Today, Explained - Your flights will be canceled

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

The government shutdown is making flying even worse. And maybe more dangerous. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. A security checkpoint line at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You always think flying can't get worse, and you are always wrong. You have traveled out of Houston's Bush Airport within the last week. Please tell me what is actually going on. Who stuck at the airports in three-hour lines just to get through TSA? Child, this is crazy. This is insane. Always, always wrong. Tomorrow, the government is going to cut flight capacity at some of the country's busiest airports.

Here's the Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his prediction. You will see mass chaos, you will see mass flight delays, you'll see mass cancellations, and you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it because we don't have the air traffic controllers. Because no one coming to work, because no one getting paid, because shut down. Coming up on today, explained, your flight's been canceled. Is the Justice Department still just? Ultimately, Donald Trump is the person who began the weakening of the Justice Department in his first presidency.

I'm Preet Bharara. In this week, investigative reporters Carol Lenig and Aaron Davis join me to discuss their new book, Injustice, how politics and fear vanquished America's Justice Department. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet, wherever you get your book. Podcasts. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard today, Explained. We hope you enjoy your flight.

Please prepare for take-off. My name's Daryl Campbell. I'm an aviation safety writer for The Verge, and I also wrote the book, Fatal Abstraction. Tell us broadly, what is going on in American airports, Well, the government shutdown has really affected a lot of the operational behind the scenes that you may not know what's going on if you're on an airplane, but it's absolutely critical to just the normal functioning of aviation. The two things that most people will probably experience is, number one, at the security line, a lot of transportation security agency or TSA officers

haven't been paid since at the very least the middle of October, if not more. Oh, they want there and they don't care what you have to sacrifice to get there. Do I pay for medication? Do I pay for my food? Do I pay for gas to go to work? But have nothing to eat that day. It's one thing to say, like, you know, people's mortgages and rents are due, which they are.

People have already missed other payments. So this is just the biggest one. And that's a huge impact because a lot of these TSOs are, you know, coming in, they have to pay for gas, they have to pay for childcare. I am a mother five. I'm a grandmother of two. I run a single parent household. So it's hard.

It's hard enough just going to work. Now when you're adding not getting paid, that's when you just like multiply the level of pressure. And they just can't afford to go into a job that's not paying them. So you'll see things like the number of lanes being shut down or TSA pre-check not being available. At Bush Airport only TSA checkpoints at terminals A and E are open. At Hobby Airport, fewer screening lanes are open with wait times exceeding over an hour.

hour. I've been here for four hours. My feet hurt. My legs hurt. My back hurts. I'm very tired. The other thing is that the air traffic controllers, so the people who tell airplanes where to go and went to land and really just try to avoid any possibility of a collision or violent maneuvering because people have to take evasive action or anything like that, those people also aren't getting paid. And that means that there are fewer people coming in and you're seeing these huge delays where either airports can't handle the planned volume of traffic, or in some cases, some airports are operating their control towers or their air traffic control facilities with not enough people at all.

In Orlando last night, the FAA warned that the airport was close to turning away arriving flights altogether due to staffing issues. At 415 Western Time, the control tower here at Hollywood Burbank Airport will be unmanned. There are no controllers who will be on the job starting in less than 15 minutes. due to that government shutdown. There's already been a brush with disaster. A Delta flight with 300 passengers was 125 feet from landing in Boston, just as a commuter plane was taking off from an intersecting runway.

So it's really starting to have a huge impact in just delays and cancellations. Okay, this is, what you've just told me, is terrifying. It is also understandable if people have not been paid since October for doing a job like air traffic control. which is a very, very important job. So let's start with the air traffic controllers. How are they responding to this? What have they been doing?

So what we're seeing is just a lot of air traffic controllers calling in sick or being unable to come into work. We are continuing to see spotty staffing issues at air traffic control facilities across the country. The three New York City airports have been especially hard hit. And the FAA says on Friday, those facilities saw nearly 80% of controllers call out. And that usually impacts the level of traffic that can come in. So a single air traffic controller can only handle so many simultaneous flights.

