March 27, 2026
President Trump just ordered all TSA agents to be paid and they may get paid as soon as Monday.
He signed this memo – not executive order – but memo before leaving the White House for the weekend.
The memo says “I hereby direct the secretary of homeland security, in coordination with the director of the office of management and budget, to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the democrat-led DHS shutdown, consistent with applicable law, including 31 USC 1301(a).
For the record – the deal that passed in the Senate last night with Republican *and* Democratic support did fund TSA and all of DHS except for ICE and Customs and Border Protection. But as I reported in this video the republicans in the House rejected that. So because of that action – TSA agents were not going to be paid.
That’s why Trump issued this memo.
Shortly after it was signed, Homeland Security posted this saying TSA has immediately begun the process of paying its workforce. TSA officers should begin seeing paychecks as early as Monday, march 30.
Ok – so there are two big questions.
The biggest one is – if it was this easy to pay TSA agents with just a presidential memo. Why would President Trump let millions of travelers suffer in those long lines for weeks and why would he let tens of thousands of TSA agents suffer for more than a month with no pay? The answer is – what I have told you from the beginning. It’s leverage. Both parties are using this pain on you the traveling public and pain on federal workers as leverage to get what they want. But as I have reported there was going to come a time where the pain on you and the federal workers was just too much and someone was going to have to do something. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate tried to do something last night to legally fix the problem– but politics got in the way and Republicans in the House didn’t like that deal so they stopped it.
The second big question here is – is this legal? Maybe. Maybe not. As I have reported the constitution is very clear that congress has the power of the purse – not the president. Period. The legislative branch appropriates the money for specific things and the law says the executive branch must apply that money to those specific things. However the Trump administration for more than a year – when things get hairy — has been moving money around…not from department to department which would raise all kinds of red flags…but from within each department which only raises minor little red flags or completely goes unnoticed. For example during the last government shutdown in the fall because congress couldn’t agree on funding and the troops weren’t getting paid — the Trump administration moved money congress allocated for research and development at the Department of Defense over to pay the salaries of the troops. Trump’s memo today does *not* say where exactly this money for TSA salaries is coming from. But we’re assuming when he says “funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” he may be taking money that homeland security received from Republicans in the big beautiful bill and reallocating it to TSA. Now – there is money in that big beautiful bill that could probably legally be reallocated by the secretary of homeland security to TSA so that may be what’s happening. But again – we don’t know because no one is telling us where this money is coming from nor are they telling us what legal authority they’re using to do it.
The silver lining here is that – it looks like TSA agents will get paid. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that things are going to snap back into place and everything’s going to be perfect at the airport. Almost 500 TSA agents have already quit their job and thousands more have been calling out because they haven’t been paid for more than half of this fiscal year. Many of them are over this. And it’s unclear if they’re just going to willingly go back to face these shenanigans.
Read the Presidential Memo here.
Read the statement from DHS here.
