Senate Moves to Reopen DHS as Trump Eyes Executive Order to Pay TSA During Shutdown

Lines of impatient travelers snaked past shuttered food stands at Reagan National Airport on Friday morning, as a supervisor with a bullhorn tried to calm a crowd that had already missed one wave of flights.

“Just hang tight,” he called out. “We’re told paychecks are coming.”

Forty-two days into a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, those paychecks — and who has the power to issue them — have become the center of a constitutional and political fight.

A split DHS funding fix

Overnight, the Senate voted unanimously to reopen most of the department through the end of the fiscal year. In a highly unusual move, the bill would keep two of its most powerful immigration enforcement agencies — Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — outside the normal appropriations process.

At the same time, President Donald Trump has said he will sign an executive order directing the new homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, to “immediately pay our TSA Agents,” even though Congress has not yet restored funding.

The twin moves could ease chaos at airports, but they also test the limits of presidential spending power and underscore how immigration enforcement has split DHS into two tiers: the parts lawmakers are rushing to fund and the parts they are deliberately leaving on a separate track.

How the shutdown hit airports

The shutdown began Feb. 14, when Congress failed to pass a DHS appropriations bill. As with past funding lapses, tens of thousands of employees deemed essential — including most of the Transportation Security Administration’s roughly 60,000 screeners — have been required to keep working without pay under long-standing shutdown rules.

By late March, DHS officials said nearly 500 TSA officers had quit since the shutdown started, and thousands more were calling out because they could not afford gas, child care or rent.

“This reckless shutdown has driven nearly 500 TSA officers to quit, while thousands more are forced to call out because they can't afford gas, childcare [or] rent,” department spokesperson Lauren Bis said this week.

Airport wait times lengthened, and industry groups warned some terminals could have to close if staffing deteriorated further.

Trump’s proposed order—and the legal constraints

Against that backdrop, Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday that he would sign an order instructing Mullin, confirmed as secretary earlier this week, to resume paychecks for TSA officers.

“I am going to sign an Order instructing the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, to immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports,” Trump wrote. “I will not allow the Radical Left Democrats to hold our Country hostage any longer.”

The president did not detail how DHS would lawfully route those payments in the absence of a full-year appropriation. Under the Constitution’s appropriations clause and the Antideficiency Act, federal agencies generally may not spend money or incur obligations without specific authorization from Congress, except in narrowly defined emergencies.

A law passed after the 2018-19 shutdown, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, guarantees automatic back pay for furloughed or unpaid federal employees once funding is restored. It does not, however, permit agencies to issue paychecks while an appropriation is lapsed.

Trump and his advisers appear to be looking instead to a separate source of money: a massive pool of multi-year and mandatory funds created for DHS in 2025 under a sweeping reconciliation law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That law set aside at least $150 billion in flexible DHS money, as well as tens of billions of dollars more for immigration enforcement.

Supporters describe it as giving the department needed flexibility; critics, including Rep. Gabe Vasquez, a New Mexico Democrat, have called it a “$150 billion ‘blank check’” for ICE with “no guardrails or oversight.”

Those funds have allowed ICE and Border Patrol to keep operating at near normal levels through the current shutdown, according to lawmakers and budget analysts. Now, some Republicans argue that the same law gives DHS room to reprogram money or tap fee-funded accounts to pay TSA, even as the annual appropriation remains stalled.

Legal specialists say that would be untested territory. The Antideficiency Act bars federal officers from authorizing spending that exceeds the amount of money “legally available” for a given purpose. Whether the broad language in the 2025 law is enough to make TSA salaries legally available mid-shutdown is not yet clear from public documents.

Congress could ask the Government Accountability Office for a formal ruling or take the administration to court if it believes the executive order violates spending laws. But that would mean openly trying to stop paychecks to airport security workers as passengers complain about missed flights — a politically fraught position for both parties.

The Senate’s bill: funding most DHS, excluding ICE and CBP

The Senate’s bill, passed in a pre-dawn session Friday, represents a different kind of workaround. Pushed by Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, it would fund TSA, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and most other DHS components through Sept. 30. But it explicitly excludes ICE and CBP’s core enforcement operations — the very agencies at the heart of the budget and policy fight.

“Want to go home. Airports a mess,” one House Democrat said, predicting colleagues would feel strong pressure to accept the Senate bill once it arrives.

Democrats have argued for weeks that ICE and CBP should not receive fresh appropriations until Congress enacts new oversight after a series of deadly enforcement incidents, including the killing of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti during a CBP operation in Minnesota in January.

They note that both agencies still have access to large streams of money from the 2025 law and say that gives lawmakers time to negotiate conditions such as body-worn cameras, changes to use-of-force policies and independent investigations of deaths in custody.

Republicans close to the White House counter that excluding ICE and CBP amounts to “defunding” border security. The House Freedom Caucus has demanded that any DHS funding package include tougher border provisions and nationwide voter-identification rules, complicating prospects for quick passage.

A two-track homeland security showdown

The result is a two-track approach to homeland security: air travel, disaster response and maritime safety on one track, with broad bipartisan support for getting money flowing again; immigration enforcement on another, financed in the short term by pre-existing funds and used as leverage in a broader policy clash.

Inside DHS, the division is just as stark. If Trump’s order takes effect and the Senate bill becomes law, TSA officers, Coast Guard sailors and FEMA staffers could see normal pay resume even as many department contractors and support personnel remain furloughed. ICE and Border Patrol agents, drawing on their separate funding, would see little change.

Shutdown veterans say that dynamic highlights how the rise of large, flexible appropriations has changed the nature of funding showdowns. When Congress can pre-authorize tens of billions of dollars outside the annual budget process, and when presidents can try to repurpose that money by executive order, the practical power to decide which operations feel pain — and when — can shift away from lawmakers.

For now, the immediate concern for many travelers and front-line workers is simpler. At Reagan National, some TSA officers on break scrolled a social media feed filled with screenshots of Trump’s pledge and headlines about the Senate vote.

They knew that back pay is guaranteed whenever the shutdown ends. What they do not yet know is whose decision — the president’s, the Senate’s, or the House’s — will land in their bank accounts first, or how the choices made this week will shape the next time Washington runs out of money to pay them.