After weeks of spiraling airport lines, unpaid workers, and political brinkmanship, President Donald Trump says he will step in and pay TSA agents directly.
Trump Moves To Pay TSA Workers Using Existing Funds As Airport Chaos Exposes Washington Dysfunction
Last night, Trump announced he will order the Department of Homeland Security to “immediately pay” TSA officers despite the ongoing funding impasse in Congress.
The move comes after more than a month of a partial shutdown affecting DHS, during which TSA agents have been required to work without pay while passengers endure record wait times at airports across the country.
Nearly 500 TSA officers have already quit. Lines have stretched for hours. And now, the federal government’s solution is to try to pay them anyway, without actually passing a funding bill.
Where Is The Money Coming From?
The administration has not fully detailed the mechanism, but the plan appears to rely on redirecting existing appropriated funds within the Department of Homeland Security to cover TSA payroll.
Rather than “new” funding, this is a reallocation of money that has already been approved by Congress, likely pulled from other DHS programs or accounts that have not yet been spent…maybe even from ICE, which was fully funded as part of the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
That raises an obvious question: if this was always an option, why did it take five weeks?
There are legal gray areas around how far the executive branch can go in repurposing funds without explicit congressional approval. An earlier plan to unlock additional funding by declaring an “emergency” has been set aside. There were also political incentives to let the pressure build, particularly when a shutdown is tied to a broader policy fight.
But looking in from the outside, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this could have been done earlier…or at the very least explored more aggressively before airport security lines turned into a national embarrassment.
This Is Not How Government Is Supposed To Work
I’m someone who believes that there is nothing new under the sun, but that doesn’t mean the incompetence of the past somehow justifies or explains the extreme incompetence of the present day.
The United States government has been unable to pass a bill to fund airport security, one of its most basic responsibilities. Instead, the president is now attempting to patch together a solution by shifting money around inside an agency.
This is not a policy solution. It is a workaround.
And like most workarounds, it raises more questions than it answers:
- How long will the money last?
- Is this legally sustainable?
- What happens when those funds run out?
No one seems entirely sure. And the scary thing is I don’t really care at this point. Just pay the workers…you cannot force people to do work for five weeks and not pay them. It’s criminal.
That sentiment itself is scary, because in theory only Congress should have the power of the purse.
Meanwhile, Airports Are Becoming A Case Study In Failure
While Washington argues, airports are dealing with the consequences.
Staffing shortages have led to unprecedented delays, with some passengers waiting hours just to clear security. ICE agents have been deployed to assist with basic functions like crowd control and, in some cases, ID checks. The National Guard has even been floated as a backup option.
None of this is normal. None of this is sustainable. And yet, here we are, with folks showing up to airports five hours early and still missing their flight.
The most pathetic part of this saga is that, behind closed doors, there appears to be broad agreement that the situation is untenable. Lawmakers on both sides acknowledge that TSA workers should be paid. Airlines are stepping in to help where they can. Every person inside or outside the administration says that paying frontline workers is the right move.
And still…no durable solution.
By the time you read this, there may even be a deal moving through Congress that would fund most of DHS while continuing to fight over immigration enforcement, the same basic framework that has been on the table for weeks. What has changed? The POTUS and GOP majority are seeing that polls numbers are not supportive…
Using TSA has a political football is disgusting and symptomatic of a government that is woefully incompetent.
CONCLUSION
Trump’s move to pay TSA workers may offer temporary relief, and credit where due, it should not have taken this long to find a way to compensate people doing essential work.
But the fact that this solution comes in the form of a workaround, rather than a functioning legislative process, says everything about the current state of Washington. This was avoidable and foreseeable. It should not have required five weeks of chaos at America’s airports to get here. All of this is a sick charade of incompetence, which I hope voters will remember this November.
There is a bill in both the Senate and House that would pay them so Trump’s action doesn’t really mean anything other than ensure no more paychecks are missed.
Air transportation is funded by user fees so it should never be subject to the appropriations process. The day probably will never come that both parties give up control of parts of the government that are funded by user fees but nothing is different with how the TSA and ATC are funded now compared to how it has been in the past.
FWIW the $5.60 TSA September 11t Security Fee each of us pays for travel one way on every ticket is supposed to fund TSA and other airport security functions but despite the law preventing use of this fee for anything other than TSA and other airport security functions, a significant portion of the money collected, e.g. more than $4.5 billion in 2025) keeps getting diverted to the U.S. Treasury “general fund”.
Matt, you must feel all those years in law school, passing the bar, completing CLE, etc. are kind of a waste because laws are merely suggestions. Constitution? Who cares. The President can just use whatever money he wants whenever he wants if he wants; do war; insider trade; anything goes. Oh, and 4th Amendment, nah, ICE can just barge into your home on a whim. Could’ve saves 3+ years of school. Just sayin’… Bah!
It’s about the psychopathology of his presidency. The President thrives on impulsivity and chaos. Sometimes it is planned such that he can reach some superficially heroic resolution. In this case, the optics have been so catastrophic that it’s just a matter of how long public will retain memories of the self-imposed shutdown.
To me, using ICE at airports is politically radioactive, but Americans–voters and the press–have short and forgiving memories.
