Key events
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
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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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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.
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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.”
Republican chair of House committee: ‘The shutdown is not a game’
Shrai Popat
Top officials at agencies affected by the ongoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown are testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The lapse in funding for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has lasted 40 days with little end in sight.
During opening remarks, the Republican chair of the House homeland security committee, Andrew Garbarino, said that the shutdown has caused “massive disruptions” across airports, “weakened our nation’s cybersecurity posture” and “left states unsupported with less than 100 days until the start of major events across the United States, such as FIFA World Cup”.
Garbarino continued to blame his colleagues across the aisle for employees across affected agencies going without pay. “The shutdown is not a game, and frankly, I’m tired of it being treated like one,” he said during his opening remarks. “Mistakes are too high, we owe it to the American people to stop the political games to fund DHS and to get back to regular order.”
Ranking Democrat on House committee: ICE agents ‘cannot do TSA’s job, nor should they’
Democratic representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking member of the House homeland security committee, opens the hearing with a reminder about the violence caused by ICE, a branch of the partially shut down department of homeland security, earlier this year.
“Democrats want to ensure that before we give even more money to ICE and CBP, which is already flush with cash, that we rein in the deadly abuses we saw in Minneapolis. We owe Renee Good and Alex Pretti that much as Good’s family implored the committee in a letter this week.”
Thompson went on to say he was “extremely troubled” by the deployment of ICE to several US airports as the TSA is overwhelmed.
“These agents cannot do TSA’s job, nor should they,” he said. “And they aren’t trained to do it. So we see images of ICE agents standing around or walking through terminals, doing nothing to reduce the lines at security checkpoints, while TSA personnel continue to do their jobs without pay because Republicans refuse to vote for legislation to fund TSA. It’s ridiculous and maddening, but not surprising.”
House committee to hold hearing on partial DHS shutdown
The House committee on homeland security is about to hold a hearing on the DHS shutdown with officials from its affected agencies.
The speakers include a TSA official as agency staffing shortages result in longer-than-usual security lines across US airports.
We’ll bring you the latest lines from this hearing.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have attempted to seize on the airport chaos, with each party pointing the finger at the other.
This morning the Republican senators Tom Cotton and Bernie Moreno took to X to blame Democrats for the partial homeland security shutdown over the party’s stance on issues pertaining to ICE.
“Senate Democrats want to ban ICE officers from wearing masks so their left-wing street militias can dox the officers and terrorize the officers’ wives and children at their homes,” Cotton said. “That’s why TSA lines are so long.”
Democratic senator Mazie Hirono posted a photo of a federal agent on his phone inside an airport while a long line amassed outside. (It was unclear where this photo was taken or obtained.) She wrote: “There is NO need for ICE at our airports.”
US airports continue to see long lines and fewer TSA staff amid partial DHS shutdown
The partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security continued on Wednesday, as longer-than-usual lines at major US airports have caused turmoil for travelers this week.
Some airports are officially advising travelers to arrive four hours before their scheduled flights as Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff, who have been working without pay for over a month, are not reporting for duty amid the standoff.
On Tuesday, Delta partly suspended its speciality service desk for members of Congress until funding for the TSA is restored. The service desk is used to help members of Congress book flights at special government rates, secure airport escorts and make last-minute flight changes.
On Wednesday, a CBS reporter spotted a familiar face on a long line at Houston’s international airport: former Trump attorney general Bill Barr.
Cambodian man deported by Trump administration to Eswatini being repatriated, lawyer says
A Cambodian man deported by the United States to the African kingdom of Eswatini under the Trump administration’s third-country program was released on Wednesday to be repatriated after spending five months in detention at a maximum-security prison with other deportees, his lawyer told the Associated Press.
Pheap Rom was deported to the southern African nation in October and held at the Matsapha Correctional Center. He took a commercial flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, to start his journey to Cambodia, his US-based lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, told The AP.
The US has sent 19 migrants from other countries to Eswatini in three batches since July. Rom is the second to be repatriated after a Jamaican man was flown home in September.
Two of the leading progressives on Capitol Hill will today introduce legislative proposals intended to protect workers’ rights in the brave new world of artificial intelligence.
Bernie Sanders, the left-wing senator from Vermont, will join forces with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic representative for New York, to launch artificial intelligence data center moratorium ct, which they say would ensure that AI benefits workers, is safe and effective, and does not harm communities or the environment.
