Trump Orders Immediate Pay for TSA Officers After Month Without Full Paychecks

At Portland International Airport, Transportation Security Administration workers had been sleeping in their cars while waiting to be paid. At Houston's airports, travelers endured security waits of more than four hours. Six weeks into a partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday directing the agency to immediately resume pay for its roughly 60,000 TSA employees.

Trump previewed the action Thursday on Truth Social, writing that he was instructing newly confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to "immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation." The formal order arrived Friday afternoon as a Senate-passed DHS funding deal appeared poised to collapse in the House amid Republican opposition. DHS said TSA staff would begin receiving paychecks "as early as" March 30.

"As the Democrat-caused shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security continues well into its sixth week, America's air travel system has reached its breaking point," Trump wrote. "This is an unprecedented emergency situation."

The numbers behind that claim are striking. Roughly 60,000 TSA staff have gone without pay since appropriations for DHS lapsed in February, including some 47,000 transportation security officers. Nearly 500 of those officers have quit outright since the shutdown began. Call-out rates climbed to 11 percent nationwide, producing the long security lines at major airports that have come to define the crisis for travelers.

The executive order directs DHS to "use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown." The order does not specify an exact funding source in its text, but senior administration officials told CBS News and Fox News separately that DHS intends to draw on money from last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill Act to cover the payments.

Legal experts were skeptical. "I haven't seen any plausible assertion of a legal basis for paying TSA agents," said Josh Chafetz, a professor of law and politics at Georgetown University. Trump did not detail what legal authority underpinned the order, and multiple observers noted any payments could face a court challenge. The White House had previously floated invoking a national emergency declaration to unlock the funds, a path ultimately set aside because it would have been politically fraught and near-certain to draw lawsuits.

Trump acknowledged the constraints in a Truth Social post: "It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it!" The order includes a forward-looking provision stating that once regular DHS funding is restored, "every effort should be made, as authorized by law, to adjust applicable funding accounts within DHS to ensure the continuation of DHS operations and activities consistent with planned expenditures prior to the lapse."

While awaiting Friday's action, the administration had already deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to more than a dozen airports to help manage security lines, and Trump suggested he might activate National Guard forces if conditions worsened. Officials also considered an offer from Elon Musk to personally fund TSA worker pay, but rejected it over legal concerns tied to Musk's existing government contracts.

The executive order arrived as Congress remained unable to pass a long-term fix. A Senate-approved DHS funding bill ran into resistance from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who rejected it, leaving the legislative path uncertain. Mullin, sworn in earlier last week, now inherits the immediate task of distributing pay to a workforce that has spent more than a month managing some of the country's busiest checkpoints without receiving full compensation, even as the underlying budget standoff shows no clear resolution.