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TSA official: nearly $1bn in missed pay and upwards of half of staff calling out of major airports
Shrai Popat
Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting administrator of the TSA, said that her agency has been shut down for 50% of the fiscal year so far. This includes the record-breaking lapse in federal funding last year that lasted 43 days.
“This Friday, we will have reached nearly $1bn in missed paychecks,” she told members of Congress at today’s hearing.
“Many in our workforce have missed bill payments, received eviction notices, had their cars repossessed and utilities shut off, lost their childcare, defaulted on loans, damaged their credit line and drained their retirement savings. Some are sleeping in their cars, selling their blood and plasma and taking on second jobs to make ends meet,” she added.
McNeill added that prior to this most recent shutdown, only 4% of TSA employees would not report to work. Now she said that “multiple major airports are experiencing days where 40 to 50% of their staff are calling out” because they cannot afford to work without pay.
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Prosecutors examined whether Trump disclosed classified map on plane after leaving office
Hugo Lowell
Federal prosecutors examined whether Donald Trump showed a classified map to people on his plane after his first term, including to his now White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to justice department materials produced to the House judiciary committee.
The incident was described in a 13 January 2023 briefing memo prepared for the then attorney general, Merrick Garland – roughly six months before special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
The memo also described the documents Trump retained as some of the most protected materials held by the federal government, estimating that one document was accessible to only six people, and alleging that the documents were pertinent to his business interests.
Trump’s alleged disclosure of the map, as described in the memo, would mark the second known time he waved around a classified map in front of Wiles. The indictment charging Trump also described an incident where he showed a classified map to people at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
Here’s the story:
Fema warns of dwindling funds amid DHS shutdown
Shrai Popat
Throughout today’s hearing, Victoria Barton, an official at Fema, told lawmakers on the House homeland security committee that a portion of her agency’s staff was able to continue working thanks to the Disaster Relief Fund.
However, she later said that the fund only has $3.6bn remaining. If there was another major storm, depending on the magnitude, the fund could be depleted “pretty rapidly”.
The House oversight committee has postponed its planned interview with Tova Noel, one of the prison guards on duty at the New York facility where Jeffrey Epstein was held the night he died, NBC News reports.
Earlier this month, the panel asked Noel, who has said she believes she was the last person to have seen Epstein alive, to come in tomorrow for a transcribed interview, as part of its investigation into the convicted sex offender’s death.
A spokesperson for the committee told NBC News that the interview was not taking place this week, and the panel was in communication with her attorney about a future date.
The committee requested an interview with Noel after documents released by the justice department suggested she Googled him shortly before he was found dead in his cell in 2019.
Noel and her partner at the Metropolitan Correctional Center that night, Michael Thomas, admitted to not checking on Epstein, who was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and had previously attempted suicide, every 30 minutes as they were supposed to. They were charged with falsifying records, though the case was later dropped.
‘ICE needs to act like every other law enforcement agency,’ Democrat says at DHS hearing
Shrai Popat
During today’s hearing, Democratic representative Seth Magaziner shared a montage of news clips showing the violent tactics used by federal immigration agents during crackdowns across the country, including the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
He also noted that Democratic lawmakers in the House have crafted a bill to separate funding for the TSA, Cisa, Fema and the coast guard – to ensure these agencies can function – as long as Republicans reject reforms for ICE agents.
“Firing Kristi Noem is a good start, but it is not enough,” Magaziner said of Donald Trump’s former DHS secretary, recently replaced by Markwayne Mullin. “ICE needs to act like every other law enforcement agency, with warrants, with badge numbers, with standards of conduct.”
He urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would end the impact on several DHS agencies, while continuing to negotiate over “the much-needed changes to ICE”.
The White House has posted a bizarre and slightly disconcerting video of Melania Trump appearing on stage with a humanoid at the first lady’s Fostering the Future Together roundtable on AI education.
Footage shows Trump, dressed in white, striding down a red carpet alongside a robot similarly clad in white to a soundtrack of sci-fi-sounding music as a waiting audience applauds.
Trump stops as she reaches the conference room, but the humanoid keeps walking to its right before doubling back to take center-stage. Addressing the room in a female voice, it introduces itself as “Figure three, a humanoid built in the United States of America” and welcomes invitees in a range of languages. Trump and the other invitees respond with a round of applause that comes off as less than spontaneous.
Shrai Popat
Democratic representative Shri Thanedar just asked McNeill about the administration’s decision to deploy ICE officers to airports, and how this functions given the fact it takes at least four months to train a transportation security officers (TSO).
