As the United States enters yet another bruising chapter of budget brinkmanship, the newest casualty is the nation’s aviation system. A fresh shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security has pushed tens of thousands of Transportation Security Administration workers into unpaid status as of February 14, 2026, even as they are ordered to keep airport checkpoints running. For American Airlines, United, Delta, and Southwest, the timing could hardly be worse, colliding with rising spring travel demand and an already stretched workforce. For international visitors from Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Germany, it is rapidly shaping into a nightmare of grinding lines, missed connections, and frayed tempers at gateway airports across the United States.
TSA Workers On The Front Line Without Pay
The current funding lapse specifically hits the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the TSA. While air traffic control operations are protected this time by previously enacted funding for the Department of Transportation, security screening staff are not so fortunate. Around 95 percent of TSA officers have been designated essential, meaning they must report to work even as paychecks stop, a scenario that has become grimly familiar after the prolonged shutdowns of late 2025 and early 2026.
For screeners, the financial strain is immediate and personal. Many live paycheck to paycheck in expensive metro areas where major hubs like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami dominate the air network. During the last shutdown, unions and airport officials reported screeners turning to credit cards and emergency loans simply to pay rent and buy groceries. Charities at some airports organized food banks and free meal programs. With another stoppage now in effect, those fragile coping mechanisms are again under pressure.
Morale is a central concern. While TSA officers are accustomed to long shifts and occasional passenger hostility, working indefinitely without compensation is a different order of stress. During previous shutdowns, growing numbers of screeners simply called in sick or sought temporary side jobs to keep cash flowing. Even modest absenteeism ripples quickly through a tightly scheduled security operation, lengthening lines, closing lanes, and forcing airports to triage checkpoints at peak times.
Behind the scenes, TSA training, overtime approvals, and nonessential administrative tasks are also constrained during a shutdown. That narrows managers’ ability to flex staffing for surges and undercuts longer term efforts to improve screening efficiency. In effect, an agency that was already under sustained pressure now has fewer tools and less motivated staff with which to keep America’s checkpoints moving.
Major Airlines Brace For A New Wave Of Disruptions
For the four big U.S. carriers that dominate domestic and transatlantic travel, the stakes extend far beyond bad optics. American Airlines, United, Delta, and Southwest are still digesting the operational and financial hit from the record-length shutdown in late 2025, when unpaid controllers and TSA agents contributed to days with thousands of delays and hundreds of cancellations nationwide. Flight-tracking data at the time showed double-digit percentages of each airline’s schedule running late, with Southwest often posting the highest delay ratios and Delta suffering elevated cancellation rates at key hubs.
Executives at these carriers remember clearly how slim buffers in the aviation system were tested by that crisis. A shortage of air traffic controllers, mandatory overtime, and last-minute sick calls in tower facilities combined with security bottlenecks at checkpoints. The result was a precarious network where a staffing gap in Atlanta or Chicago could ripple to Denver, Phoenix, and Seattle within hours. Recovery from that disruption took weeks, even after federal pay resumed.
This time, the immediate risk is concentrated at security rather than in the control towers, but the airlines are not taking chances. Carriers have started warning customers to arrive earlier, pushing notifications through apps and email, and building in additional ground time for some flights at the most affected hubs. American and United, with large transatlantic networks and heavy reliance on congested northeast airports, are particularly exposed. Delta is watching Atlanta and New York closely, while Southwest, with its dense domestic point to point network, could feel a cascade of missed connections if screening delays consistently push departure banks behind schedule.
Industry groups representing U.S. airlines have already renewed their calls for political leaders to resolve the funding dispute quickly. The message is blunt: the aviation system is an essential economic engine and should not be used as a bargaining chip. Yet with Congress deeply divided over broader immigration and security policy, airline planners must assume a protracted shutdown is possible and adjust their operations accordingly.
