We’re in the midst of the quietest government shutdown in American history. For 34 days, funding for the Department of Homeland Security has been blocked in a standoff over the Trump
administration’s deeply unpopular immigration enforcement, something the White House has finally realized is such a public opinion disaster that they’ve stopped calling it mass deportation. The biggest public-facing side of this shutdown is TSA workers, who have now worked without a paycheck for a month. But aside from frustration about longer airport security lines, there’s been little pressure on
Washington to end the impasse.
ICE and CBP agents are currently being paid, and could in theory go on for a lot longer without appropriations because of the $175 billion given to the agencies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Given the positions of both sides, there’s certainly a world where neither of them is funded by additional appropriations for the duration of Trump’s term.
One way that Republicans could funnel money to other parts of DHS is by using the same technique as they did for ICE and CBP last year: use a reconciliation package to deliver funding to specific agencies outside of the appropriations process. But there’s a problem now, one created by Donald Trump’s boneheaded decision to bomb Iran. Because we are using up munitions at such a rapid
rate, there’s an expectation that the White House will come to Congress with a supplemental funding request to keep the war going. The war is deeply unpopular, and few Democrats have any interest in supporting it monetarily. So Republicans may have to use up that reconciliation bill to fund the war.
While the White House and Republicans are pretending to compromise, they’re rejecting anything that would narrow the matter to ICE and CBP, the specific agencies at issue. And there isn’t any deus ex machina on the horizon that would magically get funding restarted. The quietest shutdown is almost certainly going to become the longest one, too.
|
