300 TSA workers quit amid Dems' refusal to fund DHS

Hundreds of TSA agents are quitting their jobs as Democrats in Washington are digging their heels in on a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security. As of Friday, TSA agents were going without a paycheck.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that the impacts of not funding DHS are real, and they’re in an unsustainable position.” Senate Democrats have been holding up funding for DHS, taking issue with practices in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

The White House told The Daily Wire that 300 TSA agents have quit their jobs since the shutdown started. There have been longer lines and wait times at the airports, and callouts at the agency have increased. “They’re not getting rich doing these jobs. They live paycheck to paycheck,” Ken Cuccinelli, a former DHS official, said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed that the Democrats are “ready to fund TSA” but that “Republicans are blocking it,” even though the Democrats voted down DHS funding as recently as Thursday.

The vote failed 51-46, with it being a cloture vote to end debate on the issue; 60 votes were needed. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) was the only Democrat to vote in favor of funding DHS.

“We all have to acknowledge that this shutdown had no impact, zero impact on ICE, all of the funding was already in place there from the Big Beautiful Bill that I did not vote for,” Fetterman told NewsNation earlier this week.

“Why punish all those TSA agents and all the other people under the DHS umbrella just because the base demands that we just shut it down, knowing, absolutely knowing it will have no impact on ICE,” he added.

However, some Democrats, including Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), have changed their tune after there were two terrorist attacks on US soil that took place on Thursday. There was a shooting at Old Dominion, where the gunman yelled "Allahu Akbar" and then killed a professor before being killed by ROTC students. Additionally, a suspect drove a truck into a synagogue in Michigan, which was loaded up with explosives.

Slotkin said on Friday when asked about DHS funding, "Certainly, we need to fund the Department of Homeland Security, and we need, in my view, to cut away all the conversation on ICE, which is its own conversation from all the core mission of the Department of Homeland Security. But they're essential." The day before, however, she had voted against funding DHS along with the vast majority of the Democrats in the Senate.