Congress Agreed and Disagreed on the Same DHS Bill in Under 12 Hours. BTV’s TSA Officers Are Still Unpaid.
The Senate passed a funding bill at 2 a.m. The House rejected it by lunchtime. 510 TSA officers have resigned since the shut down began. Both chambers left for a two-week recess.
This story replaces an earlier version published on March 27. It is updated to reflect the president's signing of the executive order to pay TSA workers on Friday afternoon.
In the early hours of Friday morning, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved legislation to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security — including the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and FEMA — through the end of the fiscal year. The bill excluded funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the agencies at the center of the political fight that has kept roughly 50,000 TSA officers working without pay since February 14.
By early afternoon, House Republican leaders rejected it.
Speaker Mike Johnson told GOP members the House would not vote on the Senate bill. Instead, he proposed an eight-week stopgap that would fund all of DHS, including ICE — a measure Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer immediately called “dead on arrival.” Members of the House Freedom Caucus said they would not support any bill that did not include immigration enforcement funding and the SAVE America Act, the president’s voter ID bill.
The Senate had already left for a two-week Easter and Passover recess. House members were set to follow. Any bill passed by one chamber would need to be passed by the other before reaching the president’s desk — meaning the DHS shutdown, now at 42 days and counting, is frozen in place for the foreseeable future.
The only near-term lifeline
On Friday afternoon, President Trump signed an executive order directing DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to begin paying TSA agents, calling it an "emergency situation." It is not yet clear where the money will come from or whether the order will survive legal challenge. TSA has said it would take approximately five business days for any pay to reach officers.
As of Friday afternoon, 510 TSA officers have resigned since the shutdown began — up from the 480 reported in acting TSA Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill’s congressional testimony on Wednesday, March 25.
What this means for BTV
Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport has remained operational throughout the shutdown, with security lines holding at 15 to 45 minutes and no ICE agents deployed to its checkpoint. That stability has relied in part on a community-supported food drive and weekly meals for unpaid TSA officers. (Our full report on BTV’s situation, the staffing math, and the structural risks is here.)
None of that changes today. BTV’s TSA officers missed their second full paycheck this week. If Trump’s executive order holds, some relief could arrive within days. If it doesn’t — or if it faces legal challenge — the food pantry remains the backup plan.
Vermont Senator Peter Welch, who spent the week pushing to decouple TSA funding from the ICE fight, has not yet commented on the House rejection. The overnight bill essentially did what Welch proposed: fund everything except immigration enforcement. The House killed it anyway.
The next two weeks
Congress is gone. The shutdown continues. The executive order is now the only lifeline.
Here’s what to watch:
The executive order’s legal footing will be tested quickly — where the money comes from matters, and it’s unclear whether existing appropriations can be redirected to pay TSA without congressional approval.
The House may attempt to pass Johnson’s eight-week CR, but it would need to clear the Senate, where most members are now on recess and Democrats have already rejected the concept. Even if it passed, it would only push the same fight to late May.
Meanwhile, the workforce damage compounds daily. It takes four to six months to recruit and certify a new TSO. The 510 officers who have already resigned cannot be replaced before the summer travel surge or the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Every additional day of the shutdown raises the odds that small-hub airports like BTV — which operate with lean crews and no access to reserve staffing — face the kind of call-out spike that has already crippled checkpoints in Houston, Atlanta, and New York.
BTV’s Director of Innovation & Marketing Jeff Bartley said it plainly two weeks ago: “As this lingers, there may be impacts down the road.” The road is getting longer.
Sources include WSJ, CNBC, CNN, NPR, CBS News, AP/GBH, PBS, and TSA testimony (March 25, 2026).
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