The Brief

Millions of spring break travelers are heading to the airport this month, and Johnny Jones was hoping to be one of them. But the ongoing shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security forced his family to cancel its vacation plans.

"I won't be traveling anywhere, but I'll be helping out getting people to where they're going," said Jones, a TSA security officer at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. He also serves as the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 100, which represents about 45,000 TSA officers nationwide.

Those TSA officers have been working without pay since funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsed on February 14th. They've already missed part of one paycheck, and many security officers received no money at all in their paychecks on Friday as the partial shutdown approached the one-month mark.

"They're panicking, they're scared, they're afraid. And they don't know what they're going to do," Jones said in an interview. The majority of TSA employees work paycheck to paycheck, Jones said, and don't have enough savings to cover their expenses. "They're just flat-out not paying their bills because they don't have any money," he said.

Passengers have encountered hours-long security lines at major airports in Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, Austin, and elsewhere, as many TSA officers have called out sick. Some officers have taken on second jobs in order to make ends meet, Jones said.

"The officers can't afford to come to work. The gas is expensive right now," said Suzette, a security officer at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport who's worked for TSA for more than two decades. She requested we only use her middle name because she is not authorized to speak to the media.

TSA staff members at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas unload donated lunches from MGM Resorts on Wednesday as a partial government shutdown continues, and workers stopped receiving paychecks.

(

Ty ONeil

/

AP

)

"People have childcare. You have a mortgage that you have to pay," Suzette told NPR's Morning Edition. "Where are you getting the money from to pay?"

DHS has blamed the long lines on Democrats in a series of social media statements over the weekend, though Democrats say Republicans are also to blame.

Democrats have refused to approve DHS's budget unless GOP lawmakers and the White House agree on changes to how immigration officers operate after the fatal shooting of two American citizens in Minneapolis. Senate Democrats introduced bills to fund TSA and other components of DHS instead, but Republicans blocked them.

More than 100,000 DHS workers will miss their first full paycheck Friday, according to the White House, including employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the TSA. 

Meanwhile, airline passengers are still paying the security fees that help to fund the TSA's budget, even as the partial shutdown drags on. The passenger fee, also known as the aviation security fee or the September 11 security fee, was enacted when the TSA was created after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.

"That fee has underwritten part of the TSA budget for all those years," explains former TSA administrator John Pistole. Airlines collect $5.60 for each one-way segment on a domestic flight, Pistole says. And that money has continued to accrue, even though none of it is finding its way into the bank accounts of TSA workers.

Security officers also went more than 40 days without a paycheck last year during the partial government shutdown last year. The back-to-back shutdowns have only made it harder for the agency to attract and retain workers, Pistole said, as more than 1,000 security officers resigned from TSA during October and November of last year.

At Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, TSA workers are still on the job Friday despite not receiving a full paycheck due to the partial government shutdown.

(

Annabelle Gordon

/

AFP via Getty Images

)

"The longer it went, the more officers who resigned," Pistole said. "Not knowing how long the shutdown will continue, [they] will basically look for other work, because surprise, they have bills to pay."

An additional 300 TSA officers have quit during the current shutdown, according to the White House.

Travel and aviation industry leaders say all of this is creating unnecessary stress and confusion for passengers.

"Travelers should be concerned that Congress has created unpredictability in the system. They've created a system where we don't know whether we should show up at the airport one hour ahead, four or 5 hours ahead," said Geoff Freeman, the CEO of the U.S. Travel Association.

Freeman had urged the Trump administration to restart Global Entry, a program that allows pre-approved, low-risk travelers to get expedited processing when they enter the U.S. from abroad. DHS moved to reopen the program this week.

Now Freeman is hopeful that a change in leadership at DHS will help to break the stalemate over funding for the department. Last week, President Trump announced that he is removing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and wants Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R.-Okla., to take over.

"The politics of the shutdown are complicated," Freeman said in an interview. "Changes at the Department of Homeland Security create additional opportunities for compromise," he said, though he expects the shutdown to continue into next week at a minimum.

NPR's Milton Guevara contributed reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

President Donald Trump announced Friday afternoon on his Truth Social platform that Richard Grenell, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, is leaving his position at the head of the Kennedy Center before it closes for scheduled renovations in July.

Trump, who has been chairman of the Kennedy Center since Feb. 2025, said that he is promoting Matt Floca, the center's current vice president of operations, to chief operating officer and executive director. Grenell's departure comes about three months before the Kennedy Center is set to close for renovations, which President Trump has said would take two years.

As NPR reported last month, the renovations as detailed in an internal memo include some facility repairs and cosmetic changes, including to public spaces that were just renovated two years ago. In his Truth Social posting Friday, the president repeated his claim that the renovations will be a "complete reconstruction" of the complex.

