Washington is locked in a high-stakes game of chicken over Department of Homeland Security funding, raising the possibility that thousands of federal workers could go unpaid for several more weeks — if not longer.
The shutdown is already the longest ever experienced by any part of the federal government, and in recent days the political sparring has gone from being a mostly partisan showdown between Republicans and Democrats into a messy internal battle for the GOP.
Both the House and Senate have adjourned for two weeks, with neither chamber seriously considering returning early despite a wave of online outrage and calls from the White House to return to session. Instead, House Republicans and Senate Republicans have spent the last several days pointing fingers at each other, while Democrats dig in against funding immigration enforcement agencies without implementing guardrails the GOP has resisted.
“The House has their process, we have ours and this happens periodically,” Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) told reporters Monday.
There is no immediate hope the standoff, which has affected tens of thousands of workers since it began Feb. 14, will soon end. An administration official granted anonymity to speak candidly said that “people are thinking this will go into the summer.”
“Morale is low. The TSA getting paid while the rest of us summer is not playing well inside the building,” the official added.
Bipartisan negotiations over immigration enforcement changes have gone almost nowhere, according to several people granted anonymity to candidly describe the talks. House and Senate Republicans are in a public tug-of-war over their competing Plan Bs. And President Donald Trump is doing little to unite his party behind a consensus position — let alone pushing them to cut a deal with Democrats.
Perhaps most worrying for those eager to end the stalemate is that the strongest impetus for a deal — the hourslong security lines at some U.S. airports — is already dissipating.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s decision to step in and fund TSA paychecks — a move privately encouraged by some Republicans — saying that the president had to do “what’s right to end this crisis that we’ve had at air travel and at airports across the country.”
But a DHS official granted anonymity to speak candidly said Trump’s decision to pay airport screeners, as well as the unanimous passage of a Senate GOP plan to fund the vast majority of the department, stripped Republicans of their main pressure point.
“Remember in the last shutdown, it was airport chaos that forced the seven Democrats to switch sides and fund the government,” the official said.
While about 50,000 airport security officers are now getting paid under Trump’s executive action, thousands more workers remain furloughed or working without pay. Those include more than 2,000 employees of the premier federal cybersecurity agency, more than 4,000 FEMA workers as well as more than 1,000 Coast Guard civilians.
DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that the record-breaking shutdown was affecting department employees tasked with protecting Americans and visitors for the upcoming World Cup soccer tournament and America 250 anniversary celebrations,
“Democrats need to stop holding these hard-working DHS employees’ pay hostage and putting politics above national security,” she said.
But as far as Democrats are concerned, they have struck a shutdown-ending deal — the Senate legislation passed early Friday morning by voice vote that would fund all of DHS except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and some parts of Customs and Border Protection. House Republicans rejected that bill and passed their own legislation late Friday that would fund all of DHS through May 22.
No senator attempted to pass the House measure in a brief Monday morning session, and in a sign that a consensus deal is nowhere close, some Senate Republicans want to instead try to fund the entire department through the party-line budget reconciliation process. That would bypass Democrats but require time-consuming procedural steps and potentially create messy new divides among Republicans.
Still, Hoeven said Republicans might have no better choice than to enact DHS legislation themselves for the remainder of Trump’s term.
“We’re not going through this again with the Dems,” he told reporters after the Senate session Monday. “We’re taking this off the table.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) also argued Republicans need to accept that Democrats will never fund the immigration enforcement agencies that became politically toxic on the left after federal agents killed two people in Minneapolis in January.
“The only thing I know to do is to take the Democrats out of it,” Kennedy said in an interview. “Just do the entire DHS budget under reconciliation.”
The problem for Republicans is they want to do much more than DHS funding in reconciliation, with the House and Senate GOP holding vastly different visions for the effort. Conservatives in both chambers are pushing to offset any new spending with cuts elsewhere — a politically tricky ultimatum.
Under the plan Senate GOP leaders passed last week, the consensus funding bill agreed to by Democrats would be paired with a reconciliation bill narrowly focused on immigration enforcement. Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned that trying to do all of DHS under the party-line process “gets a lot more complicated.”
Instead, Thune approached Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after the House rejected the Senate-passed bill to try to find another path to funding as much of DHS as possible. But expectations for a deal are low, given Democrats’ repeated rejections of stopgap funding bills. Still, Thune is expected to spend most of the two-week break trying to find a bipartisan path out of the funding impasse, according to a Senate GOP aide granted anonymity to disclose private scheduling.
A bipartisan group in the House has pitched its own plan to pair DHS funding with immigration enforcement changes. But the Senate conversations aren’t headed in that direction, absent a shift from the White House, with Thune saying the “ship has sailed” after Democrats rejected multiple GOP offers on enforcement restrictions.
Thune is dealing with pressure from the White House, online activists, House Republicans and even some of his own members to bring the Senate back into session before its scheduled April 13 return date.
In a head-scratching subplot, a few Senate Republicans have publicly suggested they did not agree with the deal they could have derailed in advance, while others have privately questioned Thune’s strategy given how quickly it unraveled in the House.
The bill was approved at 2:19 a.m. Friday after Senate GOP staffers ran a “hotline” — an established process for clearing measures slated for passage by voice vote or unanimous consent.
In addition to checking with Senate offices in the hours before the vote, Thune also briefed his conference Thursday evening on a developing plan to try to pass a bill funding as much of DHS as possible, leaving ICE and parts of CBP for reconciliation.
But Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said later that morning he opposed the deal. Asked why he didn’t object to the hotline or on the floor — or if he would try to pass the House bill in the Senate — a spokesperson pointed back Monday to his social media posts.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) similarly expressed regrets online after his social media followers aired outrage about the overnight vote. He explained on X that he “had every reason to believe President Trump and House Republicans were on board” with the play and thus “declined to call in an objection.” Spokespeople for Lee didn’t respond to questions Monday.
Hoeven, a close Thune ally, defended the majority leader Monday saying he “absolutely” believed leadership was handling the DHS funding fight well. He brushed off some of the intraparty grumbling as sour feelings about the long-running standoff.
“I think there’s some real frustration because the Democrats want to go back to open borders, and they’re blocking funding,” Hoeven said. “So I think you’re hearing some of that from senators.”
Eric Bazail-Eimil, Katherine Tully McManus, Calen Razor and Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
