Q&A – Who Was & Wasn’t Paid During the DHS Shutdown?
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Today’s entry: Brian, Thank you very much for your research and analysis on a daily basis. I know TSA agents are being paid now with a special Executive Action. The partial government shut-down is now 62 days. What about all the other unpaid Homeland Defense and Security Department employees? How can they sustain their home life for this long without a paycheck? I have seen zero media coverage their pain and suffering.
Bottom Line: As we wrapped up April the DHS shutdown also came to an end. In total there were 76 days to the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. During this time, we were at war with Iran and have had yet another attempted assassination of President Trump. We also experienced weeks of travel delays at airports with TSA employees not having been paid until President Trump declared a national emergency to be able to do so – though even the emergency funding tapped into would have run dry over the next week had funding not been passed.
As a result of the on again, off again political games played with government shutdowns we’re now down over 1,000 TSA employees compared to the start of the latest shutdown – in other words ongoing impacts are guaranteed even if the shutdown ended today. That speaks to the human condition referred to in today’s note that’s largely been ignored by news media during these increasingly dangerous political funding games. Let’s start by hitting the reset button on the current state of play.
The partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security which began on February 14th, due to Democrat demands to expose identifies of Border Patrol and ICE employees and to significantly limit their abilities to enforce the law. The DHS shutdown is the longest funding lapse on record for any federal government department - exceeding the record established just last fall – which is why increasingly even essential impacted federal government employees are exiting their roles.
DHS has approximately 272,000 employees. Of all government departments it has the highest concentration of essential government employees, 90%, as determined by the president, with the balance consisting of administration and support staff within DHS agencies. This is due to DHS being home to the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, Border Patrol, ICE, CISA, and FEMA among other agencies.
During this shutdown, there were three status changes that have impacted who was reporting to work and who was being paid on schedule.
The first was on March 27th when President Trump signed the executive order to pay TSA employees through an emergency declaration. The second change came less than a week later, April 3rd, when President Trump signed an executive order titled: Liberating the Department of Homeland Security from the Democrat-Caused Shutdown. In that order President Trump extended the emergency declaration to include all DHS employees (not just TSA) allowing for them to be paid out of emergency funding from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And the third change in policy came the following week on April 10th, when DHS issued a department-wide return to work order for all furloughed DHS employees.
In tracking the federal government’s payment updates, all DHS employees were paid, including backpay, as of April 16th and have been paid on schedule since. Due to these developments, there are no longer DHS employees who aren’t being paid. This would explain why you aren’t hearing related stories. However, for nearly the first two months of the DHS shutdown, all DHS employees except for Border Patrol and ICE (who were covered in the OBBB), went without scheduled pay and to the point of today’s note you didn’t hear the “woe is the federal government employee who isn’t being paid” narrative as has happened at varying times previously. This is sadly explainable by virtue of which party may be blamed for a shutdown.
In the past when Republicans could be framed as being the cause of government shutdowns you’ve commonly had attention paid by news outlets to the plight of unpaid federal employees (2019, 2013, 1995). When Democrats might more easily be blamed for the shutdowns less attention has been applied to covering the impact of employees (current, 2025). This is evidenced by a majority of Americans, 54%, blaming Democrats primarily for the two most recent shutdowns. In the 2019 government shutdown 53% blamed Republicans.
So, to sum it up, thankfully all DHS employees are being paid, after two months without pay for most, and the media at large didn’t care about the impact to those employees largely because it reflected worse on Democrats in the eyes of the average American.