The Department of Homeland Security has been shuttered for more than a month as congressional lawmakers remain at an impasse over funding for the agency. The shutdown has left Transportation Security Administration workers without pay for weeks, which has prompted mass callouts, excessive wait times, and winding security lines for travelers across the country with no clear end in sight. There are signals that lawmakers could be close to an agreement with a two-week holiday recess looming, and on Thursday night President Trump announced that he would sign an executive order to pay TSA agents. But it’s unclear whether he has the legal authority to do so, and such a move still wouldn’t resolve the underlying impasse.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Sally French, a travel expert and co-host of NerdWallet’s Smart Travel podcast, about the state of this crisis. We discussed how early you should get to the airport, why Houston’s airport has been so hard hit, and how long it might take conditions to return to normal once the shutdown ends.

Wait times have varied wildly across the country, with some passengers reporting quick 45-minute trips through security and others, in places like Houston, waiting for hours. Why is there such a difference depending on location? I was looking into the Houston thing. For the TSA workers, a lot of it comes down to cost of living, how far they have to commute. With any job, there is a cost to getting there, whether it’s public transit or driving, and you calculate, Is that worth it? Is the time to actually get to my employer worth it? What’s the opportunity cost of me working somewhere else? Ultimately, TSA workers are humans, and they can go get jobs somewhere else. So you just have to look at the market conditions of what’s happening in Houston in particular.

Lines seemed to be easing up in some places earlier in the week. Is there any sign that the recent deployment of ICE agents to airports helped with that?These are consistent with traditional travel patterns. And, in fact, if you really want to go on a math mission, TSA puts out their numbers of how many people pass through airport security every day, and we know Tuesday, Wednesday, even Thursdays are lighter days to fly. We just see many more people traveling on Fridays, Sundays. You get that pattern of people flying out for the weekend, people returning for the week ahead, and those are patterns that we have seen since forever.

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