Travelers worried about getting through security for upcoming flights should plan on longer lines for another week or two, Harmon-Marshall estimated.

“This back and forth about all these decisions changing is confusing the TSA officers, so they’re possibly thinking like, ‘OK are we getting paid or are we not?’” he said.

The White House said money to pay TSA employees would come from a big tax cut bill Trump signed into law last year, which funneled billions of dollars in extra funds to Homeland Security. The money has kept ICE officers paid during the DHS shutdown.:

Johnny Jones, secretary-treasurer of the TSA worker division of the American Federation of Government Employees union, said pay for TSA workers starting Monday would be welcome but that Congress needs to agree on a bill that ends the DHS shutdown.

“I guess the action is good for the president, but on the flip side, we have a lot of people that don’t have anything, and I don’t know if this is gonna fix it,” Jones said.

Assessing staffing shortages

Airports that saw passengers standing in screening lines that clogged check-in areas or showing up far too early for their flights will need to decide whether to reopen checkpoints or expedited service lanes they closed or consolidated due to inadequate staffing.

A handful of airports experienced daily TSA officer callout rates of 40%. Nationwide on Thursday, more than 11.8% of the TSA employees on the schedule missed work, the most so far, the department said Friday.

Nearly 500 of the agency’s nearly 50,000 officers have quit since the shutdown started, according to DHS. TSA Acting Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill told lawmakers on Wednesday that some of the ones who missed shifts in recent weeks might leave as well. Hiring is likely to be harder after the personal and public disruptions the shutdown has caused, she said.

“Not only is the shutdown decreasing the number of interested candidates, for those we are able to hire, they are required to complete four to six months of training before they are certified to work at checkpoints,” McNeill said.

Aviation security expert Sheldon Jacobson, whose research contributed to the design of TSA PreCheck, said he doesn’t think travelers with trips planned need to panic. The 3- and 4-hour wait times in Atlanta, Houston and New Orleans were outliers, he said.

“At a lot of the airports I look at, the delays are pretty typical,” he said.

Jacobson also noted that the number of TSA officers who quit since mid-February isn’t much higher than the normal attrition rate for the job, which is around 8%.

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Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska. AP Writer Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.

Mae Anderson And Josh Funk, The Associated Press