From the article:
Sanford said some employees make 25 percent more than they should for their work because they are classified as law enforcement officers.
This issue is all about qualifying for various types of premium pay, most notably stand-by pay. A real federal cop can earn up to 25% of their salary in these two types of premium pay. Stand-by pay is paid to cover real federal cops doing things like being deployed for a stake-out or for diplomatic protection duties where you have to be basically on-call at a moment's notice. (Stand-by pay is also paid to federal firefighters who are deployed to a fire house or temporary location during a big forest fire.) There are other premium pay opportunities of which the TSA takes full advantage. I'm only addressing stand-by pay here.
Kippie unilaterally reclassified clerks as "officers" when he instituted his intimidation campaign back in ~2007. Personnel shops and the TSA union jumped on the bandwagon and rewrote TSA clerk jobs as "federal law enforcement officers" or at least reclassified clerk jobs into the same civil service job classification series. Once you're in the series qualifying for stand-by pay, you're in. Heck, it's only taken Congress 7 years to do something about this. I'm sure the bill won't go anywhere in the Senate.
TSA clerks don't deserve stand-by pay any more than I do.