Nightmare Scenarios For Visitors From Canada, Mexico, The UK, And Germany
While U.S. travelers are certainly not spared, the new shutdown is particularly unnerving for international visitors. Passengers from Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Germany represent some of the largest inbound markets to the United States, and they tend to funnel through a limited set of major gateways that are especially vulnerable to security staffing gaps. Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal passengers often connect through New York, Chicago, or Boston. Mexican travelers pass heavily through Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Miami. UK and German passengers rely on New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as their primary U.S. entry points.
In these hubs, a modest increase in TSA absenteeism can double or triple queue times in a matter of hours, particularly at morning and late afternoon peaks aligned with transatlantic arrivals and departures. Visitors arriving after long-haul flights from London, Manchester, Frankfurt, or Munich may find themselves shuffling through snaking security lines for domestic connections, facing missed flights and overnight layovers they never planned for. Language barriers and unfamiliarity with local airport layouts can intensify frustration, particularly for those traveling with children or elderly relatives.
The perception problem is just as serious as the practical one. Over the past year, international media outlets from Europe and Canada have run extensive coverage of U.S. shutdown politics and the strain on federal workers. Images of unpaid TSA officers and overwhelmed checkpoints undercut the carefully curated brand campaigns that U.S. tourism boards run overseas. For some would-be visitors planning once in a lifetime trips, the idea of spending the first hours of a U.S. holiday trapped in security queues may be enough to push them toward alternative destinations.
Business travelers face their own specific worries. Executives flying from London to Houston for time-sensitive meetings, or from Mexico City to New York for investor roadshows, rely on predictable connections. Shutdown induced delays inject new uncertainty into trip planning, raising the risk that a critical client meeting is missed because a security lane went understaffed that morning. Such experiences can influence future decisions about where to hold conferences or locate regional headquarters.
Where The Pain Will Be Felt First: Key U.S. Hubs Under Strain
Not every airport will experience the shutdown equally. The heaviest burden is likely to fall on the nation’s largest hubs where passenger volumes are highest and airline schedules are densest. Places like Chicago O Hare, Atlanta, Dallas Fort Worth, Los Angeles International, Newark Liberty, and New York’s JFK and LaGuardia airports are already operating close to capacity on a normal day. Even short-lived staffing issues at TSA checkpoints can quickly create backlogs that take hours to clear.
These hubs are central to the operations of the big four airlines. American relies heavily on Dallas Fort Worth, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Miami to connect domestic and international traffic. United’s sprawling networks through Newark, Chicago, Denver, and Houston make those airports critical nodes. Delta’s dominance in Atlanta and its major presence in Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, and Los Angeles mean any security slowdown in those cities can reverberate across its system. Southwest, with large operations at airports like Chicago Midway, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Houston Hobby, is vulnerable to any widespread shift in passenger arrival patterns and screening capacity.
On top of sheer volume, certain hubs have structural quirks that can magnify shutdown disruptions. Airports where international arrivals must clear security again to reach domestic connections can see especially severe choke points when TSA staffing dips. Likewise, terminals with limited checkpoint lane flexibility or older layouts that constrain queue space can struggle to contain surged crowds, increasing stress for both passengers and officers.
Secondary and regional airports are not immune, but their experience may differ. Many will see delays mainly when large numbers of connecting passengers miss outbound flights from heavily affected hubs. The disruption may appear as sudden waves of evening misconnects or irregular operations days rather than persistently long security lines. Still, travelers in smaller markets should not assume they are insulated, especially if their itinerary depends on a tight connection through a major U.S. gateway.
Comparisons With The 2025 Shutdown And Lessons Learned
The late 2025 shutdown offers a cautionary blueprint of what can happen if the current funding impasse drags on. During that episode, a combination of unpaid air traffic controllers and TSA agents led to cascading disruptions. Flight-tracking services counted days with more than 4,000 delayed flights across the United States, and at the height of the crisis, nearly 7,000 flights were delayed in a single day. Major carriers saw between one fifth and nearly half of their daily schedules running behind, depending on weather and regional staffing.
