Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers are on the cusp of working without pay, and there is no backup plan in place to ensure they don’t miss a check.
During the longest government shutdown in history last year, the White House was able to shift around funding from the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” to ensure that military service members were paid. But TSA workers won’t get the same treatment.
Over 60,000 TSA workers are set to receive partial paychecks this week for the work they did before funding expired earlier this month. They won’t get another paycheck until Congress can land on a deal to fund the agency.
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And the likelihood of that wrapping sooner rather than later is low.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that if the Trump administration could “figure out a way to pay government employees, absolutely.”
“I mean, these are people who have jobs and have commitments and have families,” Thune said. “And, you know, it’s going to be really unfortunate if we get to a point where I hope we don’t, where people aren’t getting paid because the Democrats continue to insist on changes to things that are just not feasible or tenable.”
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But a White House official told Fox News Digital in a statement that, like the 43-day shutdown, the Trump administration would be able to transfer funding “to cover certain employees at DHS that were funded by the bill — namely law enforcement and active-duty military such as USCG.”
“TSA has not been part of that, as they have a different funding stream from these other agencies,” the official said.
Republicans believe that a key difference maker in the shutdown could be longer lines at airports and flight cancellations start to stack up as workers go without pay and take time off. A similar scenario played out during the previous shutdown, when cancellations compounded day after day.
“When people start missing paychecks, and you start having disruptions in travel and that sort of thing, it’s going to get more and more painful,” Thune said. “So it’d be nice to fix this before and to avoid all that, but we’ve got to have a partner that actually wants to make a deal.”
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The White House and Senate Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have been at odds over finding a compromise deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with hopes for a quick resolution to the ongoing shutdown quickly fading this week.
Both sides have rejected back-and-forth offers over the last two weeks. Senate Democrats argued that, for now, whether the agency would be reopened and TSA workers get paid was in the White House and Republicans’ hands.
Senate Democrats portrayed negotiations as having totally flatlined and put the onus of further conversations on the Trump administration.
“We told them what our priorities were, they answered with a very, very weak, limited response,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said. “And we said, ‘No, this is what our requests were. We made a few changes,’ nothing back.”
When asked if she believed the White House was negotiating in good faith, Murray said, “Not yet.”
But Senate Republicans said that talks were happening on the side among members.
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., hoped that she could convince enough Senate Democrats to come around and ensure that TSA agents, and others, wouldn’t go without pay for the foreseeable future.
“I am working on talking to people,” Britt said.
