More than 60,000 Transportation Security Administration workers have been on the job without getting paid since Feb. 14 thanks to a partial government shutdown.
The workers are going without pay because of a fight between Democrats and Republicans over immigration enforcement, which has led to an impasse and a lapse of funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Several hundred TSA workers have quit and thousands more have stopped showing up to work, many of them because they are having to take on other jobs or find other ways to make money.
At the Lincoln Airport, there has been a coordinated effort to help the roughly 20 or so TSA employees working there by bringing them food.
Rachel Barth, the airport’s director of strategic marketing, helped organize a community meal train.
“When we heard that the government was shutting down and that they would not be getting paid, we decided to just set up a meal train for our TSA agents,” said Barth, who noted that it’s just one less thing that the agents have to worry about while working without pay.
Despite the stress and hardship of going without pay, Barth said not a single TSA agent has called in sick or skipped work during the partial government shutdown.
“We’ve been incredibly lucky in Lincoln compared to some of the other airports across the country,” she said.
Neither the Lincoln nor Omaha airports has seen major delays like some other airports have.
At Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, there are donation boxes located around the airport where people can donate gift cards, up to $20 in value, for groceries or gas.
On Friday, it appeared there might be an end to the shutdown in sight, after the Senate approved a compromise that would fund all agencies that are part of Homeland Security except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.
However, Republican Speaker of the House rejected the Senate bill and said the body would move forward with its own plan to fully fund all of the agencies under the Homeland Security umbrella.