It Turns Out Running a Government is Hard
The obliviousness and arrogance of the Trump administration is coming to an airport near you.
Starting this week, ICE will be deployed to US airports to assist (“assist”) an overworked and under-staffed TSA. It’s unclear how in the world ICE agents are going to be help, given that they aren’t trained in, say, reading x-ray machines or conducting security searches; they are barely trained in being ICE agents. This is after ICE agents have killed several people on America’s streets. It is after a jet crashed into a firetruck and killed both pilots at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. It is after hours-long security lines have snaked through some of America’s busiest air travel hubs. It is after those hours-long security lines delayed investigators getting to the LaGuardia crash site — they had to call and “beg” to be let through.
Do you feel safer? Is America greater yet?
The TSA slowdowns are because of the ongoing partial government shutdown. Democrats are demanding more accountability for ICE, as they should. Republicans don’t want that. Republicans currently control the House, the Senate, and the White House. The fact that 50,000 TSA employees have been working without pay since mid-February, and that hundreds are quitting or not showing up at work in response, is a problem the GOP could solve tomorrow — it would just require them creating some accountability mechanisms for their over-funded under-trained out-of-control pet agency.
ICE receives more funding than any other law enforcement agency, by many magnitudes. The fact that ICE agents are free, paid, and available to show up at American airports to kinda-sorta-not-really do TSA’s job suggests that maybe the agency doesn’t need quite the largesse it currently enjoys.
This week, a judge also ruled that the federal government must release the deposition tapes of two very young DOGE employees, and that concerns about reputational harm were not sufficient to keep the tapes sealed. It is embarrassing, for sure, that these young and arrogant staffers had no idea what they were doing, and had to admit under oath that they did widespread damage while saving the government no money. Their reputations, I would argue, deserve to be damaged.
DOGE is the Trump administration in a nutshell.
