By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, March 31 (Reuters) – The Transportation Security Administration said absences among the nation’s 50,000 security officers fell sharply on Monday as workers were paid after working six weeks without a paycheck, and major airports that had suffered multi-hour lines said operations had largely returned to normal.
The Homeland Security Department said the absence rate fell to 8.6% after rising as high as 12.4% on Friday. The greatest number of absences reported Monday was in Atlanta, with 29% of workers out, along with around 20% at Houston’s two airports, Baltimore, New Orleans, New York’s John F. Kennedy, and Philadelphia.
The weeks-long standoff in Congress caused chaos and security lines that in some cases topped four hours, longest in the TSA’s nearly 25-year history.
Hundreds of U.S. immigration agents and Homeland Security Investigations officers began deploying at 14 U.S. airports last week to aid security screening. The White House has said they would remain in place until operations returned to normal.
President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Friday that ordered TSA workers to be paid, even though Congress has still not ended the 46-day-old partial government shutdown. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said workers started receiving pay Monday.
DHS said most TSA officers on Monday received a retroactive paycheck that included at least two full two-week paychecks, and it plans to provide workers with the remainder of a partial missed paycheck from the beginning of the shutdown as soon as possible.
More than 500 airport security officers have quit since mid-February, and tens of thousands of other DHS workers are still not being paid.
Airports are grappling with a school spring break travel surge, with volume about 5% higher than last year.
Democrats in Congress held up funding for DHS while demanding changes in rules governing its immigration operations after agents in Minneapolis shot and killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
After weeks of rancor, the Senate passed a bipartisan compromise bill to end the six-week deadlock that would have paid TSA workers. But Republican leaders in the U.S. House on Friday rejected that legislation, instead passing a bill to fund all of DHS.
(Reporting by David Shepardson)
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