TSA pay starting Monday may not end airport delays overnight

TSA pay to restart Monday, but security lines could lag

Transportation Security Administration workers could receive their first full paychecks in more than six weeks as early as Monday after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday directing the Homeland Security secretary to pay them immediately. Travel experts and labor leaders said the order is likely to be a first step toward stabilizing staffing, but they cautioned that the airport problems seen during the lapse in pay may linger while airports adjust staffing levels and Congress continues to negotiate Homeland Security funding.

Eric Rosen, director of travel content for The Points Guy, said that while checks in workers’ hands would help, staffing issues tied to the disruption could remain visible in the short term. “Until checks are actually in hands, we might still see some of these staffing issues,” Rosen said, adding that the order is “a bit of good news” for both TSA officers and the flying public.

The timing also matters because travel demand typically rises around spring breaks and holidays such as Passover and Easter. With people booking flights during those periods, Rosen and other experts said the key question is whether airports can restore screening capacity quickly enough to keep pace with passenger volume.

Why the delay is expected to continue

TSA personnel have worked without pay since Feb. 14, after the Department of Homeland Security lapsed due to a dispute in Congress over federal immigration operations. As the shutdown went on, some TSA officers called out of scheduled shifts, and the department said the resulting absences contributed to hourslong wait times and to airports in cities including Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York and elsewhere closing express lanes or consolidating screening.

Eric Rosen framed the operational challenge as more than a payroll issue, saying TSA staffing problems were still likely to show up before workers had confidence that pay would not be interrupted again. Caleb Harmon-Marshall, a former TSA officer who runs the travel newsletter Gate Access, similarly said the officers he speaks with want back pay quickly because they have been struggling with bills and accumulating debt, late fees and interest. Harmon-Marshall said that even with improved pay flow, airport staffing might not stabilize significantly until workers feel confident about how long the situation will last.

Harmon-Marshall estimated that travelers with trips planned should plan on longer security lines for “another week or two.” He said the confusion created by shifting decisions has affected TSA officers, with one concern being whether they are “getting paid or are we not,” as the unpaid period stretched.

What the White House and unions say

The White House said the funds to pay TSA employees would come from a big tax cut bill Trump signed into law last year, which it said funneled billions of dollars in extra funds to Homeland Security. The money, the White House said, has kept U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 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 starting Monday would be welcome but also said Congress needs to agree on legislation 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 and attrition

Airports that saw passengers standing in screening lines that clogged check-in areas—or that arrived far too early—may need to decide whether to reopen checkpoints or expedite-service lanes that they closed or consolidated due to inadequate staffing. The department said that on one day, some airports experienced daily TSA officer callout rates of 40%, and that on Thursday, more than 11.8% of TSA employees on the schedule missed work. The department said that was the most so far.

DHS also said nearly 500 of TSA’s nearly 50,000 officers have quit since the shutdown began. TSA Acting Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill told lawmakers on Wednesday that some of those officers who missed shifts in recent weeks might leave as well. McNeill said hiring could be harder after the personal and public disruptions, noting that new TSA officers typically complete four to six months of training before they are certified to work at checkpoints.

What travelers may see next

Aviation security expert Sheldon Jacobson, whose research contributed to the design of TSA PreCheck, said travelers with trips planned should not panic. He said the longest waits he saw—such as those in Atlanta, Houston and New Orleans that lasted three to four hours—were outliers and that delays at many airports were “pretty typical,” adding, “At a lot of the airports I look at, the delays are pretty typical.”

Jacobson also noted that the number of TSA officers who quit since mid-February is not much higher than the normal attrition rate for the job, which he said is around 8%. He said the current situation is still likely to involve uneven conditions at different airports as TSA staffing and travel demand adjust in the wake of the unpaid period.

Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska. AP Writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.