While the Senate must clear a much more arduous 60-vote threshold to pass appropriations than the simple majority enjoyed by the House, there’s one practical reality that matters more than the messy math of ending what is now the longest government shutdown in the nation’s history.
That is, despite last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill securing almost $200 billion to fund Donald Trump’s deportation operations, this funding is allocated only to front-line law enforcement personnel at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Any government funding deal that excludes appropriations for ICE and CBP, even if it funds the rest of the Department of Homeland Security, will leave some 20,000 civilian employees at ICE and CBP unpaid.
The good fight for reconciliation
Senate Democrats have made clear that they will not vote to fund ICE and CBP again, an unprecedented abdication of Congress’s historic responsibility to keep the government funded on a bipartisan basis. This recalcitrance persists despite the fact that Republicans made extensive concessions, including a ban on deportations in supposedly sensitive locations such as schools and churches, a requirement that deportation agents identify themselves as federal LEOs, and universal bodycam expansion. Realizing Democrats simply want to defund ICE and CBP, Senate Republicans scrapped those reforms and passed a clean DHS funding bill that excluded funding for ICE and CBP.
House Republicans and the president both balked at the Senate bill last week, only to be strong-armed by the upper chamber’s impossible margin this week. That leaves the entire federal government and the conservative movement with one option that cannot be allowed to fail: concurrently funding DHS and ICE via reconciliation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has been clamoring for Republicans to get started on a second reconciliation bill since the ink on Trump’s signature began to dry on the 2025 OBBBA. And he’s been doing this for good reason. While the OBBBA succeeded in permanently extending most of the expiring tax cuts from Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, avoiding the largest tax increase in history that would have resulted at the end of last year absent an extension, the OBBBA did not make enough spending cuts to permanently undo the inflationary deficit expansion of Bidenomics.
Republican-led funding solutions for White House
Luckily, the Republican Study Committee has already outlined at least $1.6 trillion in new spending cuts for a second reconciliation bill, largely accomplished through curtailing further waste and fraud in federal entitlements and stopping the flow of welfare to non-citizens.
The tentative plan appears to be for the House to pass the DHS funding sans-CBP-and-ICE, and then pass a second reconciliation bill combining funding for the latter two agencies throughout the rest of Trump’s term with a grab bag of other White House priorities, such as badly needed defense funding in light of Operation Epic Fury and the SAVE Act.
This is a good plan created by Republicans for an abominable situation created by Democrats. But not only can this plan not be allowed to fail — it must happen immediately.
The laziness of Senate Republicans, who didn’t want to use their remaining time in the majority to pass a second reconciliation bill, deserves mockery and analysis at a later date. But right now, Republicans must understand that there can be very little time elapsed between the reopening of the bulk of the DHS and the reconciliation bill.
Time and funding are of the essence
We all understand the urgency of reopening the rest of the DHS, as between this year’s shutdown and the 2025 shutdown, the second-longest in U.S. history, some 100,000 DHS employees have been compelled to work without being paid on time for about three of the past six months, or half of the fiscal 2026. Reopening the DHS would end this national disgrace for most of them, but again, not all of them.
CBP has almost 70,000 employees, and ICE has nearly 22,000. About 70,000 LEOs within DHS have been continuously paid during this shutdown thanks to the OBBBA. But even if we assume that all those officers are housed within CBP and ICE, and they probably aren’t, over 20,000 CBP and ICE employees have gone unpaid for the entire shutdown.
DHS: 100,000 EMPLOYEES UNPAID AMID SHUTDOWN
The basic arithmetic to end the DHS shutdown is brutal. If Trump and Johnson have accepted that the Senate simply doesn’t have the numbers to refund ICE and CBP through a normal appropriations package for the rest of DHS, that’s simply reckoning with the reality of razor-thin margins. But the Senate cannot slow-walk a subsequent reconciliation package, because the notion that “ICE and CBP are fully funded” is a lie. Only with an immediate reconciliation can the 20,000 civilian employees enabling Trump’s deportation agenda get paid for the first time in nearly seven weeks.