McNeill said she was “extremely thankful” that Donald Trump for “leveraging assets” across the DHS.
“We’ve been spending time training [ICE agents] in the last few days and we’re seeing relief,” she added.
Thanedar noted that there have been several images of federal immigration officers milling around airports “looking at their phones or chitchatting”.
McNeill maintained that the agents that have been transferred are conducting “non-specialized screening functions” and that it’s been “incredibly helpful to alleviate the burden on our workforce”.
Chaplains in the US armed forces will no longer display their military rank, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has announced in a new reform to how men of the cloth under Pentagon command perform their duties.
“The memo I will sign today directs chaplains, all of whom are officers, to replace the rank insignia on their uniforms with their religious insignia,” Hegseth, who has put his own devout Christian beliefs on stark display in the form of body tattoos, said in a video message.
“A chaplain is first and foremost a chaplain and an officer second. This change is a visual representation of that fact, specifically unique to the role of a chaplain. They are first and foremost called and ordained by God.
“While they will retain rank as an officer, to those they serve, their rank will not be visible [and] instead be seen among the highest ranks because of their divine calling.”
He said the change was meant to “uplift and celebrate the chaplain’s role as a chaplain”.
Hegseth also said that, henceforth, the military would use just 31 faith codes, rather than the current 200, to cater to the varying religious beliefs held across the armed forces.
In 2024, army chaplain corps guidelines said it represented more than 100 different religious groups.
Chaplains in the military are commissioned officers acting as religious leaders and counsellors to service members and their families. The chaplain corps in the US military dates back to 1775, when it was established by George Washington as an exclusively Protestant group. Catholic and Jewish chaplains were introduced during the 19th century. Muslim and Buddhist chaplains became part of the service more recently, in 1994 and 2008, respectively.
TSA faces ‘dire situation’ ahead of World Cup security needs, official says
Shrai Popat
McNeill also noted that since it takes four to six months to train transportation security officers (TSOs), any newly hired officers will not be able to work on the checkpoint until well after the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
“This is a dire situation,” she said. “We are facing a potential perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers at our airports for the World Cup games in less than 80 Days.”
TSA official: nearly $1bn in missed pay and upwards of half of staff calling out of major airports
Shrai Popat
Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting administrator of the TSA, said that her agency has been shut down for 50% of the fiscal year so far. This includes the record-breaking lapse in federal funding last year that lasted 43 days.
“This Friday, we will have reached nearly $1bn in missed paychecks,” she told members of Congress at today’s hearing.
“Many in our workforce have missed bill payments, received eviction notices, had their cars repossessed and utilities shut off, lost their childcare, defaulted on loans, damaged their credit line and drained their retirement savings. Some are sleeping in their cars, selling their blood and plasma and taking on second jobs to make ends meet,” she added.
McNeill added that prior to this most recent shutdown, only 4% of TSA employees would not report to work. Now she said that “multiple major airports are experiencing days where 40 to 50% of their staff are calling out” because they cannot afford to work without pay.
Shrai Popat
Thompson, the top Democrat on the House homeland security committee, scolded congressional Republicans for doing “Trump’s bidding every time he snaps his fingers and they jump”.
During his opening remarks, Thompson called Wednesday’s hearing a “cover” for the president.
Shrai Popat
On Tuesday, Democrats remained unimpressed by Republican lawmakers’ latest proposal to end the partial shutdown of the DHS – which would not include any funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This comes after top brass of the GOP met with Donald Trump to formulate an offer that would hold off appropriating funds for federal immigration enforcement, and save that for another budget bill.
Since ICE received $75bn through Trump’s sweeping policy bill last year, it’s been largely protected from the expired funds that have affected other agencies within the DHS.
Democrats argue that Republicans’ recent plans don’t contain any guardrails on officers, which they have been demanding for months, since the fatal shooting of two US citizens during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, insisted that Democrats will send an updated counteroffer. “And I can assure you, it will contain significant reforms in it,” he told reporters.
The Senate budget committee is meeting on Capitol Hill to examine the solvency of social security, one of the US’s great political sacred cows dating back to Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s.
Jeff Merkley, a Democrat senator from Oregon, set a pessimistic tone by warning that the system was facing a looming cash crunch and would be essentially bust in six years, on current trajectories.
“The independent estimates by the social security administration and the congressional budget office find that just six years from now, the trust fund is empty,” he said. “Six years from now, that’s like tomorrow. It’s right here for any senator running for reelection this year and their term. The trust fund is out of money … That means that essentially a quarter of the payments would halve, or all the payments would have to be reduced by a quarter, and that would be a huge impact for families.”
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