CLAYTON COUNTY, Ga. — A plan is in place to pay Transportation Security Administration workers, and there are shorter wait times at Atlanta’s airport into the weekend.
President Donald Trump signed an executive action to pay those workers who have missed several paychecks.
The House rejected the Senate-passed Department of Homeland Security bill, meaning that the partial shutdown is not over.
Channel 2’s Bryan Mims was live at the world’s busiest airport on Channel 2 Action News 4:00, where he’s seen short lines Friday afternoon.
At the main checkpoint, wait times have at times dwindled to less than 10 minutes.
That’s drastic improvement since early in the week, when wait times were five hours or more.
Just like that, Melisa Smith and her two kids strode right into the main checkpoint, only a smattering of fellow fliers ahead.
No endless zigzagging lines creeping at a turtle’s pace.
“Today is much better than it was on the way here,” Smith said.
On the way here from Denver, she worried about missing her flight.
Smith was relieved to hear that while the House rejected the bill, the Senate unanimously voted to pay TSA workers, who have gone six weeks without a paycheck and that the president announced an executive order to compensate them.
She said it gave her comfort, “very much so. It shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. They should have been able to come to an agreement sooner, but it is what it is.”
Bobby Jennings and his wife arrived more than five hours before their flight to Puerto Rico, monitoring social media chatter about wait times.
“Everything switched for our planning. We went from getting here at a certain time. We moved it back and back. The more we’ve seen on social media, the further back we booked our trip,” he said.
They were wonderfully surprised to see the sparse crowds.
At times, early in the afternoon, getting through main security took less than 10 minutes!
But local TSA union rep George Borek says even with the TSA funding vote, long lines will continue to materialize.
“It will probably be a week or so before it truly gets back to some kind of normality because we still don’t know what the fallout is,” Borek said.
He points out that about 500 TSA agents have quit across the country, and he expects that number to rise.
While lines are short now, you’re still encouraged to arrive four hours before your flight because wait times are so unpredictable.
A local organization rallied Friday to put food on the table of TSA workers.
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