The Transportation Safety Administration gave workers partial paychecks while Donald Trump's federal government shutdown was in effect. Weeks after the longest shutdown in U.S. history, over 1,000 TSA employees are still waiting for pay owed.
When his shutdown over a non-existent border wall crisis finally ended, Trump said his first priority would be getting federal employees paid up in full on all their back pay owed. That hasn't happened.
The Office of Management of Budget instructed agencies to prioritize repaying its employees, CNN reports, but TSA now says the number of employees who have not been paid in full is about 1,000.
From CNN:
"Of TSA's 60,000 employees, approximately 1,000 throughout the country require some sort of pay correction," the agency's statement read. The agency says it continues to process those corrections, which mostly affect one pay period.
The median TSA salary is less than $41,000, according to 2017 data and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A TSA official who is "frustrated with the situation" said the delay in pay is a self-inflicted wound. The official, who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to speak to the media, blames it on Pekoske's actions during the shutdown.
"The problems are with pay period 26," the official said, referring to the final two-week pay period of 2018 that was partially paid as an incentive to try to keep workers who were calling out on the job. TSA said at the time that one week of back pay was paid out.
"It appears as though their effort to partially pay people screwed things up and they are still getting their act together," the source said.
More than 1,000 TSA employees still owed back pay from shutdown [cnn.com]
