Donald Trump killed a plan to reopen the Department of Homeland Security and get TSA workers paid by the end of the week, a veteran Republican senator has revealed.
John Kennedy, 74, told Fox News’ The Will Cain Show on Monday that he and Republican colleague Ted Cruz had drawn up a two-step path out of the shutdown. That was to take Democrats’ offer to reopen the rest of the DHS, then pass ICE funding separately through reconciliation, where Republicans would not need Democratic votes.
Kennedy said the 79-year-old president rejected it. “No deals with the Democrats,” the Louisiana senator said Trump told them. “It would have worked. We could have had TSA paid by the end of the week.”
The public admission comes a day after the Daily Beast reported that Senate Majority Leader John Thune had taken a similar “everything but ICE” proposal to Trump, only for the president to shoot it down. It was also reported that Trump tied any DHS deal to passage of the SAVE Act, his proof-of-citizenship voting bill.
That leaves Republicans publicly blaming Democrats for an impasse that Kennedy now says Trump himself prolonged while the operational damage gets worse.
Reuters reported that more than 3,450 TSA officers—nearly 12 percent of the workforce—did not show up for work on Sunday, while more than 400 TSA workers have quit since the shutdown began in mid-February. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport told passengers to arrive four hours early on Monday.
Reuters reported that more than 100 airport leaders, along with the heads of the two biggest airport trade groups, warned Congress on Monday that the funding gap was causing increasingly serious disruption for passengers and airport operations.
By late Monday, senators were back at the White House trying to salvage the same framework Kennedy described on Fox.
Multiple media outlets reported that negotiators were working on a package to fund most of DHS, including TSA, while leaving out ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations.
Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection would stay funded, with new guardrails amid Democratic demands that include body cameras, visible identification, and tighter rules on home entries. Senators said they hoped to take written language to Tuesday’s caucus meetings.
Whether Trump will accept that version remains unclear. He has already demanded that Republicans refuse “any deal” with Democrats until they also pass the SAVE America Act, even though that bill does not have the 60 Senate votes it would need.
If nothing breaks, TSA officers are set to miss a second paycheck on March 27.
In a statement emailed to the Beast, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson did not comment on Kennedy’s claims and instead blamed Democrats for having “recklessly shut down the Department of Homeland Security,” leading “countless TSA employees to work without pay.”
