President Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to keep paying its workforce by redirecting money from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Employees are getting paid again, yet the decision has opened a larger legal fight over whether the White House moved outside Congress’s control of federal spending.
Trump first signed a directive on March 27 for Transportation Security Administration workers, then widened the order on April 4 to cover all DHS employees. In the memo, he cited “an emergency situation compromising the Nation’s security.”
Border funding is now being used for payroll
The dispute centers on the source of the money. Trump instructed the DHS secretary to use funds that have a “reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That law provided $10 billion to DHS for border-related functions, with no specific reference to TSA in the text.
Budget specialists quickly focused on that gap. Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNBC that the administration has not publicly explained its reasoning in enough detail for outside observers to judge whether the action is lawful. He said the case has not been made in any public way.
The Antideficiency Act is at the center of the challenge
Legal experts point to the 150-year-old Antideficiency Act, which bars the executive branch from spending money that Congress did not specifically appropriate for a given purpose. That is where the order runs into trouble: TSA handles airport security, while the bill’s funding was directed to DHS border missions. Whether that link is legally sufficient remains unclear.
Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress estimated that funding TSA payroll costs about $140 million per week. On that basis, the available pool could support payments for nearly a year. Critics argue that durability does not answer the legal question. The size of the funding source is separate from whether the spending purpose matches the law.
A temporary fix leaves the broader standoff in place
Senate Majority Leader Thune called the order a “short-term solution” that eases immediate pressure, while also saying it does not resolve the underlying funding standoff between the two chambers. The second executive memo issued on April 4 drew added scrutiny because it extended the same approach beyond TSA to all DHS employees, including furloughed staff and workers in agencies not clearly tied to the bill’s border enforcement mandate.
The constitutional issue reaches past a payroll decision. Article I of the US Constitution gives Congress exclusive authority over federal spending, and unilateral payment of workers without an active appropriation has historically invited legal challenges under the Antideficiency Act. In his original March 27 memo, Trump said America’s air travel system had reached its “breaking point.” The unresolved question is whether the remedy he chose falls within his legal authority.