We’ve all experienced that excruciating wait in a TSA line: tapping feet, wailing babies, and navigating mazes of stanchions. But if you’ve been to the airport the past couple of days, waiting in security lines is probably even worse than usual.
Take Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport and Hobby Airport, which have seen TSA wait times exceed an agonizing three hours—and even up to four-and-a-half hours in some cases. Travelers have missed flights, and TSA agents, who make an average of $26 an hour, are working without pay since the government shut down more than a month ago.
The debacle began because fewer TSA agents are working amid the government shutdown. This meant several security checkpoints were closed off, requiring all travelers to funnel through only two terminals; typically nine security checkpoints are open. Even TSA PreCheck areas—meant to expedite security for approved travelers—were packed. At some points, lines to get through security stretched out the door of Bush Airport, local Houston station KHOU 11 reported.
As for how long delays could continue, Jim Szczesniak, director of aviation for the Houston Airport System, said it could last as long as the government is shut down.
“The federal government shutdown has impacted TSA staffing and operations nationwide, and Houston Airports is doing everything possible to support our TSA partners and keep passengers moving safely and efficiently,” he said in a statement on Sunday. “We ask that passengers continue to arrive early and expect extended security wait times until the federal government shutdown is resolved.”
How the federal government shutdown affects air travel
The federal government started a little over a month ago, on Oct. 1, when Congress failed to pass a funding bill to keep the government operating.
The shutdown affects air travel because federal workers, including TSA agents, air traffic controllers, and airport security personnel, have been furloughed, working without pay, or have not shown up for work. With severe staffing shortages, TSA lines stretch longer and flights get delayed or canceled.
Some airlines like United, Delta, American, and JetBlue are even feeding TSA who continue to show up for work.
“United [Airlines] is donating meals for air traffic controllers and other federal workers whose pay is delayed,” the airline toldCBS News. “We appreciate the hardworking federal employees who are keeping the air travel system running.”
Delta has also offered a limited number of meals for transportation workers, but still operating “within the strict rules established for employees of federal government agencies.”
Even while going without pay, TSA agents aren’t allowed to strike because they’re federal workers. In 1981, 13,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike following negotiations over pay and work schedules, but the Reagan administration fired 11,000 of them and barred them from ever working for the federal government again. Still some TSA and air traffic controllers have just simply not been showing up for work, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said he won’t fire them.
“They need support, they need money, they need a paycheck,” Duffy told CBS on Sunday. “They don’t need to be fired.”
Air traffic control shortages
Before the government shutdown, there was already a shortage of air traffic controllers—a problem that largely came to light after a major incident earlier this year. In January, there was a deadly midair collision near Reagan National Airport between an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter, killing 67 people.
An Federal Aviation Administration internal safety report revealed severe staffing shortages at the air traffic control tower: Just one controller was handling both the helicopter and the airplane communications simultaneously that night. This incident unveiled just how understaffed air traffic control has been, and the FAA is still short about 3,000 controllers. And as of Nov. 1, the FAA said nearly half of major air traffic control facilities have staffing shortages as the government shutdown drags on.
Although air traffic controllers are paid relatively well at about $145,000 a year, it’s not an easy job to get—or keep.
“It takes a long time to train an air traffic controller,” former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, Mary Schiavo, toldCNN earlier this year. “It’s very expensive. And about a third of them wash out because it’s very rigorous.”
Air traffic control is antiquated
And on top of all else, America’s air traffic control systems are critically outdated.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy admitted earlier this year some of the decades-old equipment air traffic controllers use looks like it came off the set of Apollo 13, and compared it to a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle.
Meanwhile, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said it actually takes longer today to fly from Atlanta to LaGuardia than it did in the 1950s, when the airline opened that route, due to aging air traffic control systems.
“That’s the air traffic control system. It’s very slow. It’s congested,” Bastian told TODAY in May. “If you modernize the skies, you can kind of bring greater efficiency.”
And with the holiday travel rush fast-approaching, travel delays are even more anxiety-inducing than ever. But there’s no real foresight on how long the government shutdown will last, and therefore, how long the air travel nightmare will continue.
Women have their own unique set of challenges in the workforce; the “motherhood penalty” can set them back $500,000, their C-suite representation is waning, and the gender pay gap has widened again. One senior executive from $36 billion manufacturing giant Kimberly-Clark knows the tribulations all too well—after all, she’s one of few women in the Fortune 500 who holds the coveted role.