And in places like New York or Dallas or Atlanta, where there's just this huge amount of traffic, you need three, four, five people at a time, even during your lowest periods of volume. So when one person calls out, that means that's a third of your capacity that you just can't handle. And so that tends to compound. And this past weekend was the worst for controller staffing. since the shutdown began. Ground stops all over the country because if you don't have these controllers,

you have to slow down the air traffic to keep the skies safe. It's not just one airplane that gets delayed. It's also the people who are supposed to be on the next flight because the airplane was supposed to be in another city and another one. Some of these smaller airplanes, like a 737, like you might fly on Southwest,

do five or six trips in a day. And so when the first one gets disrupted, that means all five or six are also disrupted and it just kind of cascades throughout the system. Okay, so calling in sick is very effective in terms of the air traffic controller saying, hey, guys, without us, you're kind of screwed. We talked to you earlier this year about there already being a ton of discontent among air traffic controllers. What has been happening with them?

Essentially, the FAA as a government agency, is always trying to fight for scraps on the budget, and it just does not have the amount of money available to hire enough people, and to maintain a lot of these facilities that are in some cases 30 or 40 years old. So there's already this background of limited staffing and budget that's causing radar systems to go out and satellite tracking to be unavailable for long periods of time. Earlier this year, we were talking about what was happening at Newark. Controllers there lost both radio communications and a picture on their radar scopes. scope shift went black again.

If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff. You're literally in the middle of the day, and your systems go out, and you cannot see an airplane that's coming in. So you just basically lose track of it. And so that's just what's happening before any of the shutdown stuff. Now, if you think about the stress normally at air traffic control and just sort of the amount of concentration that it takes to do that job well, When you layer on top of that, gosh, I haven't been paid in three or four weeks. Today was payday, and we collected a $0 paycheck. Do I put food on the table? Do I pay gas? Do I pay my electric bill?

Something has to give somewhere. That just creates an even higher level of stress. So consequently, people are totally justified in taking leave to deal with the stress of the job. And then I think on top of that, people are also using their bank's PTO as kind of a protest to say, hey, this is really not fair, and if I'm not getting paid, then I shouldn't really be expected to do this. So I think we're also seeing a little bit of that. Okay, so that's the air traffic controllers. There's also, as you said, TSA agents.

They are also calling in sick. Is it the same story? It's pretty different. A lot of them make the lowest rung on the salary ladder in the government, so an average annual salary of $30,000 to $40,000. And if you're living in a high cost of living area like L.A. or New York or Washington, D.C., I mean, you really don't have a lot of margins. I was talking with one TSA officer named Johnny Jones. He's here in Dallas where I live. Then he was saying that, you know, put yourself in the mind of these TSOs. They got less than two weeks notice that this government shutdown was even happening. They're still scheduled out, and it costs them, you know, $10 to between gas, tolls, just to get to the, their job if they've also got to worry about child care or, you know, figuring out if they're kids sick or something like that, maybe they have to go and drive for Uber or a lot of them have

second job. And so maybe they have to prioritize that one. And I think that's happening in a much larger scale than it is for air traffic controllers because, again, there's less sort of margin of safety in terms of finances and the fact that just a lot of them have this second job back up. So they just kind of switch between the two. But it's really, I mean, I was talking with some people who said there were hundreds of TSA agents who were calling out sick. And that's why we're seeing, like, Houston had, I think, a two or three-hour security line. Wow. You're seeing the same thing at New Work, places like that.

All right. So TSA agents calling in sick leads to longer lines. That's a pain in the butt for everybody. What are the risks if they are not there? There's a big portion of the TSA experience, let's call it. That's a lot of security theater. Yeah. you know, people are not smuggling bombs on the airports.

Nobody's going to try and do a 9-11-style attack. And in fact, airlines themselves have done a really good job of just developing tactics to stop the next 9-11. So if you eliminate a TSA, if anyone tried to do another 9-11 style attack, they just wouldn't be able to because of the policy and the security barriers that airlines have enacted. So I think that's one big thing. Now, there are probably other things like scanning for people accidentally taking loaded weapons on an airplane, which I live in Texas, it happens a lot more than you might think. But that's a potential risk or, you know, people accidentally taking a lithium battery or there's one guy at the airport last time was trying to take a power drill on. So a lot of sort of inconvenient slash minor security things. But I really doubt that, you know, getting rid of the TSA would cause the next 9-11.

Now, that being said, I think there's also a level of sort of deterrence that happens, but that's just a hard thing to quantify. In terms of the operational impacts, though, I mean, there are still going to be supervisors and plain-closed cops who could step in and do some of this. In San Francisco, it's actually not run by the TSA. It's a private security organization, so you could see something like that happen. but it would still be pretty disruptive. All right.

