DHS funding in limbo but TSA agents to be paid
Some airports remained clogged with hourslong delays at security
What happened
White House border czar Tom Homan said Sunday that TSA agents may receive overdue paychecks this week, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to redirect other Department of Homeland Security funds to pay airport security workers. House Republicans the same day rejected a bipartisan Senate bill to fund DHS except for the agencies responsible for Trump’s mass deportation push, then approved their own stopgap funding bill and adjourned for a two-week Easter-Passover break. Some airports remained clogged by hourslong security lines over the weekend.
Who said what
The Senate “appeared to have finally figured out” how to fund DHS, The Associated Press said, only for the deal to collapse “spectacularly” in an acrimonious split with House Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called the compromise worked out by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) a “joke,” then pushed through legislation that would fund all of DHS for eight weeks. House Democrats said they would have backed the Senate compromise if Johnson had allowed a vote. “This shutdown should have ended,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) told CNN over the weekend.
Homan told CBS’s “Face the Nation” he “hopes” Trump will force lawmakers to return early from their break to pass a DHS funding bill. It’s “good news” the “struggling” TSA officers will be paid, he told CNN. But “it’s ridiculous” that they are “sitting there right now, working very hard, not being paid by members of Congress out on vacation getting paid.”
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What next?
Homan said the ICE agents deployed to aid TSA workers will stay on “as long as they need us, until they get back to normal operations.” In the DHS funding fight, it’s “not clear what the Senate will do next,” the AP said, but “nothing ahead is likely to be easy.”
