75 Days 1,000+ TSA Agents Gone and Democrats Have Very Little to Show for It

POLITICS CONGRESS & ELECTIONS

The government shutdown is over. Congress restored DHS funding, Fetterman called out his own party, and Maine’s Senate race just got a whole lot stranger.

SHUTDOWN BY THE NUMBERS

75 Days shutdown lasted

1,000+ TSA agents who quit

1 Democrat who voted against it

It’s over. After 75 days, Congress has voted to restore federal funding to most of DHS — with ICE and CBP carved out for a separate reconciliation package down the road. The lights are back on. Federal workers will get paid. But the obvious question is sitting right there: what exactly did Democrats get out of this?

Senator John Fetterman — never one to stick to the script — didn’t wait to answer that. He went straight to X and wrote what a lot of people were already thinking: DHS employees went unpaid, more than a thousand TSA agents walked out, and the country was measurably less safe. He was the only Democrat who refused to vote for the shutdown from the start, and his message this week was blunt. He called it “unnecessary” and “a failure of Congress.” Hard to argue.

“DHS employees unpaid, 1,000+ TSA agents quit, nation less safe. This was unnecessary and a failure of Congress.”— SEN. JOHN FETTERMAN (D-PA), POSTING ON X

Think about what 75 days of airport chaos actually meant for regular families — delayed flights, longer lines, short-staffed checkpoints. All of that disruption, and Democrats ended up agreeing to a deal that looks more or less like what was available before the shutdown started. That’s a tough result to spin.

Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, had what by any fair measure was a genuinely productive stretch. He got FISA reauthorized, brokered the funding deal, and hosted the King and Queen of England at the Capitol — all in a week that headlines had pre-written as a disaster for him. Political obituaries are a risky genre.

MAINE SENATE RACE

Meanwhile, down in Maine, the 2026 Senate picture just shifted in a significant way. Governor Janet Mills — Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked recruit and the candidate national Democrats spent heavily to recruit — dropped her Senate campaign Wednesday. She was seen as the strongest possible challenger to incumbent Republican Susan Collins, and her exit leaves a significant vacuum.

Who fills it? That’s where things get uncomfortable for Democrats. The candidate now positioned to advance through the primary is David Plantner — and he’s already dealing with damaging opposition research that surfaced a tattoo with Nazi imagery, which he says he had covered up after learning its significance. He has also faced scrutiny over past comments about women and Black Americans. For a party that just spent $4 million trying to recruit someone less controversial, this is not the outcome they were hoping for.

“When you go to Maine, they say ‘reelect Susan’ — she works hard for them.”— CASSY SMEDLEY, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR

Collins, for her part, is one of the most durable politicians in the country. She has survived election cycles that were supposed to end her career, and she runs consistently ahead of her party’s brand in a state that has a complicated relationship with both parties. A general election matchup against a candidate carrying this kind of baggage would almost certainly be favorable territory for her.

Maine is a genuine must-win for Democrats if they want to flip the Senate. Losing Mills as a candidate isn’t just a setback — it’s the kind of domino that can reshape a whole map. Republicans are watching this one closely.