Almost 40 days into another partial government shutdown and Congress is no closer fully funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and so instead appear poised to fund all parts of the department except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which would be further funded in another budget reconciliation bill similar to the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gave about three years of funding to ICE and the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.
That might be best to be hoped for, even after there have been four Islamist terror attacks on U.S. soil in Austin, Texas, New York City, Norfolk, Va. and a synagogue Dearborn, Mich. since the war in Iran began amid the government shutdown. And after two pilots died at a congested LaGuardia Airport in New York City as Transportation Security Administration are short-handed as they continue working without pay, with long security lines increasingly delaying flights everywhere.
Also unfunded is DHS’ explicit counterterrorism mission, and also the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. None of it has moved Democrats, who refuse to provide cloture on a DHS appropriations bill.
Even with the domestic death toll mounting during the war and shutdown, none of it has impacted Congressional Democrats politically at all. They remain ahead in the generic Congressional ballot polls, leading 156 out of 175 such polls taken this cycle, or 89 percent. Republicans have led just 10, or 5.7 percent. The rest were tied.
In fact, during the last shutdown and this one, Democrats’ lead in the generic ballot has widened. They simply are not paying a political price, even as airports were ground to halts twice in less than a year.
And so they simply see no downside to continuing their demands that ICE funding be separated from the rest of DHS after the tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota at the hands of the ICE and Border Patrol officers they were obstructing — and so Senate Republicans are going to give Senate Democrats what they want — which is a way to get everything funded without them having to vote for all of it.
This was the inevitable outcome of separating DHS funding from the rest of the government. There were still three consolidated minibuses: 1) H.R. 6938 that funded the Department of Commerce, the Department of Justice, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers civil works projects, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service and the Indian Health Service; 2) H.R. 7148 that funded the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President, the judiciary, the District of Columbia, the Department of State and related programs, the administration and oversight of foreign assistance programs, bilateral economic assistance, international security assistance, multilateral assistance and export and investment assistance; and 3) H.R. 5371 that funded the Department of Agriculture, the legislative Branch, military construction and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Only DHS was excluded, and so the current procedure being agreed to, without passage of an additional reconciliation bill — which is up in the air — for the moment, effectively allows Democrats to drain the additional funds that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that were going to ICE and Border Patrol, about $140 billion. Now, about $28 billion of the extra funds they had added to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: $10 billion for ICE and $18 billion for Border Patrol will be drained.
Democrats apparently never intend to fund ICE again, especially if the win the House and/or Senate in 2026, which for them is just a waste of money anyway, they don’t want to really deport any illegal aliens. For Congressional Republicans, then, with the midterms bearing down and there but one more budget reconciliation bill to pass, the move now must become to get the rest of the President’s agenda fully funded likely for the remainder of his term.
Whatever else the President needed to complete his mission in Washington, D.C. to make America great again — Republicans had better stick it in that bill, including fully funding ICE through 2028.
Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government.
