On Thursday, hours-long security lines snaked through New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. The wait was far from the longest in the country—George Bush International Airport in Houston reported three and a half hour lines. Over a month into a partial government shutdown that has left some Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees working without pay, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents are calling in sick or leaving work en masse, leading to travel chaos around the US. The Trump administration’s solution? Send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in.

ICE agents were deployed to at least 14 airports on Monday, ostensibly in an effort to speed up security lines—and five days into ICE’s incursion, airport employees are infuriated. The ICE agents, Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) who work for the TSA tell WIRED, don’t have the proper certification and training to perform many of tasks that might truly speed up security lines. The TSA employees say they’re frustrated by the situation—and worried about what it might mean for their future.

ICE agents have been spotted walking in packs, patrolling security lines and baggage areas. They have been seen giving directions to lost passengers, photographed distributing mini water bottles to those waiting in line, and, more often than not, standing around and appearing to do very little. “ICE are here and they’re doing literally nothing to help,” passengers in a security line overheard one airline worker complain on Wednesday at John F. Kennedy airport in New York.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some passengers stuck in line spotted ICE agents being trained to check passenger IDs and boarding passes. In a hearing in front of the US House Committee on Homeland Security on Wednesday, TSA acting head Ha Nguyen McNeill said that “the travel document checker function is one of the nonspecialized screen functions of the TSA,” and said ICE agents are being trained to conduct checks.

TSOs say ICE’s presence is frustrating to those working without pay—especially because ICE agents are being paid. “If you want to bring a tactical force into an environment where it’s required to have customer service and a mindset where you know what you’re doing, how to identify something that might be suspicious—they don’t have that training,” says Hydrick Thomas, a security officer and the president of AFGE Local 2222, which covers New York and New Jersey airports.

Security officers say they’re concerned for their coworkers, who, thanks to last fall’s government shutdown, haven’t received a steady paycheck for half of the fiscal year. Agents are worried about paying for rent, mortgages, gas, and childcare. Food banks have stood up drives in several airports, including those in Houston, North Carolina, and San Diego. In Knoxville, Tennessee, airport authorities are accepting donations for employees at a Delta Airlines counter. Eleven percent of airport checkpoint employees called out on Tuesday, compared to four percent pre-shutdown, a federal official testified to Congress on Wednesday morning. Some airports, including those in Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York’s John F. Kennedy, have seen daily callout rates higher than 35 percent. More than 480 TSA screeners have quit since the shutdown began in February, the agency says.

Long term, security officers say they’re concerned that the federal government plans to replace them with other federal agents, including ICE agents, or private sector employees. One mentioned Project 2025, a blueprint for the second Trump administration published by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which advocates for privatizing TSA altogether.

“A part of the American dream that I was sold was that working for the government was honorable and stable,” Carlos Rodriguez, a security officer and a AFGE TSA Council 100 vice president representing airports Northeastern airports from New Jersey to Vermont. “But this is not honorable or stable at this moment.”

Every year, without fail, the US experiences at least one major disruption in air travel due to severe weather, government shutdowns, software outages, or power outages—you name it.

Right now, a partial government shutdown has meant that thousands of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers have not been paid for several weeks, causing many to call out of work or quit. That has meant long security lines—more than three-hour waits—ensuing chaos at airports around the country. It’s unclear how long this mess will last, so it’s worth thinking about other options.

Flights are also expensive and hard on the environment. If you can take a bus, train, or ferry to your destination, why shouldn’t you? These travel search apps help you find routes and prices so you can compare them and make the best decision.

Wanderu

Best for Buses and Trains in the US and Canada

In the US and Canada, Wanderu is my go-to search aggregator for travel by bus or train (it works in Europe and the UK, too). Wanderu is your classic travel aggregator, looking up the schedules and prices across several bus and train operators, including Amtrak, BestBus, Flixbus, Greyhound, OurBus, Peter Pan, RedCoach, Vamoose, and others.

You see price comparisons at a glance, as well as options for upgraded class fares, departure and arrival times, and the location of each bus and train station, since sometimes you can save a lot of time by choosing one point over another. Filters help you narrow down your results based on your preferences, and you can book right from the app.

