Senate Republicans are openly pressing Speaker Mike Johnson to bring a DHS funding bill to the House floor, a bill the Senate already passed by unanimous consent, as a partial government shutdown stretches past two months and the White House warns that the department is running out of money to pay its workers.
Johnson told reporters Wednesday he would not advance the Senate-passed package until Republican senators first move a budget reconciliation bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol for the next three and a half years. That demand has put him at odds with senators in his own party who say he backed out of a deal they believed was settled before the Easter recess.
The result is a standoff inside the Republican conference that has stalled the most basic function of government, paying the people who screen passengers at airports, patrol the southern border, and guard the nation's coastline. And the longer it lasts, the harder it becomes to blame Democrats alone.
The backstory matters. In late March, Senate Republicans struck a deal with Democrats to fund most of DHS through the normal appropriations process while routing ICE and Border Patrol money through budget reconciliation, a maneuver that would bypass a Democratic filibuster. Democrats had refused to fund those two agencies unless Republicans accepted sweeping immigration enforcement restrictions, including requirements that federal officers obtain judicial warrants before entering private homes and a ban on officers wearing masks.
Senate Republicans viewed the split approach as a practical workaround. The chamber passed the partial DHS package by unanimous consent before Easter. A Senate GOP aide told The Hill that Republican senators were told Johnson and President Trump would support the bill before they gave consent to advance it.
Then Johnson changed course. He dismissed the Senate bill publicly, and National Review reported that he called it "a joke," adding: "I'm quite convinced that it can't be that every Senate Republican read the language of this bill."
That remark landed poorly on the other side of the Capitol. One Republican senator, speaking anonymously, captured the mood plainly:
"We have agreements at the top levels with our leadership in a lot of ways, or at least conceptual agreements, I don't know why we can't stand by them. That is frustrating."
Johnson's position is not without logic, and it reflects real pressure from his right flank. House conservatives do not want to pass a bill that funds most of DHS while leaving ICE and Border Patrol twisting in the wind, dependent on a reconciliation process that could take another month or longer to complete.
Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia laid out the calculus directly:
"If we can take a skinny reconciliation bill up first, then we'd be more comfortable with the Senate-passed funding bill.... But until then, it just makes more sense to do reconciliation overall and deal with it in one bill."
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a leading voice in the House Freedom Caucus, went further. He blamed the Senate for creating the mess in the first place by agreeing to separate DHS funding from ICE and Border Patrol. "I think the Senate keeps making mistakes, and I think we're living with those mistakes every day," Roy said. "We shouldn't have isolated DHS. Now here we are with isolating ICE and Border Patrol."
The Freedom Caucus has demanded that the entire department be funded through one reconciliation bill, a position that Fox News reported has created yet another layer of intra-party friction and complicated Johnson's path forward.
Roy also warned Senate Republicans against assuming the House would rubber-stamp whatever the upper chamber produced: "But if the Senate is going to proceed, and they're going to drive through this, because they just think they can assume we're all voting for everything, I think that's a mistake."
While lawmakers argue over sequencing, the department itself is hollowing out. White House budget director Russell Vought testified Thursday at a Senate Budget Committee hearing that the situation at DHS has become dire. Congress has not funded the department since February 14, more than two months.
Vought did not mince words:
"As of right now, the Department of Homeland Security is disintegrating because the secretary and I are having to figure out ways to temporarily fund people's paychecks so we don't have people quit and embark on new careers."
He added that what he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin saw the weekend Mullin took office was "incredibly concerning." The White House, Vought warned, could soon run out of money to pay TSA screeners, Coast Guard members, and other affected federal workers.
The practical fallout has already arrived. The New York Post reported that the prolonged shutdown caused severe TSA staffing shortages and airport delays, forcing the administration to find separate emergency funding to keep airport security operating.
Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said the obvious: "Time is of the essence." She added, "I certainly am not a fan of where we are in this process but we are where we are and we must figure out a pathway forward."
The Speaker's problem is structural, not just tactical. He governs with one of the thinnest House majorities in modern history, and mounting attendance problems have made every floor vote a high-wire act.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has tried to stay above the fray publicly. "I try not to tell the House what to do or how to do it," Thune told reporters Monday. But he made the stakes clear: "Obviously, the sooner we can get all those agencies funded, the better."
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was more direct. She wants the House to act immediately on the Senate-passed package. "I think we viewed it as this would be the simple, quickest, most targeted way," she said. "I think that makes more sense in trying to move things quickly."
Thune himself has challenged critics to propose something better. "My question for anybody who doesn't like what we did is: give me a better idea. Give me another option," he said, as Fox News reported.
The so-called "skinny" reconciliation bill that Senate Republican leaders envision would fund ICE and Border Patrol for three and a half years at a cost of between $65 billion and $70 billion. But moving any bill under reconciliation's special budget protections could take another month, time DHS may not have.
Johnson, for his part, acknowledged during the shutdown that Republicans may have to carry the effort largely alone. "It looks like we will have to do the heavy lift on our own, Republicans, because the Democrats are, they're obstructionists, at this point, and it's really sad," he said on Fox News, as Breitbart reported. He said he had been working with senators until almost midnight.
Yet the Washington Examiner reported that Johnson initially pushed House Republicans to reject the Senate deal because it excluded ICE and CBP funding, then reversed course and endorsed it after Thune agreed to handle those agencies through reconciliation, only to reverse again and demand that reconciliation come first. Some House Republicans criticized the Speaker for "caving" to Thune, while senators now accuse him of reneging.
The anonymous Republican senator quoted by The Hill captured the core frustration: most GOP senators still blame Democrats for blocking a full DHS appropriations bill that includes ICE funding. But Johnson's refusal to move quickly on the compromise they negotiated is making a bad situation worse.
That distinction matters. Democrats deserve the blame they have earned, refusing to fund border enforcement agencies without extracting policy concessions designed to hamstring immigration enforcement is obstructionism dressed as oversight. But when Republicans hold the House, the Senate, and the White House, voters expect them to govern, not to spend two months in a circular firing squad over sequencing.
The longer this drags on, the more it looks like a conference that cannot close. Johnson faces pressure from the Freedom Caucus on his right, from the Senate on his left flank within the party, and from a White House that needs results. Meanwhile, talk of alternative leadership continues to build in the background.
The DHS shutdown has now lasted well over fifty days. TSA workers, Coast Guard members, and Border Patrol agents, the very people Republicans champion, are the ones paying the price. Vought's warning that the department is "disintegrating" is not political theater. It is a description of what happens when the people responsible for homeland security do not get paid.
And the broader political picture for the House majority keeps getting harder. Recent special election losses have underscored how little margin Johnson has to work with, making every internal fight more consequential.
Roy is right that the Senate created problems by splitting DHS funding from ICE and Border Patrol. Cline is right that conservatives should not have to take it on faith that reconciliation will come through later. But Vought is right too: there is no money for the department, and the clock is running.
Republicans control every lever of elected power in Washington. If they cannot fund the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that guards the border, screens airline passengers, and patrols the coast, they will have a hard time asking voters to trust them with anything else.
