The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) issued its employees back pay on Monday, after Donald Trump signed an order for them to be paid even as a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security drags on, with no end in sight.
The paychecks appear to have relieved severe congestion at airport TSA checkpoints, which resulted in hours-long lines at several major air hubs over the past two weeks but brought Congress no closer to resolving the standoff over the the DHS’s budget.
“Most TSA employees received a retroactive paycheck today that included at least two full paychecks,” said Lauren Bis, the acting assistant secretary of public affairs at the DHS. She noted the agency was “working aggressively” to send a third half-paycheck that employees are owed.
“TSA officers are grateful to President Trump and Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin for their leadership to put money back into the pockets of TSA employees who worked without pay during the ongoing Democrat DHS shutdown. Working without pay forced more than 500 officers to leave TSA and thousands were forced to call out,” she said.
Trump signed an executive order last week to pay TSA officers, just days after deploying agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to airports in what he described as an effort to shorten security lines.
The president intervened amid a prolonged logjam in Congress over funding the DHS, the parent agency of TSA as well as ICE and the border patrol, whose officers have taken the lead in Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
After federal agents dispatched to Minneapolis shot and killed two US citizens in January, Democrats refused to back a key funding bill for the DHS unless Republicans agreed to impose guardrails on immigration enforcement operations, including that officers cease wearing masks and obtain judicial warrants to enter homes and businesses.
The White House refused many of those demands, but a resolution appeared to be in sight last week, when Democrats and Republicans in the Senate passed legislation to fund the DHS while excluding money for ICE and other offices involved in immigration enforcement. It was expected that Republicans would fund those agencies in a forthcoming reconciliation bill that they could pass along party lines.
But on Friday, House Republicans rejected the Senate bill, and instead passed a measure funding all of the DHS for two months, which Senate Democrats quickly rejected. Both chambers are on recess for the next weeks, and it appears unlikely that the standoff will be resolved before then.
The origin of the money for TSA employees’ paychecks is unclear. In a memo, Trump order the DHS “to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” to pay salaries.
The money appears to have shortened security lines at some major airports that last week took hours to get through. The official websites of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta international airport, the George Bush intercontinental airport in Houston and the Philadelphia international airport all reported short wait times at TSA checkpoints on Monday afternoon.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
