Transportation Security Administration officers could get their first full paychecks in more than six weeks as early as Monday after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday instructing the Homeland Security secretary to pay them immediately.
But travel experts and labor leaders said the mammoth security lines at some U.S. airports would not disappear overnight and could linger into next week or longer while TSA workers wait for their back pay, airports assess their staffing and Congress remains at odds over funding the Department of Homeland Security.
“Until checks are actually in hands, we might still see some of these staffing issues,” Eric Rosen, director of travel content for The Points Guy, a travel information website. “But (the executive order) is a bit of good news, I think, for both TSA officers as well as the flying public. And hopefully, the money starts flowing quickly and people can get back to work.”
School districts and colleges across the country have upcoming spring breaks, and travel also picks up around holidays like Passover and Easter.
Waiting for paychecks
TSA personnel have worked without pay since Feb. 14, when Department of Homeland Security lapsed due to a dispute in Congress over federal immigration operations.
As the record-long partial government shutdown went on, some of the officers who screen passengers and bags called out of scheduled shifts; several thousand missing work on a given day was enough to cause hourslong wait times and closed express lanes at airports in Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York and elsewhere.
Trump signed the executive order after House Republicans rejected a bill passed by the Senate early Friday that would have funded the TSA , the U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency but not Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.
Caleb Harmon-Marshall, a former TSA officer who runs a travel newsletter called Gate Access, said the officers he speaks with want to receive their full back pay quickly because they are struggling to pay their bills and accumulating debt, as well as late fees and interest charges.
At the same time, Harmon-Marshall said he doesn’t think the airport staffing situation will improve significantly until officers can be confident they will keep getting paid and won’t have their incomes suspended again due to the lack of agreement in Congress.
“Hopefully, with this executive order, the relief does come,” he said. “I think that they just want to know how long, because if it’s only for a pay period, that’s not enough to bring them back. It has to be an extended pay for them to come back or want to stay there,” he said.
Travelers worried about getting through security for upcoming flights should plan on longer lines for another week or two, Harmon-Marshall estimated.
“This back and forth about all these decisions changing is confusing the TSA officers, so they’re possibly thinking like, ‘OK are we getting paid or are we not?’” he said.
The White House said money to pay TSA employees would come from a big tax cut bill Trump signed into law last year, which funneled billions of dollars in extra funds to Homeland Security. The money has kept ICE officers paid during the DHS shutdown.:
Johnny Jones, secretary-treasurer of the TSA worker division of the American Federation of Government Employees union, said pay for TSA workers starting Monday would be welcome but that Congress needs to agree on a bill that ends the DHS shutdown.
“I guess the action is good for the president, but on the flip side, we have a lot of people that don’t have anything, and I don’t know if this is gonna fix it,” Jones said.
Assessing staffing shortages
Airports that saw passengers standing in screening lines that clogged check-in areas or showing up far too early for their flights will need to decide whether to reopen checkpoints or expedited service lanes they closed or consolidated due to inadequate staffing.
A handful of airports experienced daily TSA officer callout rates of 40%. Nationwide on Thursday, more than 11.8% of the TSA employees on the schedule missed work, the most so far, the department said Friday.
Nearly 500 of the agency’s nearly 50,000 officers have quit since the shutdown started, according to DHS. TSA Acting Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill told lawmakers on Wednesday that some of the ones who missed shifts in recent weeks might leave as well. Hiring is likely to be harder after the personal and public disruptions the shutdown has caused, she said.
“Not only is the shutdown decreasing the number of interested candidates, for those we are able to hire, they are required to complete four to six months of training before they are certified to work at checkpoints,” McNeill said.
Aviation security expert Sheldon Jacobson, whose research contributed to the design of TSA PreCheck, said he doesn’t think travelers with trips planned need to panic. The 3- and 4-hour wait times in Atlanta, Houston and New Orleans were outliers, he said.
“At a lot of the airports I look at, the delays are pretty typical,” he said.
Jacobson also noted that the number of TSA officers who quit since mid-February isn’t much higher than the normal attrition rate for the job, which is around 8%.
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Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska. AP Writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.
