Elon Musk Could Legally Help Struggling TSA Agents Get Paid With This One Weird Trick

I don't like Elon Musk, and I haven't since even before production started on the long-delayed Tesla Model X. As far as I'm concerned, his actions over the last decade have only reinforced that I was right the whole time, but thousands of TSA agents are about to miss another paycheck. If anything can keep those workers from falling behind on their bills while Trump plays political games, it's worth setting differences aside to remind Musk he can still help, even after the White House rejected his initial offer to pay them. Without even breaking the law. 

As I said at the time, whether the blatant illegality actually concerned Trump and his team or not, from a legal perspective, they made the right call. The U.S. very specifically doesn't allow the executive branch to fund employee salaries with private donations because we don't want a handful of wealthy donors having that kind of influence over the federal government. It would be convenient to bend the rules just this once, but setting that kind of precedent would be far worse. Unfortunately for those unpaid TSA agents, you can't pay your mortgage with "avoiding another concerning legal precedent." 

So, Musk has plenty of money and has offered to help the TSA agents who could really use that money. Sending that money to DHS or donating to the federal government's general fund would be illegal. How do we get around this? Well, there's no law against sending money to a friend on Venmo, so that's one option. The problem is, TSA is a big agency, and sending tens of thousands of Venmo transactions would be impractical to say the least. He does have another option, though — donating to worker relief funds. 

Like other federal agencies, TSA agents are unionized under the American Federation of Government Employees, and while no union has the cash on hand to fully cover its members' salaries during a shutdown or a strike, one way they help is by organizing worker relief funds that others can donate to, knowing the union will distribute the money to their members directly. We had one the last time Jalopnik's former owners forced us to strike, and having that little extra bit of cash available was still incredibly helpful.

As far as I can tell, there's no law that would prevent Musk from donating to a union's worker hardship fund, even as a federal contractor. If Musk really does want to help, why not fill those worker hardship funds to the brim? Covering the salaries of the unpaid TSA agents was reportedly going to cost about $250 million, and even if the AFGE president hates Musk with a passion so blinding, it makes me look like an Elon fan in comparison, something tells me Everett Kelley's taking any call helps secure $250 million for his union members, right when they need it most. 

Of course, the most obvious problem here is that Musk hates unions and has for a long time. Kind of like me with Elon. But if I could set my feelings aside long enough to write this entire post without saying a single mean thing about Elon, I'd like to think he'd be willing to set aside his distaste for unions long enough to do something to help the TSA agents he's already said he wants to help. It would be far more efficient that tracking down every single TSA worker's Venmo information, and unless I missed a statute, it's completely legal. 

So what do you say, Elon? Are you ready to call a temporary truce and get this thing done? We can go back to feuding later, but for now, let's put some money in those TSA agents' pockets. If that doesn't work for you, all I can ask is why not?