For airlines, one sobering lesson from 2025 was how rapidly a complex network can seize when multiple pressure points are hit at once. Staffing shortages at approach control facilities in Atlanta, radar centers in Texas, and towers in the Northeast wind up interlinked. At the same time, screening bottlenecks at security checkpoints force airlines to hold boarding doors open longer, delay pushbacks, and rework crew duty schedules. Recovery from that kind of multi front disruption is not simply a matter of flipping a switch when the shutdown ends. Schedules must be rebuilt, aircraft repositioned, and crews and maintenance windows resynchronized.
TSA leadership also drew internal lessons from that period, including efforts to improve communication with the traveling public and to prioritize staffing at critical checkpoints during peak periods. Yet many of the underlying structural issues remain unchanged. The agency still faces chronic recruitment and retention challenges, relatively low pay compared with private sector security work in some markets, and a workforce that has lived through multiple shutdowns in just a few years. With this new funding lapse, those gains are being tested once more.
For travelers, the key takeaway from recent shutdowns is that impact can escalate in waves. The first days may bring only modestly longer lines, but as unpaid status stretches into weeks, absenteeism often rises, and the system begins to fray. International passengers planning trips months in advance have to weigh whether conditions might deteriorate further by the time they travel, even if early reports seem manageable.
What International Travelers Can Expect In The Coming Weeks
Visitors from Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, and other key markets landing in the United States over the next several weeks should prepare for a travel environment that is more fragile and less predictable than usual. Airlines and airports will do everything they can to keep traffic flowing, but they cannot fully insulate passengers from the effect of unpaid security staff and the broader disruption of a political stalemate in Washington.
At a practical level, travelers can expect longer security queues at busy times, especially early mornings and late afternoons at major international gateways. Connection windows that might have been comfortable in normal circumstances could become risky. Because the shutdown does not halt flight operations outright, schedules will look largely intact in booking systems, which may mask the underlying vulnerability to knock on delays when screening lines swell or a checkpoint lane has to close suddenly for lack of staff.
Customer service touchpoints may also be under strain. When many passengers miss connections due to long queues, airport service desks and call centers experience surges in rebooking requests. Lines at transit desks inside customs and immigration areas can stretch, creating additional stress for international visitors trying to salvage same day onward travel. Even where airlines proactively protect connections by holding flights or rebooking in advance, those adjustments can create capacity pinch points elsewhere in the network.
Travel insurers and tour operators are watching closely. Some policies have specific language related to government shutdowns and air traffic disruptions, and the fine print varies widely. Tour groups from Europe and Canada building multi city U.S. itineraries may find operators adjusting schedules, padding transit times, or even rethinking certain same day connections that look increasingly optimistic under shutdown conditions.
Political Uncertainty And The Road Ahead For U.S. Travel
Ultimately, the fate of TSA paychecks and the stability of U.S. air travel in the coming months rest not in the terminals, but in the halls of Congress and the White House. The current Department of Homeland Security shutdown emerged from an impasse over immigration enforcement and related policy conditions, with neither side eager to blink first. That political calculus means there is no clear timetable for resolution, leaving airlines, airports, and travelers operating under a cloud of uncertainty.
For the travel and tourism sector, that uncertainty cuts deep. International visitors are not just short term customers; they underpin hotel occupancy in gateway cities, restaurant revenue, cultural institution attendance, and retail spending. When airports become symbols of political dysfunction, the reputational damage lingers. Tourism boards and airline marketing teams abroad must now contend with questions from travelers and media about whether the United States is a reliable destination or one perpetually at risk of self inflicted disruption.
The coming weeks will test whether lessons from previous shutdowns have been meaningfully applied. If TSA managers can maintain staffing levels, communicate clearly with the public, and partner closely with airlines to prioritize the most critical choke points, the worst case scenario of widespread multi day gridlock may be avoided. But as long as tens of thousands of federal aviation and security workers are expected to show up without pay, the system will remain fragile, and every peak travel weekend will carry a new sense of risk.
For now, prospective visitors from Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, and beyond should watch developments in Washington carefully as they finalize their travel plans. The United States remains one of the world’s most compelling destinations. Yet until political leaders resolve the funding standoff, the country’s front door, its airports, will continue to reflect the turbulence of its politics, and travelers will need extra patience and flexibility to navigate the journey.