However, one event that dominated headlines in 2025 is now rarely mentioned by mainstream media—on February 14th, due to a deadlock between Democrats and Republicans over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, a partial DHS shutdown officially began.

To this day, the shutdown has not ended.

During this nearly two-month shutdown, over 100,000 DHS employees have been unable to receive their salaries, and nearly 11% of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff have been absent. In New Orleans, security checkpoint lines have snaked from inside the terminal to the outdoors, even looping around the parking lot seven times before reaching the entrance.

For the United States, which has almost no high-speed rail network and is highly dependent on air travel, turbulence in the civil aviation system is devastating. Even Elon Musk publicly stated his willingness to pay the salaries of affected TSA employees out of his own pocket.

Also starting in March, the prediction market Polymarket launched a weekly-updated prediction event: “Number of US Flight Delays This Week”—traders can bet on how many flights will be delayed each week, earning money for correct predictions and losing it all for wrong ones.

Beyond these purely entertainment-focused events, Polymarket has also listed several topics with considerable reference value. Through the probabilities reflected by these topics, we can attempt to interpret the true current state of the government shutdown and even US domestic affairs.

The Shutdown Game Between the Two Parties

The duration of this shutdown has already broken the previous 35-day record set by Trump. Amidst widespread flight delays and a near-collapse of the security screening system, when the shutdown will end is the most pressing question for affected individuals within the US.

Polymarket currently has a related event: “DHS Shutdown Ends by ___”. As of publication, the probability of the shutdown ending between April 5th and 8th is 44%, while the probability it will not end in April is 14%.

Betting on these two time points are many “smart money” traders—seasoned traders with high historical prediction accuracy and strong profit performance in the political sector. This trading profile confirms a clear logic: if the shutdown does not end within the April 5th-8th window, the likelihood of an agreement being reached this month drops significantly.

April 5th to 8th coincides with Congress reconvening after a recess, when both parties will bring the funding bill back to the table. If an agreement can be reached within a few days of reconvening, and the bill passes both the House and Senate before being signed, the shutdown will end.

However, if this window is missed again, the House and Senate will subsequently become immersed in their own separate agendas. Without strong political pressure, the motivation for both parties to return to the negotiating table will be greatly diminished.

Musk’s “Offer to Pay” and ICE’s “Stand-In”

Due to severe delays at major airports caused by continuous TSA staff departures, Elon Musk stated on March 21st that he was willing to pay TSA personnel salaries, which spawned the Polymarket trading event “Will Elon Musk pay TSA employees?”.

However, shortly after Musk’s post, the White House declined the offer citing legal compliance and conflict of interest concerns: under US federal law, government employees cannot accept external compensation related to their official duties; coupled with Musk’s deep involvement in federal government contracts, directly paying salaries faces serious conflict-of-interest challenges.

While the rejection had legal grounds, people still need to make a living. To minimize the impact of the aviation system’s paralysis on the midterm elections, Trump ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to be deployed to airports in March to replace TSA employees who left due to unpaid wages.

But the scene after these ICE agents entered the airports made the entire shutdown event seem even more absurd.

After Trump took office, ICE, to meet its goal of “arresting 3,000 people daily and deporting a million annually,” has been drastically compressing its recruitment and training processes—planning to hire 10,000 additional enforcement officers and shortening the originally planned 16-week in-person training to 8 weeks.

In short, the professional competence of these ICE agents is already questionable.

TSA security screening work requires systematic training covering core skills like X-ray machine operation and explosive detection, qualifications that ICE agents simply do not possess.

Thus, a historic scene unfolded: TSA employees, while working unpaid, had to demonstrate security procedures to ICE agents and teach them how to maintain order. Most ICE agents did not actually perform security screenings but instead patrolled the terminals, using their law enforcement status to question and deport suspected undocumented immigrants.

Data confirms the outcome of this farce: after ICE’s deployment to airports, flight delays did not significantly improve. By the end of March, the US aviation system still experienced thousands of daily flight delays, with TSA absenteeism at Atlanta’s airport nearing 40% and daily flight delays exceeding 350. These numbers indicate that these ICE agents, intended to act as a buffer for the shutdown, did not serve the role anyone expected.

The “Nuclear Option” to Break the Deadlock

Another trading event related to this government shutdown is “Will Republicans use the ‘nuclear option’ to break the filibuster before December 31, 2026?”, currently with a probability of 31%.

At first glance, the term “nuclear option” sounds intimidating; but in US politics, it is not a literal nuclear weapon, but rather one of the few yet highly destructive procedural cards the Republican Party holds.

In the US legislative system, the House of Representatives is responsible for proposing and drafting appropriations bills, while the Senate is responsible for deliberation and voting. Typically, ending debate and proceeding to a vote in the Senate requires 60 votes—meaning the minority party only needs 41 votes to block any bill by inتحديnitely delaying debate through a filibuster.

The “nuclear option” provides a path to bypass this threshold: a senator raises a procedural appeal, and a simple majority (51 votes) can overturn the presiding officer’s ruling, thereby forcibly lowering the vote threshold required to end debate from 60.

Currently, Republicans hold 53 seats in the Senate. Once the nuclear option is triggered, the Democrats’ ability to obstruct would be nearly zero.

But the reason the “nuclear option” is called “nuclear” lies in its high cost to the user as well: breaking Senate rules is seen by voters as an abuse of power; more crucially, once Republicans lose their majority in the future, the same rule could be used by Democrats to retaliate.

The pit dug today may be filled by oneself tomorrow. The 31% probability is precisely the market’s real pricing of this dilemma.

As this shutdown deadlock remains unresolved, Trump must also simultaneously deal with the escalating situation in Iran.

On one side is the high-stakes game of diplomacy and military pressure, on the other are airport lines, unpaid wages, and partisan bickering—the troubles this US administration needs to manage simultaneously are far greater than what headlines suggest. Crises in domestic affairs and foreign policy never wait for the other to be resolved first.

And amidst this turbulence, the rich array of political and current affairs prediction events on prediction markets will continue to serve as an objective mirror, helping us capture the true trajectory of these narratives.

هذا المقال مصدره من الانترنت: The belligerent Trump has forgotten the Americans who waited in line for hours at the airportThe Shutdown Game Between the Two Parties

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