Grenell, who served as the center's president, has a reputation as a Trump loyalist and has frequently deplored what he has called "leftist activists" in the arts. During Grenell's tenure, which began as interim executive director in Feb. 2025, the Kennedy Center has experienced intense tumult. Numerous prominent artists have canceled their performances and presentations. One of the center's core tenants, the Washington National Opera, severed its relationship with the Kennedy Center last month. Many longtime staff members have departed. Ticket sales have plummeted.

Grenell, who had no prior arts administration experience prior to his Kennedy Center appointment, told PBS NewsHour in January, "We cannot have arts institutions that lose money." He insisted that productions at the Kennedy Center needed to be revenue generators or at least revenue-neutral — a non-starter in the performing arts, in which large legacy institutions generally depend on a balance of earned revenue, philanthropic giving and some amount of government grants.

Last November, Senate Democrats opened an investigation against Grenell, accusing him and the current Kennedy Center leadership of cronyism and corruption, citing "millions in lost revenue, luxury spending and preferential treatment for Trump allies." Grenell denied the allegations in an open letter posted to social media on the official Kennedy Center accounts, which has since been removed.

In his Truth Social post, President Trump praised Grenell, writing: "Ric Grenell has done an excellent job in helping to coordinate various elements of the Center during the transition period, and I want to thank him for the outstanding work he has done."

News of his departure was first reported Friday by Axios.

Copyright 2026 NPR

How long a Los Angeles County resident lives can depend on where they live in the area, and the gap between the county’s richest and poorest communities has gotten wider over the past decade, according to a report released this week.

Average life expectancy countywide is 80.5 years, according to the report by Measure of America, a program of the Social Science Research Council. That’s down 1.6 years from the group’s previous report, released in 2017.

The Portrait of Los Angeles County measures how Angelenos are doing neighborhood by neighborhood, using a metric called the Human Development Index, or HDI. The index combines life expectancy, educational attainment and personal earnings into a single well-being score between 0 and 10.

The county’s HDI crept up to 5.64, from 5.43 in the previous report. That was far short of a county goal set in 2017 to raise L.A. County’s HDI by a full point.

“The main reason for this anemic progress is COVID and the disproportionate impacts it had on different groups of Angelenos,” said Kristen Lewis, director of Measure of America.

Drug overdoses and cardiovascular disease also contributed, the report says.

The report was produced in partnership with the L.A. County Department of Mental Health and supported by a group of philanthropic funders including the James Irvine Foundation, Cedars-Sinai and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

Life expectancy in L.A. County map graphic produced by Measure of America

(

Measure of America

)

A widening gap

The report details disparities between L.A. County’s wealthiest communities — where life expectancy went up — and poorer ones, where it dropped.

“What we saw in terms of change over time is that the areas that were already doing well are doing better,” Lewis said.

The gap between the longest-living and shortest-living communities is more than 16 years. Average life expectancy in Westwood was 88.1, compared to 71.8 in the Antelope Valley community of Sun Village.

Lewis said she drove to Sun Village during the research process and found no grocery stores and no sidewalks.

"It would be very hard to make healthy choices in that environment,” she said.

While median personal earnings rose countywide since the last report, they didn’t keep pace with dramatically rising housing costs.

In every L.A. County neighborhood, a resident earning the local median salary would need to work more than 40 hours a week to afford median housing costs, according to the report. In 31 L.A. County neighborhoods, that figure exceeds 80 hours.

The report sorts L.A. County neighborhoods into five tiers of well-being, based on where they fall on the Human Development Index, from “precarious L.A.” to “glittering L.A.”

No community in the county scored below 3.0 on the HDI and landed in the lowest tier in the 2026 report. That’s an improvement from 2017, when six areas fell into that category, including Cudahy, Westmont and Southeast Los Angeles.

The latest report examined L.A. County death records between 2019 and 2023. The earlier report had looked at 2010 through 2014.

One bright spot, according to researchers, was that educational attainment improved significantly. The share of adults with a bachelor's degree rose by more than 18%.

Measure of America's breakdown of the '5 L.A.s', rated via the Human Development Index, or HDI.

(

Measure of America

)

Disparities abound

Latinos saw the steepest decline in life expectancy of any major racial group, falling 3.7 years to 80.7 years of age.

The report attributes this largely to COVID-19, noting that Latino Angelenos are disproportionately concentrated in frontline jobs and are more likely to live in overcrowded, multigenerational households, both factors that increased exposure to the virus.

Asian Angelenos have the longest life expectancy, at 86.2 years. Black Angelenos live to 72.9, on average, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to just 71.2.

Black mothers remain nearly four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white or Asian women.

Lewis said the disparities across neighborhoods are based on policy choices.

