Last I heard it's a morally objectionable thing at this point rather than something that's having any practical impact.
(Which of course doesn't make it ok... I'm just a little less inclined to judge people that still use archive links when needed.)
Wait a minute, I'm getting additional information....you're not gonna believe this, but Republicans have been voting for it. I wonder who the holdup is, then....
> In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
> Then, they left town.
It's obvious what's happening.
https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/dhs-shutdown-fundin...
It was also at 2 o'clock in the morning
You are correct. The Speaker of the House is a toady who is held in line in the house by a small cabal of super MAGA people. Given some of his unusual personal situations, (for one, he supposedly has no bank account or financial assets) there’s likely a blackmail situation. His supine nature is also probably the strategy for the “3rd term” loophole.
That's the reason why ICE and CBP agents are still collecting paychecks while the rest of DHS is not.
It's actually a bit silly that Republicans, the party of limited government, have been holding up funding the TSA and FEMA because an agency they already overspent on won't get additional dollars. Not very DOGE.
Doesn't that mean statements like "Republicans are working hard to abuse people" are just a long winded way of saying "grr I hate Republicans"? It doesn't matter who's doing the blocking, because your side is always right and Fighting For The People™, and the other side are just obstructionists blocking reasonable reforms?
You know, prior to this sentence "they" could have referred to either party. After all, the last shutdown was largely because the Democrats were fighting for ACA subsidy extensions, but I guess it's only "playing politics as sport" when you don't agree with the justification?
> There is an official way for travelers to bypass long TSA waits if they’re willing to spend: hiring concierge services to escort them through security.
> Perq Soleil is an airport arrival and departure assistance service that can help travelers through TSA in about a minute flat by accessing alternative lines usually reserved for airport staff and airline personnel. The company — which operates in more than 300 airports and 150 countries — charges a base rate that varies by location.
Talk about burying the lede. Apparently the airports “highly discourage” line-sitters, but if you use services that pre-bribed airports you can skip the lines entirely.
Or is licensing and registration (of pilots and aircraft and manifest and flight plan) enough?
I wasn’t aware that DJI drone with 60lb payload was subject to more regulations than a Citation leaving TEB but I guess I’m open to learning what those are.
Private planes can do the same thing.
Private planes are just as capable of crashing into buildings as commercial jets. The TSA has picked up some ancillary public safety functions over the years, but their raison d'etre is to prevent hijackings.
If the governor of CA wanted a special tax to build the world’s largest pet rock museum, me saying that that’s a fucking stupid use of money does not have to be because I would be impacted by the tax (I don’t even live in CA, thank god).
If this is so, why does Congress have to fund the program? Why not pass the funds through directly to the agency?
The federal government does not work like a private escrow account where a fee collected for X automatically goes to Y. Tax revenue comes in to the Treasury, and Congress decides what agencies are allowed to spend. So even if TSA screening is funded in part by a per-ticket user fee, TSA still does not get to just collect that money and use it directly. Congress has to authorize and appropriate it.
On a practical level, imagine the chaos if every federal department acted as its own tax collector and then set its own spending priorities. That is basically an argument for gutting Congress's oversight of TSA and treating it like an independent agency, just because Congress and the executive branch invented the modern shutdown in the 1980s.
Keep in mind shutdowns are a fairly new concept, that nearly no other country has. The US also didn't have it for most of its history. Congress could stop at any time it wanted.
What the fuck is the TSA even supposed to be doing? The 9/11 guys supposedly used box cutters. Does anybody seriously think you can't get a little blade like that onto an airplane in your carry on luggage? I bring double sided razor blades with every time I fly and they have never flagged it. And more importantly, does anybody actually believe you could still hijack a plane with a pocket knife? All the other passengers now know the score, they all die unless they throw themselves on you which they will and have done many times since. What's more, you won't get into the locked cockpit anyway. Airport security is solved. Basic bitch scanning for guns is all you need and we had that solved in the 90s which is the reason the hijackers used pocket knives, which no longer works. Disband the TSA.
In addition, most fees (including most of the TSA fee) collected by the US Federal government isn't earmarked - it just goes into the general fund.
More breakdown here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/tsa-funding-security-fees-...
So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.
But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.
If you are wondering how that could happen, it starts with no-bid contracts and ends with inefficiency and has been heavily influenced by a guy whose name sounds a lot like Schmical Schmertoff.
Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.
In Turkey people with connections to the government get strobe lights permit to skip the traffic through the emergency line. There's so many opportunities both for monetization and loyalty rewarding.
Due to lapses like that sometimes I question my theory that all those people(Erdogan, Trump, Putin etc) are in the same group chat.
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
.......................
Nowhere does it say it must have to do with technology.
bookofjoe•1h ago