So after all of this, the shutdown is continuing. And the Trump administration says, we're going to cut flights at some of the biggest airports in the country. Darrell, how unprecedented is this? And what does this actually mean for travelers in the next couple of days? I can't think of another time that the FAA took such unilateral action across the whole of U.S. airspace. since September 11th. Wow. Usually they're focused on a specific area or a specific airport, but for them to say

a 10% cut on all flights across the board, I literally, you know, can't think of anything that's been like that since, what, 2001? And for context, they're expecting about 4,000 cancellations. In a typical day, you'd probably get 3 to 500, and since the shutdown has started, they've been kind of ticking up to about 7 or 800. So this is a huge experience. expansion of the disruption that travelers might face. So a couple of airlines have already kind of tip their hand as to what's going to happen. United, American, Delta, have all said international long-haul flights won't be affected. And really what they're probably going to do is cancel the flights that are the little tiny airport.

So not, you know, JFK to LAX or Atlanta to Seattle. But think about things like, you know, South Bend to Detroit or L.PAL. Asso to Love Field. Because if you think about it from an air traffic controller's perspective, an airplane is an airplane, but the airlines have this huge incentive to keep the kind of cash cow routes, the ones that have a lot of passengers and they sort of invest a lot of money in going. So you'll probably see disruption on these smaller regional ones. But it's TBD right now.

Darrell Campbell of The Verge. Coming up, believe it or not, once upon a time, American rage over flight chaos was enough to shut down a shutdown. Are we looking at a repeat? Support for today explained comes from select quote. Perhaps you've been putting off life insurance. Select quote says you can only put something off for so long before it really matters. Select quote says they take. the guesswork out of finding the right-term life insurance policy.

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You're listening to Today Explained. What happens is if you're not paying folks, eventually they don't come to work. To true Burgess. Burgess Everett is the Congressional Bureau Chief for Semaphore. And he's here to remind us that there was a government shutdown, the longest in history back in 2019, that ended because of outrage over airports. I mean, it's what happened back then, and it's what's happening now as we're seeing some of these frontline TSA employees not coming to work or air traffic controllers. And that makes it more difficult to get people quickly onto their flights. and that can mess up the whole intricate dance of our nation's flight system. The 2019 shutdown was a partial shutdown, but that piece of the government, DHS, was not funded, and that's

where TSA gets paid from. Right now, we're in a full government shutdown. So we have that element as well, in addition to all the sort of more well-known, widespread things like SNAP benefits, military pay, federal worker pay. Was it, in 2019, was it Americans saying to the government, hey, we don't feel safe flying? Was there a plane crash? Like, what exactly did happen? Well, I think anecdotally, this is how members of Congress get around. And so they start to notice this. And this is one of the, you know, if you're a senator who's busy and going across the country, this is one of the places that you're going to notice the effects of the government shut down.

I'm very concerned about security. Many TSA agents are calling off sick in order to go work other jobs because they have to put food on the table. They have to meet rent, all of that. There was also, I would say, another piece of that was Republicans were kind of at odds with President Trump overfunding. the border wall back then. They didn't think it was a realistic ask from him. And they were surprised when he said, I'm not going to sign a funding bill that doesn't fund the border wall. We're in a shutdown because Democrats refused to fund the border security. They try and make it like it's just about the wall, and it is about the wall. So there was a little bit more

disarray, I would say, on the Republican side back during that shutdown. And so as soon as the president was ready to end it. Everybody else in the Republican Party was ready to end it, too. The longest shutdown in American history will finally end today, which is great news for 800,000 federal workers and millions of Americans who depend on government services, which is a little different than today. It is, it is a little different than today. Today is a little different. There has been this question throughout this shutdown. Why do the Republicans and President Trump seem less bothered by the shutdown and by all the compounding effects than one might think. Is this strategy? What's going on? Well, I would say the president has been really

creative in lessening the pain in certain areas, like finding ways to pay military workers during the shutdown, which I had heard multiple smart people tell me this was the moment that the government would reopen is because people cannot stomach the military not getting paid. And Trump has made it a little bit less painful by paying them. Truth Social. I'm using my authority as commander-in-chief to direct our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to use all available funds to get our troops paid on October 15th. I will not allow the Democrats to hold our military and our entire security of our nation hostage

with their dangerous government shutdown. Now, I think the president's sounding a little bit different. right now. He's saying the shutdown's hurting Republicans. I think if you read the pulses, the shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans. And that was a big factor. And they say that I wasn't on the ballot was the biggest factor. And so I do feel like he's acknowledging that it's not good for him politically. I mean, you don't have to be a genius to look at these polls and see that it's hurting both parties, but voters are not inordinately blaming the Democrats, as I think Republicans believed they would. What do we know about the state of negotiations? What is in play at this point? There's been a big thaw over the past seven to ten days. I think a lot of Democrats are pretty much ready to end it, particularly with the elections behind them, with the November 1st, ACA premiums, now public for everyone to see.