Omio

Compares Trains, Buses, Flights With Excellent Summaries

If you aren’t sure whether you want to travel by land or air, head to Omio. Type in your departure point, destination, and the date you want to travel, and Omio finds routes by plane, bus, and train. A concise summary at the top of the search results tells you the lowest fare and how long it will take for each mode of transportation, so you can make an informed decision quickly. Omio also shows whether the fare will be higher or lower if you travel on a different day of the same week, in case your dates are flexible.

Rome2Rio

Includes Comparison for Driving

Rome2Rio compares prices and times for travel by bus, train, flight, and driving yourself, based on estimated fuel costs. It works reasonably well for trips in the US and Canada. Rome2Rio touts itself as being for worldwide travel, though Europe and the UK seem to be its sweet spot. Elsewhere, take the approach of “trust, but verify,” and this app will take you places.

Virail

Compares Buses, Trains, and Flights

Virail is similar to Omio, comparing travel options by train, bus, and flight, with a neat summary of prices at the top of the search results, although it lacks the total travel time. For that, you have to scroll through the results. To book a ticket, Virail sends you to other websites, and you might have to do additional legwork to reserve your seat. It works reasonably well in the US and Canada (in testing, it got a little tripped up in Mexico), and does well for travel in Europe and the UK.

Vivanoda

Includes Flight and Carpool

Vivanoda (website only, no app) is similar to Omio, comparing all your options for getting between two points—and it includes flights, ferries, and carpool/rideshare options when applicable. The site operates out of the European Union and seems to work slightly better for travel in Europe and the UK than in the US and Canada, where it has some holes. (It didn’t find a direct flight between San Francisco and Vancouver, for example, even though there is more than one daily.)

Seat 61

Best Old-School Site for Trains and Bus Info Worldwide

Seat61, also known as The Man in Seat 61 (website only), has an old-school look and some of the best, most reliable information about traveling by bus and rail all around the world. Mark Smith, who runs the site, tells you exactly where in the world he knows about the train and bus routes: The site lists all the countries it covers on the left side, everywhere from Albania to Zimbabwe. He shares timetables, prices, and even includes photos, though his site is not a search aggregator, and you do have to go elsewhere to book. That said, it’s an excellent resource.

Lloyds Banking Group’s response to a request from the UK government’s Treasury Committee shows that a programming error was the root cause of a breach that exposed details of more than 114,000 mobile banking customers.

The bank said it has made goodwill payments totalling just over £139,000 to around 3,625 customers as of 23 March. It said it also submitted a formal notification to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours after the breach, in line with statutory timelines.

As Computer Weekly has previously reported, on the morning of 12 March, a fault in the Lloyds banking app enabled some customers to see the transactions of other customers. Customers of the group’s Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank apps were affected by the security breach.

While the bank resolved the breach quickly, Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury Committee, sent an email to Lloyds Banking Group’s group CEO, Charles Nunn, with the subject line “Improper disclosure of individuals’ account information”. In the email, Hillier described the incident as “an alarming breach of data confidentiality.”

The information she requested from the bank’s boss included details of the breach, how many customers were affected, whether customers could be identified and what steps Lloyds Banking Group has taken to encourage those who may have taken copies of data – of which they were not entitled – to delete those copies.

Jasjyot Singh, CEO of consumer relationships at Lloyds Banking Group, has now responded to the Treasury Committee’s questions. Singh stated that the incident was caused by an IT change made overnight between 11 and 12 March which introduced a software defect.

“The defect meant that when a customer requested to view their current account transactions, their transaction data was potentially visible to other customers who were simultaneously – within small fractions of a second – requesting access to their own transactions,” Singh said.

The bank has now established that the defect was in the design of the code used to update the application programming interface (API) used by the app. Singh said the bank is reviewing why this individual defect was not detected by its design, quality assurance and testing processes.

According to Singh, a maximum of 447,936 customers who viewed their transaction list during the affected time period may have been presented with other people’s transactions or may have had some of their transactions presented on another customer’s transaction list. The bank has estimated that 114,182 customers clicked through to view the detail behind individual current account transactions during that time and may have been presented with information about individual payments.

Singh assured the Treasury Committee that the bank’s fraud and cyber monitoring processes has seen no evidence of misuse or malicious activity as a result of the incident. “Based on our assessment of this incident, we have not identified evidence that customers have suffered financial loss, and no customer has reported a financial loss arising from the incident at this stage. Accordingly, we have not made compensation payments on this basis,” he stated in the letter.