Transportation Security Administration employees are getting paid for the first time since the partial government shutdown began in mid-February.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed “most” TSA employees received a retroactive paycheck featuring “at least two full paychecks” covering missed pay periods during the DHS shutdown that began Feb. 14.
“A small population might see a slight delay due to a variety of reasons, including financial institution processing times or issues with their direct deposit,” DHS acting assistant secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement.
Bis added that DHS is “working aggressively” with the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center to process the half paycheck that TSA employees missed out on from the first week of the shutdown.
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Approximately 95% of TSA’s 60,000 employees had been working without pay during the shutdown. The 45-day partial government shutdown is now the longest in history, surpassing the 43-day, governmentwide lapse in appropriations last fall.
On Friday, as airport screening delays piled up and a Senate-passed funding deal faltered in the House, Trump directed DHS to pay TSA officers using money from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill didn’t provide money for TSA or airport screening, but Trump directed DHS to “use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” for the paychecks.
The Senate is now out on a two-week recess, meaning thousands more civilian employees across DHS will continue working unpaid for the foreseeable future. The Trump administration has used funding from the reconciliation bill to finance paychecks for law enforcement officers and Coast Guard service members since the start of the shutdown.
In a statement, AFGE TSA Council 100 President Hydrick Thomas called on Congress to return to Washington and reach a funding deal.
“AFGE TSA members are grateful to receive some backpay today,” Thomas said. “But many of our members have seen bills pile up, interest and late fees add up, cars repossessed, and families thrown into disarray because Congress has failed to do their jobs.”
More than 500 TSA officers have quit during the recent shutdown. Thomas said that TSA officers who called out also have “disciplinary actions looming over their heads.”
“Backpay alone does not fix those problems,” he said. “And our fellow DHS employees are still not being paid thanks to the dysfunction in Congress.”
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Both union officials and TSA leaders are concerned about attrition at TSA. The agency also lost approximately 1,100 employees during last fall’s shutdown.
“We are obviously watching our attrition rates very closely, looking at our ready pool for recruitment to see what we can do there as well,” Acting TSA Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill said during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last week.
But McNeil warned any new TSA officer hired today will not be trained in time for the World Cup. She said the agency is looking to increase the number of officers in its National Deployment Force, which can surge to different airports across the country as needed.
“We are in a very dire situation when it comes to our ability to staff the multiple different locations for the FIFA World Cup, as well as the base camps where the teams are going to be,” McNeil said. “This is going to be a really complex operation. What we are seeing in this shutdown is that more experienced officers are leaving, and that expertise you can only make up with time and experience.”
Meanwhile, union officials are also warning about the stress that repeated shutdowns are having on TSA employees.
Aaron Barker, president of AFGE Local 554, pointed to the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel TSA’s union contract, in addition to the effects of multiple shutdowns over the past six months.
“I do believe with all the negative publicity around what is going on right now, it’s going to be hard to recruit people to come to TSA, and you may even still see more officers leave after this,” Barker said during a press call last week. “October is six months away, and we may be facing this same shutdown fiasco again. No one wants to continue to live their life with this amount of uncertainty and undue stress to no fault of their own.”
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