Tamera Fenske is the chief supply chain officer (CSCO) for Kimberly-Clark, who oversees a massive global team of 22,665 employees—around 58% of the global CPG manufacturer’s workforce. She’s in charge of optimizing the company’s entire supply chain, from sourcing raw materials for Kimberly-Clark products including Kleenex and Huggies, to delivering the final product into customers’ shopping carts.
It’s a job that’s essential to most top businesses operating at such a massive scale; around 422 of the Fortune 500 have chief supply chain officers, according to a 2025 Spencer Stuart analysis. However, most of these slots are awarded to white men; only about 18% of executives in this position are women, and 12% come from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. It’s one of the C-suite roles with the least female representation, right next to chief financial officers, chief operating officers, and CEOs.
In fact, Fenske is one of just 76 Fortune 500 female executives who have “chief supply chain officer” on their resumes. However, the executive tells Fortune it’s an unfortunate fact she “doesn’t think about” too often—if anything, it motivates her further.
“Anytime someone tells me I can’t do something, it makes me want to work that much harder to prove them wrong,” Fenske says.
The first time Fenske noticed she was one of few women in the room
Fenske has spent her entire life navigating subjects dominated by men—something she didn’t even consider until college.
Her father, aunts, uncles, and grandfather all worked for Dow Chemical, so she grew up in a STEM-heavy household. Naturally, she leaned into math and science as well, eventually pursuing a bachelor’s in environmental chemical engineering at Michigan Technological University. It was there that her eyes first opened to the reality that she was one of few women in the room.
“It definitely was going to Michigan Tech, where I first realized the disparity,” Fenske said, adding that there was around an eight-to-one male-to-female ratio. “As you continue through the higher levels and the grades, it becomes even more tighter, especially as you get into your specialized engineering.”
Once joining the world of work, it wasn’t only Fenske who noticed the lack of women in senior roles—some bosses would even point it out.
The Fortune 500 boss is paying it forward—for both men and women
After Fenske graduated from Michigan Tech, she got her start at $91 billion manufacturer 3M: a multinational conglomerate producing everything from pads of Post-It notes to rolls of Scotch tape. Fenske was first hired as an environmental engineer in 2000. Promotion after promotion came, but all people could seem to focus on was her gender.
“It would come to light when I moved relatively quickly through the ranks. Some of my bosses would say, ‘You’re the age of my daughter,’ and different things like that. ‘You’re the first woman that’s had this role at this plant or in this division,’” Fenske recalls. Over the course of 2 decades, she rose through the company’s ranks to the SVP of 3M’s U.S. and Canada manufacturing and supply chain.
And anytime she was asked about her gender? She’d flip the questions back at them while standing her ground. “I would always try to spin it a little bit and ask them questions like, ‘Okay, so what is your daughter doing?’…I always try to seek to understand where they are coming from, but then also reinforce what brought me to where I am.”
Now, three years into her current stint as Kimberly-Clark’s CSCO, the 47-year-old is paying it back—but not just to the women following in her footsteps.
“I never saw myself as necessarily a big, ground-breaker pioneer, even though the statistics would tell you I was,” Fenske says. “I tried to give back to women and men, to be honest. Because I think men [are] one of the strongest advocates for women as well. So I think we have to teach both how to have that equal lens and diverse perspective.”
SpaceX is preparing to sell insider shares in a transaction that would value Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker at as much as $800 billion, people familiar with the matter said, reclaiming the title of the world’s most valuable private company.
The details, discussed by SpaceX’s board of directors on Thursday at its Starbase hub in Texas, could change based on interest from insider sellers and buyers or other factors, said some of the people, who asked not to be identified as the information isn’t public. SpaceX is also exploring a possible initial public offering as soon as late next year, one of the people said.
Another person briefed on the matter said that the price under discussion for the sale of some employees and investors’ shares is higher than $400 apiece, which would value SpaceX at between $750 billion and $800 billion. The company wouldn’t raise any funds though this planned sale, though a successful offering at such levels would catapult it past the record of $500 billion valuation achieved by OpenAI in October.
Elon Musk on Saturday denied that SpaceX is raising money at a $800 billion valuation without addressing Bloomberg’s reporting on the planned offering of insiders’ shares.
“SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X.
The share sale price under discussion would be a substantial increase from the $212 a share set in July, when the company raised money and sold shares at a valuation of $400 billion. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times earlier reported the $800 billion valuation target.
News of SpaceX’s valuation sent shares of EchoStar Corp., a satellite TV and wireless company, up as much as 18%. Last month, EchoStar had agreed to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $2.6 billion, adding to an earlier agreement to sell about $17 billion in wireless spectrum to Musk’s company.
The world’s most prolific rocket launcher, SpaceX dominates the space industry with its Falcon 9 rocket that lifts satellites and people to orbit.
SpaceX is also the industry leader in providing internet services from low-Earth orbit through Starlink, a system of more than 9,000 satellites that is far ahead of competitors including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Leo.
Elite Group
SpaceX is among an elite group of companies that have the ability to raise funds at $100 billion-plus valuations while delaying or denying they have any plan to go public.
An IPO of the company at an $800 billion value would vault SpaceX into another rarefied group — the 20 largest public companies, a few notches below Musk’s Tesla Inc.
If SpaceX sold 5% of the company at that valuation, it would have to sell $40 billion of stock — making it the biggest IPO of all time, well above Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019. The firm sold just 1.5% of the company in that offering, a much smaller slice than the majority of publicly traded firms make available.
A listing would also subject SpaceX to the volatility of being a public company, versus private firms whose valuations are closely guarded secrets. Space and defense company IPOs have had a mixed reception in 2025. Karman Holdings Inc.’s stock has nearly tripled since its debut, while Firefly Aerospace Inc. and Voyager Technologies Inc. have plunged by double-digit percentages since their debuts.
SpaceX executives have repeatedly floated the idea of spinning off SpaceX’s Starlink business into a separate, publicly traded company — a concept President Gwynne Shotwell first suggested in 2020.
However, Musk cast doubt on the prospect publicly over the years and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in 2024 that a Starlink IPO would be something that would take place more likely “in the years to come.”
The Information, citing people familiar with the discussions, separately reported on Friday that SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it’s aiming for an IPO of the entire company in the second half of next year.
A so-called tender or secondary offering, through which employees and some early shareholders can sell shares, provides investors in closely held companies such as SpaceX a way to generate liquidity.
SpaceX is working to develop its new Starship vehicle, advertised as the most powerful rocket ever developed to loft huge numbers of Starlink satellites as well as carry cargo and people to moon and, eventually, Mars.
The National Park Service will offer free admission to U.S. residents on President Donald Trump’s birthday next year — which also happens to be Flag Day — but is eliminating the benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.
The new list of free admission days for Americans is the latest example of the Trump administration downplaying America’s civil rights history while also promoting the president’s image, name and legacy.
Last year, the list of free days included Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth — which is June 19 — but not June 14, Trump’s birthday.
The new free-admission policy takes effect Jan. 1 and was one of several changes announced by the Park Service late last month, including higher admission fees for international visitors.
The other days of free park admission in 2026 are Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Constitution Day, Veterans Day, President Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday (Oct. 27) and the anniversary of the creation of the Park Service (Aug. 25).
Eliminating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Americans were emancipated, removes two of the nation’s most prominent civil rights holidays.
Some civil rights leaders voiced opposition to the change after news about it began spreading over the weekend.
“The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Cornell William Brooks, a former president of the NAACP, wrote on social media about the new policy.
Kristen Brengel, a spokesperson for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that while presidential administrations have tweaked the free days in the past, the elimination of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is particularly concerning. For one, the day has become a popular day of service for community groups that use the free day to perform volunteer projects at parks.
That will now be much more expensive, said Brengel, whose organization is a nonprofit that advocates for the park system.
“Not only does it recognize an American hero, it’s also a day when people go into parks to clean them up,” Brengel said. “Martin Luther King Jr. deserves a day of recognition … For some reason, Black history has repeatedly been targeted by this administration, and it shouldn’t be.”
Some Democratic lawmakers also weighed in to object to the new policy.
“The President didn’t just add his own birthday to the list, he removed both of these holidays that mark Black Americans’ struggle for civil rights and freedom,” said Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. “Our country deserves better.”
A spokesperson for the National Park Service did not immediately respond to questions on Saturday seeking information about the reasons behind the changes.
Politics8 years ago