TSA Lines Are Six Hours Long, Iran War Advisories Are Worldwide, and Expats Have a System for This

*Published: March 24, 2026 | BrightShadow*

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Two things happened this week that I want to put in the same frame, because together they tell a story that individual headlines miss.

First: the TSA government shutdown crisis. As of today, 50,000 TSA officers are working without pay. Three hundred have quit in the last month. JFK PreCheck — a program Americans pay $85 to join specifically to avoid lines — now runs 90 minutes instead of 13. Houston airports have had terminals with five and six hour security queues. ICE agents, not trained for airport security screening, are being deployed to fill gaps at major hubs.

Second: the State Department's worldwide caution advisory, issued March 22. Not a regional alert — worldwide. Because the US-Iran conflict that began February 28 has created conditions where groups supportive of Iran may target American interests in any country, not just the Middle East. Level 4 advisories cover Iraq and Iran. Level 3 covers Qatar. Flight disruptions are active across the entire Middle Eastern corridor.

Most readers will see these as two separate stories: a domestic infrastructure failure and a foreign policy crisis. I want to argue they're the same story — and that understanding why is the most practical thing I can offer you today.

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What Both Stories Are Actually About

The TSA situation is not fundamentally about TSA. It's about a government that classifies workers as "essential" — meaning legally required to show up — while simultaneously not paying them. The system demands performance while withholding compensation. The predictable result: the people with the most options leave first, the people with the fewest options stay and absorb the dysfunction, and the infrastructure degrades at the speed of attrition.

The Iran conflict advisory is not fundamentally about Iran. It's about what happens when Americans living or traveling abroad haven't built the information infrastructure to distinguish between "the world is dangerous" and "my specific situation has elevated risk right now." The worldwide caution level means something real: US diplomatic facilities and American-associated locations face elevated threat globally. But it doesn't mean Panama City is as dangerous as Baghdad. It means you need a system to evaluate your actual exposure — not just react to the headline.

Both situations reveal the same underlying condition: the cost of improvising has gone up.

When systems are stable and friction is low, you can wing it. When TSA works normally, arriving 45 minutes early is fine. When the geopolitical environment is calm, having your only bank account in a US bank is fine. When government infrastructure functions, you don't need to think hard about what happens when it doesn't.

But 2026 is not that environment. And the Americans who've been building redundancy and optionality into their financial and logistical lives — not because they were paranoid, but because they were paying attention — are navigating this week differently than everyone else.

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The Expat Structural Advantage (It's Not What You Think)

When I talk to people who've relocated abroad and are now watching the TSA chaos and the Iran war advisories from outside the US, the common response isn't gloating. It's something closer to: *this is exactly what we planned for, and it's working.*

Not because they predicted the specific events. Nobody forecast a partial government shutdown coinciding with US military action in Iran in Q1 2026. What they built was not prediction — it was resilience architecture.

Here's what that looks like concretely.

On domestic travel dysfunction: Expats who've relocated don't deal with TSA lines because they're not flying domestic routes to see family three times a year through O'Hare in March. When they travel, they're usually dealing with international airports in countries where the security process is 10 to 25 minutes regardless of government shutdown status, because those airports are funded by governments that don't operate on a continuous-resolution basis with a live political dysfunction dynamic.

That's not a small thing. If you're traveling 6 to 10 times a year domestically for family or work, the TSA situation represents 10 to 30 hours of friction this month alone that you can't recapture. For expats, that friction disappeared.

On geopolitical risk: The expats I work with who are in countries like Panama, Albania, Georgia, and Portugal are not in the threat radius that the State Department's worldwide caution targets. They enrolled in STEP — the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program — and receive real-time government advisories on their phones. They have accounts in multiple currencies, so if they needed to purchase a flight home tomorrow, they're not waiting 3 to 5 business days for an international wire transfer to clear. And they made deliberate choices about which countries to live in — not based on vibe, but based on geopolitical exposure analysis.

None of this is complicated. It's infrastructure. It's the stuff that looks like overcaution in stable times and looks like planning in unstable times.

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The Three Practical Systems Worth Building Now

I'm not going to tell you to move abroad if you're not ready. What I will tell you is that the three systems that protect expats during weeks like this week are accessible to anyone — including people still living in the US — and cost very little to set up.

System 1: STEP Enrollment The State Department's Smart Traveler Enrollment Program is free. You register your travel plans and receive real-time security alerts for the countries you're in or plan to visit. When the Iran conflict advisory was updated on March 22, STEP registrants got a direct notification before it hit major news outlets. If you travel internationally at all — even as a tourist — this is a 10-minute setup that has real value in elevated risk environments. Register at step.state.gov.

System 2: Liquid Funds Outside the US Banking System This is the one people resist most, and it's the one that matters most in a fast-moving situation. If your only financial accounts are US-based and you need to access funds quickly while abroad — for an emergency evacuation flight, a medical situation, a logistical problem that requires cash — you are dependent on international wire transfer timing, which runs 3 to 5 business days in normal conditions and can be slower during bank holidays or elevated demand periods.

A Wise or Revolut account with $2,000 to $5,000 in a non-USD currency — Swiss franc, Singapore dollar, or simply a multi-currency balance — gives you same-day access to funds in an emergency. You can set this up in an afternoon. The cost is essentially the currency conversion spread, which is minimal. The risk reduction is substantial.

System 3: Geopolitical Exposure Mapping If you're moving abroad or already abroad, you should be able to answer this question: does my target country have a US military base, a significant US diplomatic presence, or an active conflict with a state actor that has anti-American posture? This is not about avoiding the entire world. Most of the countries that expats actually move to — Panama, Portugal, Albania, Colombia, Georgia, Thailand (with caveats), Malaysia — have low to moderate US military exposure and are not in active conflict arcs.

The point is not to eliminate risk. The point is to choose your exposure deliberately rather than discover it reactively.

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What This Week's News Means for Your Timeline

If you've been thinking about moving abroad and treating it as a "someday" decision — this week is useful data.

The TSA situation will not resolve quickly. The government shutdown dynamic is not a one-cycle problem. And even when the immediate crisis passes, the underlying condition — essential workers underpaid, infrastructure investment deferred, system resilience degraded — persists.

The Iran war advisory is not going to disappear in 30 days. Active hostilities are ongoing. The worldwide caution level reflects a real assessment that American interests globally are at elevated risk for the medium term, not the next week.

Neither of these is an argument for panic. They're an argument for the same thing I've been making for the past year: the cost of optionality is low and the value of optionality is high. Building the infrastructure to have choices — a different place to live, access to funds outside one system, a plan for geopolitical disruption — doesn't require you to execute immediately. It requires you to stop treating the decision as hypothetical.

The people standing in six-hour TSA lines right now didn't think the system would fail them this badly. The people caught by the Iran advisories without a STEP enrollment or international liquidity didn't think they'd need it.

Infrastructure looks like overcaution until the week it doesn't.

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The Practical Next Step

If you're ready to move from "thinking about this" to "actually building the plan," a single session is a good place to start. We spend 45 minutes mapping your specific situation: where you're thinking about going, what your financial picture looks like, what the healthcare and tax transition involves, and what the three to five things are that you specifically need to address before you go.

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*BrightShadow is a relocation and financial advisory brand for Americans building international lives. Jesse Johnson is an aerospace engineer and 15-year expat who has lived in Russia, Japan, and Brazil. This is not legal or tax advice — it's the framework I use with clients to think through these decisions.*