Government Shutdown Forces TSA To Suspend Delta Air Lines Business Class Security Lanes at JFK and LAX

Thanks to the government shutdown, Delta Air Lines has lost its special business class security screening checkpoints at both New York JFK and at LAX.

Exclusive screening lanes for Delta One customers at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport aren’t currently active, Delta Air Lines confirmed. These lanes normally allow passengers who buy pricey Delta One airfare for international flights from those airports to bypass the standard security checkpoints.

This isn’t ‘the government cutting some services deemed non-essential’. TSA screening isn’t a service that’s paused without approved government funding. Instead, TSA isn’t able to maintain all services at full capacity when employees don’t all come to work.

• Most government employees aren’t being paid during the shutdown. It’s expected that they’ll receive full back pay once the shutdown ends.

• That’s true for both essential and non-essential workers (though in the latter case, the Trump Administration has made some nods towards not paying). Everyone who is working with pay deferred can expect to be paid in full, and likely all government workers even who aren’t working will be paid.

• But employees like TSA screeners and air traffic controllers are unhappy getting $0 pay in the meantime. And they can’t be expected to be in a position to finance the wait (“living paycheck to paycheck”). Many are taking other jobs in the meantime, such as driving for Uber or delivering DoorDash.

I can sympathize! This will ultimately become a ‘double dip’. And it wreaks havoc on travel. Air traffic control centers have experienced understaffing in several cases that have caused systemwide delays, although not yet at the level of 2019.

On the morning of January 25, 2019, air traffic controllers at New York TRACON (N90) and Washington Center (ZDC) called in sick in large numbers, leading to ground stops and delays across the Northeast. That ended the 35-day federal government shutdown, with a short-term funding bill passing that afternoon and getting signed by the President.

In the meantime, as the shutdown continues, we’ll see employees working without pay showing up in lower numbers. And fewer staff mean the ones who are left legitimately will feel fatigued, and they’ll call out sick as well.

For now, neither American nor United report a pause in special security queues for their premium passengers.