It would also impose a moratorium on all new AI data centers pending the imposition of national safeguards to protect workers, consumers and communities and to guarantee privacy and civil rights.
Gavin Newsom describes Elon Musk as ‘one of the greatest disappointments of our time’
Gavin Newsom, the California governor, has described Elon Musk as “one of the great disappointments of our time” and accused the billionaire Tesla owner of ceding the electric vehicle market to China.
Talking to Axios, Newsom – widely seen as a frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination – that Musk had all but given up on the American EV market that he pioneered by pivoting towards robotics.
“It breaks my heart,” he said, comparing Musk to Thomas Edison.
“I got one of the first Teslas off the line. I’ve been one of their biggest proponents. It was regulation in California that created the conditions that allowed him to take the risk to become the multi-billionaire, maybe trillionaire, that he’s become.
“He is going to allow the greatest own-goal – one of the most significant own-goals in the next decade is ceding the EV space to China. They have 70% of the global EV market. It’s about statecraft with them…It’s a national security play and I really fear what’s going to happen to American legacy automobile manufacturers.”
He attributed some of Musk’s loss of interest in EVs to Donald Trump, who has frequently criticized the cars as a “hoax” and “too expensive.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has intensified its investigation of John Brennan, the former CIA director, as Donald Trump seeks retribution for what he has called a “Russia hoax” supposedly meant to discredit his 2016 election victory.
The department requested documents relating to Brennan, who headed the agency during Barack Obama’s presidency, from the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee, NBC reported.
The request prompted the committee to vote on Tuesday night to send the DOJ several classified hearing transcripts.
A spokesperson for the committee’s Republican members said the move “may advance the accountability process that many Americans are desperate to see unfold.”
Brennan has been in the DOJ’s crosshairs since Tulsa Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, called for Obama and other national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted for allegedly concocting a “treasonous conspiracy” she said was aimed at showing that Trump’s 2016 election victory was aided by Russian interference.
White House says Trump ‘did nothing wrong’ amid classified map allegations
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
The White House says Donald Trump “did nothing wrong”, amid reports that he showed off a classified map on a 2022 flight to his New Jersey golf club.
The president also held on to a record from his first term that was so sensitive only six people would have had access to it, according to a letter released on Wednesday by a top House Democrat.
The letter from representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the leading Democrat on the House judiciary committee, adds to the public understanding of the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
It quotes from a newly disclosed Department of Justice memo from January 2023 in which prosecutors cited evidence they said they had accumulated as they moved toward a felony indictment of Trump that would be filed months later.
Responding to Raskin’s letter, the White House said he was not credible. “It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
“President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80m votes in a landslide election victory.”
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.
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.
Read our full report here:
In other developments:
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Violence continued across much of the Middle East a day after Donald Trump said the US was in “very good” talks with Iran to end the war in the region soon. Iranian barrages targeted Israel, Gulf Arab states and northern Iraq on Tuesday, while Israeli and US warplanes continued to carry out strikes across Tehran and on other targets in the Islamic Republic. More here.
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Democrats managed to flip a seat in the Florida state house in the district that is home to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. Emily Gregory, a Democrat, defeated Republican Jon Maples, who had an endorsement from the US president, in the special election in Florida’s 87th state house district. The Associated Press called the race on Tuesday evening, with Gregory, a public health expert and small business owner, leading by more than two percentage points. More here.
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Donald Trump on Tuesday swore in Markwayne Mullin as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while Senate Republicans unveiled a compromise that would restart funding to most of the agency but appears to exclude the reforms to immigration enforcement that Democrats have demanded. More here.
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Donald Trump has described voting by mail as “cheating” at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, just days after casting a mail‑in ballot himself. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” the US president said on Monday, in remarks to a roundtable on his administration’s crime taskforce. More here.
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Workers with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are reeling from the White House’s deployment of immigration law enforcement into airports as TSA workers enter their sixth week without pay as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown continues. More than 400 TSA workers have quit since the shutdown began in February, with major US airports reporting high call-out rates among workers, leading to longer security wait times. More here.
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The California governor, Gavin Newsom, backtracked on earlier remarks likening Israel to an “apartheid state” in a new interview with Politico published on Tuesday. In the interview, the Democrat, who is widely expected to launch a presidential bid in 2028, said that when he used the term three weeks ago, he meant it to apply to Israel’s future should it continue on its present trajectory. More here.
