We are sitting at the kitchen table at eleven at night, running the numbers on the Department of Justice’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund. One point eight billion dollars. Set aside by the White House to compensate individuals claiming political persecution under the previous administration—a category from which convicted rioters are expected to be among the first in line. Across the counter, the TSA workers’ union local represents the people who actually keep our airports safe during this shutdown. When Congress stalls on the DHS continuing resolution, those mid-level federal employees miss paychecks—a payroll cliff the House plan narrowly avoided for a few days. We watch this while our household mortgage sits at seven percent because our household bought our Fishtown rowhouse in 2022, and the math shows we cannot bridge the gap left by a government that refuses to fund its own workers.
Taylor Swift writes in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” that a worker can be miserable while being “the best at it,” performing her role through the collapse because there is no safety net between the performance and the eviction. That is the description of the TSA agent who shows up to her checkpoint while the DHS funding bill sits in the Senate. Anne Helen Petersen has documented that the modern worker’s burnout is structural—the performance of competence is the only thing standing between a family and destitution, and the system is priced around that exhaustion. The DHS was built in late 2002 to break interagency “stove-piping,” a design choice meant to pool twenty-two agencies under one authority so that information would flow and families would be kept safe. Instead, the department has become a hostage to partisan leverage, where its least popular subcomponents serve as bargaining chips in a legislative tug-of-war that punishes the working-federal-payroll actually operating them.
Domestic work and federal work both collapse under the same structural logic: the system assumes someone will always absorb the shock until the negotiation shifts. Rerum Novarum explicitly states that wages ought not be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner; it names the family wage as a moral mandate, not an optional corporate perk. Annie Lowrey has written that poverty in the United States is a choice, and the current DHS funding impasse is a textbook example of that choice. We are watching a shell game where the existence of a department built to unify domestic security is being used to mask the reality of its component parts. Lawmakers, caught in the raw, post-9/11 fear, built a “sprawling behemoth” that bundled essential public-safety functions—like the Coast Guard and TSA—with politically explosive enforcement mechanisms like ICE and the Border Patrol. By design, they pooled the political support for the liked components to bolster missions that were, from the start, a source of major policy friction—a decline that began when collective-bargaining disputes over the first 22 agencies turned the 2002 Homeland Security Act into a partisan referendum.
The standoff is a collective failure of legislative machinery. Democrats refused to provide the necessary votes to fund ICE and the Border Patrol, utilizing the impasse to demand reforms that were swiftly rebuffed. Senate Republican leadership had a June 1 deadline set by the executive branch, but the party couldn’t clear the legislative hurdles to meet it, leaving the department short. Thom Tillis called the compensation fund “stupid on stilts,” echoing the discomfort over taxpayer checks going to convicted Capitol rioters. But the optics do not pay the mortgage, which is why we need an annual appropriations process that funds DHS components on a predictable schedule rather than using a functioning border security apparatus as bargaining chips in partisan extortion. Even the administration’s push to divert nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds toward compensating Jan. 6 convicts has served only to complicate a funding process that already lacks basic stability.
There is a grim lesson here in the generational betrayal of our public institutions. The post-9/11 consensus that helped re-open and adequately fund the department has been utterly hollowed out, replaced by a shiftless political calculation where the department’s survival is perpetually uncertain. Like so much of the machinery we were told would provide us security, “Homeland Security” has become a label that triggers more insecurity than it mitigates. Doing the math at the kitchen table at eleven at night, we know what it looks like when a foundation is built on such shifting sands. You cannot run a home that way, and you cannot run a country that way, either.
Till the vote is counted and the paychecks clear, the TSA checkpoints will stay staffed by exhausted people who know exactly where the line is between a job and a livelihood. We are watching the math on the one point eight billion dollars set aside for individuals claiming political persecution—many expecting it to flow to convicted insurrectionists—while the TSA union rolls out a food drive for furloughed members. The lyrics tell us that blood, sweat, and tears for a career are a fair price to pay until the career starves you body and soul. When the people responsible for the lights are too busy using them as a bargaining chip to notice they’re burning the house down, it’s not because they don’t know how to do the math. It’s because the “security” they are selling is just another line item, and those of us paying for it aren’t the ones setting the price.