Currently, Transportation Security Administration workers are being paid through an emergency fund.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will run out of funding to pay federal airport security officers in the coming weeks if no congressional deal is made, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump in late March told DHS to use its emergency funds to pay Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers who had gone without paychecks for several weeks due to a partial shutdown of the department, causing airport disruptions across the country.
Mullin said in a “Fox and Friends” interview on Tuesday that funding to pay those workers would lapse in early May.
“That money is dried up if I continue down this path the first week of May, because my payroll at DHS is just over $1.6 billion every two weeks,” Mullin told the news outlet.
But after the next paycheck is sent to TSA workers, he warned, “there is no more emergency fund, so the president can’t do another executive order for us to use money, because there’s no more money there.”
Senate Republicans signaled they would move forward this week on a budget blueprint that would boost funding for DHS agencies for the next three years.
Democrats have pushed for a series of new constraints on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which operate under the direction of DHS, before authorizing additional funds.
They have argued that ICE and CBP should be subject to the same operational rules as police forces across the United States, including a requirement that agents obtain judicial warrants before entering private homes. They also have said that ICE or Border Patrol agents should not be allowed to wear masks while working and should be mandated to use body cameras.
The proposals from Democrats, along with the DHS shutdown, came in the wake of two high-profile protester shooting deaths in Minneapolis that involved ICE and Border Patrol agents earlier this year.
Mullin told Fox News that Democrats’ gambit in Congress is “putting the homeland at risk” because it allocates fewer funding and resources to ICE, CBP, and other DHS agencies such as the TSA. Some of the congressional holdouts, he also said, should be “held accountable.”
