President Donald Trump on Thursday announced he would circumvent Congress and unilaterally pay Transportation Security Administration agents, as Congress continues to negotiate on funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump’s move, announced via TruthSocial, could at least temporarily ease the tension that has been building for weeks in U.S. airports as TSA agents went without pay and clear the way for Congress to leave town at the end of this week for a pre-schedule two-week recess.
“Because the Democrats have recklessly created a true National Crisis, I am using my authorities under the Law to protect our Great Country, as I always will do!,” Trump posted. “Therefore, 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 earlier at a cabinet meeting urged Congress to find a quick resolution to the Department of Homeland Security shutdown that’s leading to increasing headaches for air travelers.
“They need to end the shutdown immediately, or we’ll have to take some very drastic measures,” Trump said from the White House.
He didn’t describe what measures he would take or detail his role in negotiations to resume funding DHS. The Wall Street Journal reported that some Senate Republicans were pushing Trump to declare a national emergency to free-up funds and pay TSA workers.
Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, on Thursday suggested that a Trump intervention might be possible.
“I’m not going to go into the details, other than to say that there is funding that can be used perfectly legally to pay TSA, to pay the rest of the coast guard, for example,” Collins told reporters at the Capitol.
In a statement later Thursday, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said “it is true that the White House is having discussions about a number of ideas to blunt the impact of the Democrat shutdown crisis, but no preparations or plans are currently underway.”
“The best and easiest way to pay TSA Agents is to fund DHS.” Leavitt said.
The DHS shutdown has dragged on for more than a month and has disrupted air travel. Transportation Security Administration agents are going without pay and are missing work in large numbers, leading to long lines at airports and increased pressure on lawmakers to find a deal, though they appear to be at an impasse.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Thursday that Democrats have received Republicans’ “last and final offer,” according to MS Now. Thune declined to provide details of the latest offer, but said the White House had “been involved on the back and forth that has occurred overnight.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee, declined to share details of the GOP plan on Thursday.
“There’s obviously active talks happening. I don’t know whether it can land,” Murphy told reporters.
With a two-week scheduled congressional recess looming this Friday and TSA lines growing, negotiations ramped up recently, leading to a brief period of optimism earlier in the week.
A group of Senate Republicans met with Trump at the White House of Monday and came out with what they heralded as a compromise proposal: funding for 94% of DHS, except for the enforcement and removal arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But Democrats — who have withheld their support for funding the agency since February, not long after federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during an immigration crackdown — dismissed the proposal because it did not contain the ICE operational changes they had long sought. Those changes include requiring immigration agents to acquire judicial warrants before entering private property and banning the use of masks.
Republicans roundly rejected a Senate Democratic counteroffer on Wednesday that included some of those proposals.
MS Now reported that the latest proposal is similar to the one the GOP already pitched earlier this week. It would fund all of DHS except for ICE’s enforcement and removal operations. And it would include language to try to address Democratic concerns that other divisions of DHS could also carry out those enforcement and removal functions.
In addition to extending the shutdown, the negotiations standoff raises the specter of cutting into the recess that was supposed to begin at the end of this week. Thune told reporters Wednesday that it was an “open-question” whether lawmakers would be able to leave town as planned.
The White House signaled on background earlier this week that it was on board with the GOP plan to reopen DHS, but Trump has so far not publicly thrown his weight behind the proposal.
Earlier this week, the Trump administration sent ICE agents to airports to assist TSA. Trump on Wednesday suggested he may also deploy National Guard members to airports for additional help.
With the clock ticking, some Republican lawmakers are now floating a proposal to fund only TSA.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said he would introduce a bill to do exactly that and said he expected his Republican colleagues to support it. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said there was general agreement on funding TSA, but that Democrats were trying to get clarity on how to fund the agency without also funding ICE.
Senate Democrats have repeatedly forced votes to fund all parts of DHS aside from ICE, Murphy pointed out.
“We’ve been offering that on the floor every day. So of course we would fund TSA alone,” Murphy said.
Thune, however, said a TSA-only approach would not solve the larger problem.
“You have FEMA out there. You’ve got the Coast Guard. You have all these other important agencies,” Thune told reporters on Thursday.
— Emily Wilkins contributed to this story.