They think they've pinned that on the Republicans. And there's a lot more bipartisan talk. The Republicans need to hear what the people are saying. Because it's clear. They are saying enough is enough. There is nothing left for the Republicans to do, but get back to work. The Republicans got to sit down and talk to us about it. And I agree with Bernie Sanders. The way to solve this is for Trump to sit down with Jeffries and I.

It's interesting, though, what is on the table is sort of what's always been on the table, which is a vote on extending these expiring, enhanced premium tax credits for the Affordable Care Act. Democrats can kind of pick what they want to have a vote on and get a guarantee from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and then a new continuing resolution which is sort of a stopgap bill that would keep the government funded while negotiations on these full year funding bills

which Congress really struggles to pass most of the time would continue. So that's kind of what's been on the table for weeks now. I think what has changed is that everybody's sick of the shutdown. The Senate's been in session for seven weeks. These folks want to go home and now a lot of these key dates are in the rearview mirror and there's a sense that, okay, it's time to end this thing. So as you said, and as we've covered on the show, the Democrats made this about health care.

They said the Republicans are going to raise your premiums, and that's why we're standing our ground. Open enrollment has started. People are seeing those price increases. What do we know about whether or not the public and their thoughts about health care are actually putting pressure on the Republicans to move on this? Well, I think the Republicans are pretty darn divided on propping up or anything seen as propping up, Obamacare. And that's how they view these enhanced subsidies. The COVID-era Obamacare subsidy that they're all talking about is supposedly the issue of the day. It was supposed to be related to COVID. And it's become a boondoggle.

It's a subsidy for insurance companies when you... But the reality is they've lowered people's premiums. And so when you get a sticker shop type price increase, which we're seeing all across the country, and it's blamed on congressional inaction, like that's not great for Republicans. The Republicans have never done anything to correct the problems that exist with it. And I don't think it's an easy thing to fix.

However, it's something that we should have a plan for. And Mike Johnson, for a month now, cannot give me a single policy idea. So there's a decent group of Republicans in the Senate and probably a group, you know, we've seen about a dozen or so in the House. So certainly enough to pass the House and maybe to pass the Senate.

Senate to revive these subsidies, but there's a whole other sector of the Republican Party that hates them. They think it's bad policy, and they think it props up Obamacare, and anything that they do to bring down these premiums could be seen as sort of like helping a failed system that the Affordable Care Act put in place. So there's a big division in the Republican Party that's been kind of simmering behind the scenes that we're going to see really come out publicly over the next two months as negotiations on whether to extend these things really, really, really heat up, because the drop dead is coming up. It's really at the end of the year. I know that the markets are open now, but Republicans have always said there's some time. It's a December 31st

problem. So I expect this to be kind of a dominant issue over the next six-ish weeks. We started by talking about how this shutdown is different. Back in the day, there were pressure points that applied this time. It seems like the pressure points are, for a long time, they were nowhere to be found. What do you think is the legacy of the longest shutdown in history? Well, I think it's really going to depend on the midterms. And the reason I say that is the other big, full government shutdown of this sort of modern era of politics happened in 2013. It was the opposite on Obamacare. Ted Cruz was trying to defund Obamacare alongside a bunch of conservatives and the House and Senate.

Republicans kind of got the crud kicked out of them in the polls during that. It looked really bad. They eventually cried uncle. Fast forward a year later, they didn't pay a price for that at all. In fact, they had an amazing election in 2014. So, Democrats have this in the back of their head. They're saying, yeah, we don't like shutting down the government. It inordinately affects our constituents.

A lot of them are federal workers in places like Northern Virginia or Maryland or across the country. They have in the back of their mind that Republicans didn't pay the price for that. Trump hasn't seemed to pay the price for a lot of his controversies, so they don't think they're going to pay the price in the midterms for this. So I would give this about a year fuse because I think if voters are still talking about this a year from now, that's probably bad for Democrats. They've made the bet that that's not what voters are going to be talking about. They're going to forget it pretty quickly. Samifor's Burgess Everett. Harimuagdi produced today's show Amina El-Sadi edited.

Laura Bullard is Best Director and Patrick Boyd is our engineer. Vox is on sale. Vox.com slash members. to sign up. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.