It is meaningful to recall underlying reason for the President’s actions (other than to stay on camera) is the SAVE Act: a thinly veiled attempt at voter suppression. If one boils it all down: four-hour queues, unpaid TSA employees, useless ICE staff at airports are all there because the President wants to ensure that the frail elderly, people of lower socioeconomic status, married women (with name changes,), naturalized citizens, and those in rural areas are unable to vote, or they are delayed or obstructed.
Voter fraud is exceedingly rare. The SAVE Act raises questions about the 14th and 24th Amendments, but the President and his adjutants are bankrupting TSA employees, preventing travel, and hammering the air transportation system just to get the SAVE Act codified. It is shameless, stubborn, and bigoted.
The President just voted by mail himself. But it the SAVE Act has been turned into a stubborn “critical” issue such that the expeditious flow of passengers and cargo has been decimated. As travellers, TSA employees, airline crews, businesses, we’ve become pawns in the President’s self-serving games.
I have to laugh. One travel blogger slams Trump for his illegal use of the funds to pay TSA, and you condemn him for not using the same funds sooner. Heads I win, tails you loose. It’s obvious Trump has broken your mind–can you go for loner that 10 minutes without cussing him out again in your mind??? Guess it is a moot point now since Trump has broken the senate logjam.
Doesn’t matter to most of the whiny, vocal posters (see above)…Trump can do no right in any of their eyes.
Dear Leader didn’t do anything (yet). It was the Senate GOP that caved into Democratic demands when it became clear this was a losing issue for them. But now that there is active civil war in MAGA and Speaker Johnson cannot get the Freedom Caucus to support the Senate bill, Agent Orange will get a chance to earn my praise.
Trump hasn’t broken our minds. Trump is Trump, and always has been.
What’s broken my mind, as well as others who actually care about this country and our democracy is why people like yourself continue to enable him? Why don’t you care? What are you getting out of this man running our country, our financial system, and our judicial system into the ground? Explain yourself. How is his ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ actually helping YOU?
It’s clear how Trump is benefiting from his presidency, it’s clear how tech and the billionaires created by it are benefiting from it, But what isn’t clear is exactly what YOU get out of it when he ‘wins the libs’!!! Where did your extreme and pathetic cynicism come from? Is your life really that tragic to burn the whole place down?
Once again no one is surprised by the sociopathic behavior by Trump. To many of us it is very familiar from our own travels and personal interactions. However, what is unique is how many apparently functional adults continue to enable him, and his enablers when they know all he does is lie to them and gaslight them.
Is your little ego that fragile and you’re that bitter to continue to go along with the disaster occurring in front of your eye? Is that what you want for your family? Your children? This is the example you want to set?
Yes, USA. The rest of the world is still laughing at you and your Great Leader, Criminal Trump!
YOU ARE SO RIGHT, WE LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF FOOLS! Fortunately, only 50% of the country are the reals fools, those are the individuals who allowed him to have the current term. These voters are the decendents of the idiots who re-elected Richard Nixon in 1972 to only have him resign in descrace in 1974. Donald Trump is too crooked and stupid to have enough sense to resign.
Correction: Senate Democrats voted 7 times in a row to deny funding for DHS (inclusive of TSA, etc). Don’t believe me? Read it yourselves in the Congressional Record. It is absolutely gaslighting and intellectually dishonest to claim that this is on Trump or the GOP. The Democrats did it, bragged about it, and refused to negotiate in good faith. Then, and only then, did the President step in.
You’re a tool. The Dems voted over and over to fund the TSA…a clean bill that should have enjoyed bipartisan support. I 100% support the Dems for standing firm on reigning in the out-of-control tactics of ICE. The Dems were right to deny more funding to that troubled agency.
Stop drinking the Kool-Aid, fool…it was the GOP that has held TSA hostage over its demands to fund ICE.
Matthew, being a lawyer, you should know better than most that name-calling does not add to the validity of your argument. Nor does it contribute to civility on your own blog. Leave statements like “you are a tool” “you fool” to those who can’t engage in a rational debate.
I don’t disagree, but I think there’s some merit to the paradox of Proverbs 26:4-5.
It’s particularly egregious given that TSA is directly funded by passenger ticket levies. Trump could have fixed this immediately, but chose to wait it out in the hope he could extract the money required to run his Geheime Staatspolizei. Unlike the Gestapo, however, ICE is poorly organised, indiscriminate, and run by morons.
When my comment produces a response like that, I know with 100% confidence that you were enraged by the (inconvenient) truth. I’m reminded of the Lenin quote about “useful idiots” in the West that the Marxists could always count on to trash their own country, parrot Pravda talking points, and virtue signal like an ignorant freshman at UC Berkeley (or freshperson in your lingua). It’s not a good look. If you support open borders, no voter ID (unlike every single country in Europe, Africa and South America), and no prosecution of illegal alien criminals, just say it. Stupidity is not a crime, Matthew. It’s just really offensive to those of us with common sense.
What a non-sequitur. I support voter ID, removing or executing illegal aliens who commit any crimes beyond illegally entering the country (depending on the circumstance), and support the police…I don’t support withholding pay from TSA workers as the GOP has done nor do I support masked thugs murdering American citizens…ICE is out of control and any freedom-loving constitutionalist should recognize that. Look in the mirror, dude, you are the useful idiot you decry. Check Trump’s net worth and those of the people in his inner circle. Follow the money, you poor soul.
Classic politicians. Always making the other side look guilty when they have the solution. They let the press get to it and have this whole commotion, and then they heroically swing in to save the day!