TSA agents will continue to work in the event of a DHS shutdown, they just won't get paid.
White House officials have
resigned themselves to what seems a potential inevitability—a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
“Right now, that does seem to be where we’re headed,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Monday.
While all of the Homeland Security employees
will lose their paychecks, many will stay on the job. So even though TSA and border patrol agents will still be visible to the American public,
the real impact of a shutdown may not be immediately obvious.
"A shutdown of DHS would have serious consequences and amount to a serious disruption in our ability to protect the homeland," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said at a press conference at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services headquarters.
Employees would go without pay, trainings for local law enforcement and firefighters would be canceled, and new grants to help states and localities deal with disasters would stop, Johnson and other officials at the press conference said.
Specifically, training for some 500 newly hired border officers would cease. Upcoming trainings for first responders to be held by the Federal Emergency Management Agency will also be cancelled.
And then there's the greater issue of the mental toll a shutdown would take on the agency's employees—frankly, how many people are willing to work for free while Congress is busy eating donuts and navel gazing?
DHS already suffers from low morale among its employees and a high turnover rate. Officials have warned that furloughs or forcing people to work without pay would be unlikely to help.
Earlier on Monday, Obama appealed to governors in his push for a DHS funding bill, saying they should think of the department employees who work in their states.
"These are folks who, if they don’t have a paycheck, are not going to be able to spend that money in your states," Obama said at a National Governors Association meeting. "It will have a direct impact on your economy, and it will have a direct impact on America’s national security, because their hard work helps to keep us safe. And as governors, you know that we can’t afford to play politics with our national security."