By Richard Cowan, Nolan D. McCaskill and David Shepardson
March 27 (Reuters) – Congress tried but failed on Friday to overcome a six-week funding standoff that has snarled airports and stopped paychecks for tens of thousands of federal workers, raising concerns of further travel disruptions during the busy spring-break season.
After a day of legislative drama, Congress ended up right back where it started – unable to resolve a dispute over immigration enforcement that has halted paychecks for many of the 270,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, even as most of them are required to stay on the job.
With lawmakers deadlocked, the White House said President Donald Trump had declared an emergency that would enable airport-screening officers to be paid as soon as Monday.
But other DHS employees who have worked without pay since mid-February, including many of those responsible for emergency response and coastal defense, would still go unpaid while lawmakers leave Washington for a two-week break.
The day started with an early-morning vote in the Senate, which unanimously passed a bill that would restore funding for most DHS operations while tackling a dispute over immigration enforcement that led to the standoff.
Democrats backed the measure because the bill did not include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Republicans backed it because it did not include the restrictions that Democrats had sought to curb Trump’s aggressive approach to enforcement.
But Republicans who control the House rejected that approach. Instead, they narrowly passed a stopgap bill that would fund all of DHS though late May, including immigration enforcement. Democrats had already declared that to be a nonstarter.
“We’ve been clear from day one: Democrats will fund critical homeland security functions — but we will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.
It was unclear whether the Senate would take up the bill. Or, if the Senate takes up the bill, Democrats were expected to block its passage.
The shutdown has led to long lines at U.S. airports, and many of the 50,000 security officers who have gone without pay have called in sick or resigned. Nearly 12% of TSA officers did not show up to work on Thursday, including more than a third of officers at New York’s JFK, Baltimore, Houston’s two airports and Atlanta.
Major disruptions and security wait times of several hours or more were reported on Friday. Airline officials told Reuters the problem could worsen this weekend if there were no concrete details on how TSA officers would be paid. The agency’s acting chief, Ha McNeill, said this week that some agents have been sleeping in their cars at airports to save gas money and selling blood and taking on second jobs to make ends meet.
DEMOCRATS BLOCK DHS FUNDS AFTER US CITIZENS KILLED
Democrats, the minority party in both houses of the U.S. Congress, used what little leverage they have to block DHS funding after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. They are seeking to curb Trump’s immigration-enforcement push, which has resulted in more than half a million deportations and created chaos on the streets of U.S. cities.
Despite the shutdown, both ICE and Border Patrol are able to draw on separate funding from the sweeping tax and spending bill Republicans passed last year.
Republicans have suggested they will try to secure additional funding for those agencies own through a cumbersome procedure that would allow them to bypass Democratic opposition, though it is unclear whether the party can maintain enough unity in an election year to do so.
Locked out of power in Washington, Democrats have forced two government shutdowns in the past six months. Neither delivered the results they sought, as they failed to secure expiring health subsidies last November and came out of the latest standoff without a deal on immigration enforcement.
Still, Trump’s administration has backed off, at least for now, from the confrontational and at times violent tactics that sparked mass protests in Minneapolis, Chicago and other cities.
Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem this month. Her successor, former Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin, has signaled support for some Democratic proposals, such as limiting the ability of agents to forcibly enter homes without a judicial warrant.
Other Democratic proposals are likely dead in the water. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said their call for agents to operate without masks was a “nonstarter.”
(Reporting by Richard Cowan, Nolan D. McCaskill, David Shepardson and Ted Hesson in Washington and Anusha Shah and Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Andy Sullivan, David Gregorio and Rosalba O’Brien)
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