experience. Well, I didn't. If I did, it would have been on my resume. And they thanked me for applying, but they said, basically, we're looking for shooters. We're looking for retired military, military folks that are just getting out, spec ops guys. Basically, they're looking for someone that, if it came down to it, could take the shot inside an airplane and drop somebody 60, 80 feet away without harming everybody else. Also, air marshals carry what's called frangible rounds. The rounds will not necessarily penetrate the skin of an aircraft. They break apart in a sense. They're not, they're they're lethal, don't get me wrong. But a frangible round will not necessarily break through the skin of an aircraft, causing an immediate decompression, and that doesn't help the situation at all. But they thanked me and they said, look, we need to get this ramped up quick, and we're just looking for shooters. So again, no harm, no foul. I understand why they needed that to happen. So when it comes to the current situation, and it doesn't have to be necessarily a situation with the TSA and how they're overworked, understaffed, and not being paid. You need to take a lot of things into consideration. So here's my TSA funny story. When I was in Newark, I had my toothpaste in my carry-on because I wanted to brush my teeth midway on one of my international flights. My bag went through x-ray, and the TSA agent yelled, like at the other end of the x-ray, whose bag is this? And I raised my hand and he said, You have toothpaste in your bag. You can't have that. That's considered a liquid. Well, I was in Newark and he was a bit rude. So then I responded with, It's a paste, not a liquid. Well, I probably shouldn't have said that. I was sent to secondary screening for being a smart ass, and eventually I was on my way without toothpaste. But I was able to get some get some on the flight and brush my teeth before I landed. So when it comes to prepping, it doesn't have to be about buying more corn at the store. It doesn't have to be getting a solar set up in case the power goes out. It's about being prepared. So if you are flying in the next week, two weeks, who knows how long this is going to go on. I personally think this should resolve itself with some sort of stopgap measure, whether partially funded or something. This cannot continue because of the inconvenience and the safety concerns at all of these airports. But you need to be prepared. Again, we're talking about simple preparation. If you know you're going to be in line, bring some food, bring some water. If you've got a best friend and they don't mind hanging out with you in line, if they want to hold your spot while you run to the potty because you're going to be there for two, three, four, five hours. I saw a video where people in, I believe it was New Orleans, were sleeping in the line in the middle of the night while no flights were inbound or outbound. They were sleeping in line to be the first 20 or 30 people when the desks and the gate agents open to take flights for the next day. How sad is that? So just be prepared. Be prepared for anything. It's a crazy world out there. The TSA situation, among everything else, is not helping the situation at all. It's increasing stress, it's increasing anxiety. And I wouldn't be surprised if a fist fight or worse breaks out in one of these airports because people are just basically fed up with the politicians in DC and their inability to get their thumbs out of their butt and pass whatever resolution or whatever funding measure they need to to get these folks paid and to get the lines back down to a reasonable level. I really appreciate you guys stopping by as always. Again, if you could do me a big favor and just leave a review, leave me a five-star review. If I suck, then leave me a three-star review. If I suck really bad, send me an email and tell me how I can improve. Don't don't necessarily leave me a two-star review. Let me know how I can improve the podcast before you try to sync my ratings with a one or two-star review. But no, all kidding aside. If you have a second, just leave me a review. Again, that will really, really help the podcast. Practicalprep podcast at gmail.com. I'm on the Twitters. And then as far as the August and Farms affiliate link, I will leave the affiliate link in the show notes. If you click on that affiliate link, you pay the same prices as everybody else. There's nothing shady going on behind the scenes, but when you use that affiliate link, there is a chance that I will get a small commission from your sale. In addition, at checkout, put in podcast prep as a coupon and you will get an additional 10% off. All right, folks, again, thanks so much. I really do appreciate it. Be careful out there. Take care of one another, and until next time.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

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