Earlier today, Senate Republicans released the text of their budget resolution, the first step in the process of enacting a reconciliation bill, which can avoid a filibuster and thus pass even without any support from congressional Democrats. The budget resolution shows only the broad areas of how the budget will be changed, with the details to be filled in later in committee markups. However, from a mixture of the public reporting and what Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has said, we know the current plan of Senate Republicans: Provide around $70 billion in funding to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for 3 1/2 more fiscal years—through the end of the Trump administration and through the end of fiscal year 2029—primarily through money to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, all while providing zero dollars of relief for struggling Americans.
The budget resolution instructs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) to increase deficits by no more than $70 billion over the next 10 years; it also instructs the Senate Judiciary Committee not to exceed $70 billion in increased deficits. In total, that could technically allow for $140 billion more for DHS—or even more if the committees find a commensurate amount of offsets for any spending they want to do above $140 billion. However, public reporting indicates the Senate Republican plan seems to be increasing spending for DHS by around $70 billion in total.
The committee instructions were written to allow for flexibility, due to how complicated the committee jurisdiction is for various parts of DHS. They were written this way so that congressional Republicans could move forward without first figuring out entirely what they want to do, as they still will have a large amount of leeway. A similar approach was taken in the budget resolution that paved the way for the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB), instructing each the Senate HSGAC and Judiciary Committee to increase the deficit by no more than $175 billion over the decade, allowing for a total of $350 billion between them. At the time, Sen. Graham similarly said his intention was to only have $175 billion in new deficits between these two committees; the law ultimately produced $138 billion in new deficits between the committees. In total, a reconciliation bill pursuant to the budget resolution released today is likely to produce roughly $70 billion in new deficits for DHS—despite the department still having tens of billions of unobligated dollars from funds provided nine months ago via the BBB.
In addition to doing nothing to reign in DHS’ many civil and human rights abuses, congressional Republicans’ reconciliation plan misses an opportunity to do affirmative good for struggling households.
Congressional Republicans are using reconciliation to fund these agencies as a way of avoiding putting any restraints on ICE and Border Patrol, which congressional Democrats have demanded after the chaos and harm the agencies have unleashed on citizens and noncitizens alike. DHS has been partially shut down since February 14 because congressional Democrats and Republicans could not agree on the terms of funding the agency.
While there was broad agreement in Congress on the funding levels for the agencies within DHS itself, congressional Democratic leadership asked for a handful of reforms to try to prevent more killings of citizens and noncitizens and avoid another wave of other civil rights violations from being undertaken by the department. Congressional Republican leadership has rejected calls for legislative reforms to ICE and Border Patrol operations and is now instead using this process to provide funding with no oversight.
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In addition to doing nothing to reign in DHS’ many civil and human rights abuses, congressional Republicans’ reconciliation plan misses an opportunity to do affirmative good for struggling households. If Congress is seeking to spend an additional $70 billion, those funds should be used to help Americans get by and get ahead.
The author would like to thank Debu Gandhi, Colin Seeberger, Emily Gee, Will Roberts, Madeline Shepherd, Peter Gordon, Ben Greenho, Rosa Barrientos-Ferrer, Silva Mathema, and Sara Estep.