The House of Representatives balked at the Senate bill
passed in a rare overnight session Friday that would have funded the Department
of Homeland Security sufficiently to pay Transportation Security Administration
workers.
The Senate bill was largely lifted and shifted from a
Democrat proposal that still excluded funding for Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. House Republicans dug in their heels and refused to back the bill,
knowing even if they crafted their own bill to send back to the Senate
colleagues, the latter already would be on recess.
President Donald Trump, as
promised Thursday evening, directed newly appointed head of DHS Markwayne
Mullin to release funds from the department to pay TSA workers. The TSA will
have worked at least 44 days without pay should those payments begin to arrive
on Monday as the administration said they should expect.
House speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) during a news
conference on Friday afternoon characterized the middle-of-the-night Senate
vote as "a joke," referring to what he saw as his Republican Senate
colleagues' capitulation to Democrat demands to pass a bill that did not
include full funding for ICE.
The repercussions for travel, however, have not been a joke.
Hundreds of TSA workers have quit and security screening lines at airports
across the country continue to slow down, putting pressure on airport
operations, airlines and travelers, not to mention the skeleton crew of workers
actually manning security checkpoints. The Trump administration this week
deployed ICE agents—fully paid—to more than a dozen airports across the nation
to play support roles, but the waits in many cases so far have not abated.
The Global Business Travel Association, U.S. Travel
Association, AHLA and other travel advocacy organizations have resorted to
pleading, arguing and even chastising Congress for allowing the government
shutdown to snarl the travel industry for the better part of six weeks. Delta
Air Lines pulled legislators' front-of-the-line privileges in a show of support
for TSA workers, just as Congress was breaking for recess to travel to their
home states.
Ongoing Impact on Business Travel
Pay can't come soon enough for TSA workers, but the fix for
the system may take longer. This is the second round of TSA job abandonment in
less than six months thanks to the previous
government shutdown last fall. The result leaves the already slim TSA ranks
even slimmer.
In such conditions, businesses become concerned about duty-of-care
obligations toward their employees and contractual obligations to clients,
Direct Travel chief operating officer Christine Sikes told BTN in an email this
week.
"When travel fails, business outcomes fail, including
missed client meetings, delayed deals, and missed regulatory or operational
deadlines. As TSA absenteeism rises, predictability drops, even when flights
are operating normally," she wrote. "For some companies, the question
is shifting from 'Can we travel?' to 'Can we rely on travel to deliver results
right now?' This creates reputational and financial exposure, especially where
travel is tied directly to revenue or contractual commitments."
While Sikes denied there was a broad hit to business travel
due to the operational issues, she did say companies were triaging who should
travel, when and how—particularly with routing through the worst impacted
airports. She also reminded the industry that travel management companies are
playing a critical role as complexities mount.
"We're experiencing higher than normal client
interactions because of the missed flight scenarios amongst our travelers
driven by missed flights and TSA-related delays. We're seeing a prioritization
of "must-travel" vs. deferrable trips. Client leadership teams are
asking: Does this trip materially change an outcome? If not, it's being
postponed or moved virtual."