In response to the air travel chaos, President Donald Trump ordered on March 27 that TSA staffers be paid using existing funds. In the days after officers received their retroactive paychecks, wait times began improving at multiple airports that had been struggling with long security lines. The Trump Administration has drawn funding from the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill in order to pay TSA staffers during the shutdown.
Beyond the TSA, the President later ordered DHS to pay “each and every employee of DHS with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown.”
But last week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the department is going to run out of funds to pay staffers by the beginning of May.
“My payroll through DHS is just over $1.6 billion every two weeks, so the money is going extremely fast and once that happens, there is no emergency funds after that,” Mullin told Fox and Friends last week. “I’ve got one payroll left and there is no more emergency funds, so the President can’t do another executive order because there’s no more money there.”