Trump signs executive order to pay TSA workers after House rejects funding bill

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Former TSA officer Caleb Harmon-Marshall, who now runs a travel newsletter called Gate Access, said he doesn’t think the situation will improve significantly at airports until the officers can be confident that they will continue to get paid reliably.

Right now TSA officers have a lot of questions about what Trump’s executive order will mean for them after Congress was unable to reach an agreement on Homeland Security funding, said Harmon-Marshall, who is in a group with a number of current TSA officers and some who have recently quit during the shutdown.

“I think that the traveling public could expect possibly a week or two of this to continue. This back and forth about all these decisions changing is confusing the TSA officers, so they’re possibly thinking like, ‘Okay, are we getting paid or are we not?’” Harmon-Marshall said.

“There’s still so many questions,” he said.

Harmon-Marshall said the officers he talks to are hoping that they will finally get paid after struggling to pay their bills during the shutdown and accumulating debt and late fees and interest charges.

“Hopefully, with this executive order, the relief does come. 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.

The length of this current shutdown coming so soon after last fall’s funding lapse has been too much for some officers to bear.

“These officers have been patient trying to wait it out. But there’s just a certain point where you can’t wait anymore. You have to go get another job,” Harmon-Marshall said. “You have to go find other means for income and I think they’re beyond that point.”