“There's nothing natural or inevitable about inequality,” Lewis said. “It was really decades of deliberate decisions, policies and investments designed to advantage some groups of Angelenos while excluding others that really created this landscape of inequality we see today.

Measure of America rankings of the top and bottom L.A. County neighborhoods by Human Developent Index score.

(

Measure of America

)

What comes next

Lewis said she hopes local officials and community organizations use the report to guide planning, programming and investment decisions.

After the first report in 2017, the city of Los Angeles relocated some workforce development sites based on neighborhood HDI scores, and the county Department of Mental Health used the findings for needs assessment, according to the report.

Kalene Gilbert, a coordinator at the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, said the department used the 2017 report to decide where to pilot community school programs, targeting areas with the worst education disparities.

“If we're really serious about equity in L.A. County, it's reports like this that really help make that a reality because this provides that understanding of where the need is at a really detailed level,” Gilbert said.

The report’s underlying data end in 2023, before several major crises hit L.A. County.

The January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed thousands of homes and displaced tens of thousands of people.

Federal immigration enforcement raids that summer disrupted daily life in immigrant communities, leading the Board of Supervisors to declare a state of emergency in October.

The passage of the federal budget bill in July 2025 cut $750 million in annual funding for the county's public health system, according to the report.

None of that is reflected in the latest HDI scores.

Gilbert said those crises are already affecting the people DMH serves. She said immigration raids have made some clients afraid to leave their homes for appointments, forcing the department to shift toward telehealth.

“We consistently hear concern about just even coming out into the community,” Gilbert said.The report's interactive portal, where residents can explore data for their neighborhoods, is available at Measure of America's website.

In the heart of L.A.’s Chinatown neighborhood, a 6,000-square-foot space looks to provide mental health care services for Los Angeles Unified School District students, as well as for kids and young adults ages six to 25.

For years, mental health has been a top concern for L.A. youth, many of whom experience high-level stressors, including housing insecurity, gun violence and discrimination in and outside school.

Last year, the L.A. County Youth Commission’s annual report revealed mental health was the top concern for youth, with education and employment falling close behind.

The commission surveyed 856 youth across the five different districts of the county, 524 of whom listed mental health as a top concern. The majority of the youth who selected mental health as their main concern were Latino and system-impacted.

Witnessing rising health care costs and deep cuts to mental health funding in California led Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers to expand their critical outpatient services for youth, also known as their Child and Adolescent Outpatient Program (GCAOP).

With a new location for its GCAOP inside the Chinatown Service Center, the Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers hope to reach more children and youth who can benefit from therapy, medication management and psychiatric care.

On Tuesday, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the new location for the GCAOP in Chinatown. She began her remarks by thanking Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers “for stepping up,” with the new facility expected to serve more than 230 youth annually.

“This place will provide the healing needed to prevent challenges from escalating into crises,” Bass said. “Make no mistake, we have a long way to go, but my administration and leaders like those at Gateways are turning the tide on major challenges like mental health that have been ignored for decades.”

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education, under the Trump administration ,announced it would stop funding roughly $1 billion in grants that were meant to boost the ranks and training of mental health professionals who work in schools. The department claimed that the grants were awarded under the Biden administration, a decision that was said to conflict with the current administration's priorities.

Aside from terminating the 2025 grants, the department also proposed an additional reduction for the 2026 fiscal year. These consecutive cuts would reduce resources for school counselors and psychiatrists, something that for school districts like LAUSD can be detrimental.

As L.A. Public Press reported earlier this year, LAUSD enrollment has dropped due to ICE raids spreading across L.A. County and many LAUSD staff, including counselors, have indicated that in times like these, the hiring of more trained attendance counselors and investing in mental health support are vital.

Despite that, for many LAUSD campuses, especially in low-income neighborhoods, staff shortages, including counselors and therapists, are a reality.

To combat some of the local shortages when it comes to mental health, the Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Centers are partnering with LAUSD to provide outpatient services to students, including individual and family therapy and psychiatric evaluations across more than 15 of the district's campuses.

“Our program is designed to meet young people where they are, whether that’s in school, at home, or here in the new Chinatown Service Center location,” said Charlotte Bautista, director of Gateways Child and Adolescent Outpatient Program. “We know early access to mental health care can change the trajectory of a child’s life, and we are providing a safe space where families can heal, grow and thrive together.”

Charlotte Bautista, director of Gateways Child and Adolescent Outpatient Program, said this expansion also allows for more students and families who deserve consistent, high-quality care to be reached, reducing waitlists and out-of-pocket costs.

“Our program is designed to meet young people where they are, whether that’s in school, at home, or here in the new Chinatown Service Center location,” she said. “We know early access to mental health care can change the trajectory of a child’s life, and we are providing a safe space where families can heal, grow and thrive together.”

This story was produced by CALÓ News, a news organization covering Latino/a/x communities.