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The House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure that would temporarily fund the Department of Homeland Security late Friday, but the 43-day shutdown could drag on for several more weeks.
The two-month funding extension approved by the House is likely dead on arrival in the Senate, where any funding bill needs to overcome a 60-vote threshold, meaning buy-in from a handful of Democrats. That hurdle has not stopped House GOP leadership from arguing that their rejection of a Senate-passed deal — and pitching a subsequent rival DHS funding proposal — is the way out of the shutdown.
“We’re not going to split apart two of the most important agencies in the government and leave them hanging like that,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters leaving the U.S. Capitol on Friday night. “We just couldn’t do it.”
“House Republicans will have no part in reopening the border and stopping illegal immigration enforcement,” Johnson said earlier Friday on “The Ingraham Angle,” in a scathing takedown of the Senate-passed deal that stopped short of funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and portions of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
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But the full-court press launched by House Republicans aimed at persuading the Senate to return to Washington to take up their bill is likely to fall on deaf ears in the upper chamber.
A GOP aide told Fox News Digital that “the easiest way to end this shutdown is for the House to pass the Senate-passed bill.”
“We know the Democrats are not going to support a CR, in fact the Senate tried to pass CRs for the last 40 days and Dems have blocked Every. Single. One,” they said.
Senators left Washington, D.C., for a two-week Easter recess after unanimously approving a DHS funding measure in the early morning hours Friday with some traveling abroad on congressional delegations.
“I would suggest that the Senate does come back and at least take a vote,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain said Friday. “That is what they were elected to do. So they’re going to stay out on recess for two weeks and not come back while people don’t get paid. That’s pretty sad.”
Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, also called on the Senate to return to Washington “immediately” to take up the House-passed measure in a statement late Friday.
House lawmakers are also scheduled to be in recess for the next two weeks.
Left holding the tab in the cross-chamber feud are the tens of thousands of DHS employees working unpaid during the shutdown.
President Donald Trump moved Friday to shield TSA agents from further financial distress by taking executive action directing DHS to pay those employees with existing funds.
The roughly 50,000 agents have missed two full paychecks during the ongoing funding lapse, leading hundreds to quit their jobs and forcing others to grapple with mounting financial distress.
The president’s move is likely to alleviate lengthy wait times at TSA security checkpoints, though senior officials have warned of long-term impacts due to more than 500 agents quitting during the funding lapse.
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However, other DHS personnel, such as those employed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and certain support staff working for ICE and CBP will still have their paychecks withheld until the department’s funding is restored.
“Anybody who shows up to work deserves to get a paycheck, and the Senate needs to come back and at least do their job,” McClain told Fox News on Friday.
Democratic lawmakers are sure to spend the next several weeks blaming Republicans for the impasse after Johnson’s decision to reject the Senate deal.
“We’re here dealing with a partisan spending bill that the Senate has already indicated is dead on arrival,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said on the House floor Friday. “And so Republicans have taken the decision to own this shutdown decisively. There is no doubt.”
The short-term DHS funding patch passed by the House is a clean extension of government funding and has no partisan policy riders.
Trump also came out against the bill Friday afternoon in an interview with Fox News.
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The bill notably does not include any of the reforms that Democrats have demanded for six weeks to rein in immigration enforcement, including tightening warrant requirements and prohibiting agents from wearing masks.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who warned throughout the funding stalemate that nobody wins in a shutdown, has indicated that Democrats are less likely to get those demands met than when the funding lapse first started.
“I mean, I think that ship has sailed, and they kind of kissed that opportunity goodbye by failing to provide funding for those agencies,” Thune said.
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