Congress is building a path to resolution for DHS — even as it opens the next appropriations cycle

Guest:	Mitchell Miller
Title:	Capitol Hill correspondent, WTOP
Summary:	DHS remains the only federal agency operating without a finalized 2026 appropriations bill, leaving Congress to rely on an unusually intricate reconciliation process to reach an outcome. All of this is happening as lawmakers begin shaping 2027 spending plans, layering urgency onto an already stalled debate.

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Interview transcript

Terry Gerton I’m starting to feel like it’s Groundhog Day when I talk to you. We are still talking about DHS funding and reconciliation. So let’s start there again. What is the latest on DHS Funding?

Mitchell Miller Well, here we are in April, right, this is the fiscal ’26 budget, just to remind people, and where we are is actually a little bit ahead of where we’ve been in the past. They are slowly but surely making progress and this week is really going to be critical because the Senate has decided that it is going to go ahead with a budget resolution this week on the floor. They are bypassing the budget committee, although the chair of that committee, Lindsey Graham is bringing this resolution to the floor. And what that means is they will get it to the floor and then they will have the infamous vote-a-rama to take all the amendments related to the budget resolution. The Senate hopes to get it through and then eventually they will bounce it back to the House. Now, as we’ve talked about before, that is complicated because many House conservatives don’t like the Senate approach. They think that they need to add more things in connection with budget reconciliation. The resolution, of course, is the first step to reconciliation, and the Senate really wants what they call a skinny bill to get through ICE and border protection so that they can move on to the overall Department of Homeland Security bill — so keep following me here — but once that happens, then the House Republicans say then they will attack the Department of Homeland security overall and try to pass it that way. But what this means is we’re looking at weeks and weeks of additional legislative activity now.

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Terry Gerton So just to make sure I’m tracking with you, this budget resolution would just fund CBP and ICE. It would get into reconciliation and then once reconciliation is through, they would come back with a funding bill for the rest of DHS.

Mitchell Miller That is correct and part of the complication is that many house republicans worried about the midterm elections want to stuff more things in connection with reconciliation and they say, look if you’re going to go all in and say republicans only can pass this then we have to have a bigger imprint on the reconciliation bill so they’re talking about various things like adding more health care benefits because they know that’s an issue as they come up to the midterms. There’s a whole host of other things that they would like to add in. Now, of course, the headache for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is the more you add in to reconciliation, the more likely that this is going to get into a slog. And here we are, of course in mid-April, and if you slog your way through May when there is actually a break, then before you know it, you can be getting into late May, all the way to Memorial Day weekend. And there’s just really concern that they can’t really blow past any more deadlines at this point. And in fact, President Trump has set a June 1st deadline to say, look, we’ve got to get all of this done, including homeland security, by June 1. So this is going to be a very interesting period here in Congress.

Terry Gerton One of the June 1st deadlines that the president also established was getting the Save America voting law passed. Is that now part of reconciliation? Is that another domino that falls somewhere else?

Mitchell Miller Well, that’s a great point because a lot of Republicans, that is another one of these things that they want to add into reconciliation. They want to have something in connection with the SAVE Act. The problem is, if you get it passed in the House, then it has to go back to the Senate again if you make that kind of change, and the Senate Democrats have indicated they will not allow that to pass. So I think that might be a domino that might fall to the side,  much as that would really anger a lot of House Republicans because they feel — and Senate Republicans, many of them — who want to see that get in there. But there is at some point you have to kind of finish adding all of these things, as you know, and just come up with something that everybody can agree to.

Terry Gerton So at the bottom of that pile of actions is still DHS funding. They are still not funded despite the president’s executive orders to pay some people out of adjacent funds. Could we be looking at July before the Department of Homeland Security’s miscellaneous agencies actually get 2026 appropriations?

Mitchell Miller Well, you know, it could actually happen if they get tripped up on some of these issues that we just touched on. And that would really cause some problems. And in fact, last week there were a lot of warnings from various agency officials saying, look, you can’t just say that DHS is eventually going to be funded. As we know, the administration has used money from the so-called Big Beautiful Bill from last year to try to let it limp along. But we had warnings last week, for example, from ICE, from Border Protection saying they need this funding moving forward. There was warnings in connection with the fact that the World Cup is going to be taking place later this year, and there are a whole host, of course, of security issues that have to be taken care of. And lawmakers were warned last year that if they don’t get the funding for this, a lot of these things are going to fall apart. So really, even though it’s kind of been in the background a lot at this time, it’s really coming to a head now.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Mitchell Miller. He’s Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. Mitchell, I don’t feel like we’ve resolved the 2026 issue, but I want to move to 2027, because that is literally right around the fiscal corner. Russ Vought testified on the Hill last week. Some House appropriations bills are coming out. What are you hearing about the progress and the schedule for ’27 appropriations?

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Mitchell Miller Right. So they better get going on 2027, right? And Russ Vought did come to the Hill. He did not want to talk about the exact amount of money that the White House was going to ask lawmakers for in connection with additional funding for the war with Iran. But we do know some details of a variety of pieces of legislation that are now being rolled out. For example, the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Legislation appropriations in the House has released a discretionary spending of about $157 billion. That’s a 3% increase. Some of the highlights is that it would fully fund veterans’ health care programs and benefits, maintain funding for mental health. It would also include billions of dollars for capital improvements to VA medical facilities. On the flip side, there are reductions proposed for financial services and general government appropriations. These would be cut by close to a billion dollars or just under 4 percent. And some of the highlights there or lowlights in the view of some people, perhaps federal employees, is that the administration proposes to continue to shrink the size of the federal workforce to what it calls pre-COVID Biden levels. So you can look for, again, more domestic cuts, at least proposed by the administration. We’ll have to see what congress does and they are going to also be identifying those federal office spaces to lower costs, what they say is needed to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. So you’re going to see in a different way some of the continuation that we saw of things related to DOGE, although not quite as formalized. And then overall, the big picture is, of course, we’re hearing a lot of talk from members of Congress, especially on the Republican side, since they control everything, that they are going to get back to regular order and we are going to have all these appropriations bills neatly lined up and passed, a dozen of them in time for the start of the next fiscal year. However, I am very skeptical that is going to happen since that has literally not happened in 30 years. So I think we will see some progress in the coming weeks and months, But don’t look for them to meet that deadline come October 1st.

Terry Gerton Mitchell, I think my magic 8-ball says signs point to no.

Mitchell Miller No question.

Terry Gerton Especially since they will all want to get out of town before the election in November.

Mitchell Miller Exactly.

Terry Gerton There is one other topic that I want to raise, and that is around war powers and authorization of continuing operations in Iran. Number of votes have made it to the floor in both chambers. Nothing has passed yet. You mentioned that Mr. Vought didn’t talk about supplemental funding there. Is there a threshold or a marker on the calendar that might cause lawmakers to change their minds on this issue?

Mitchell Miller There actually is, and it is essentially the end of this month, right around April 28th. We’re going to hit the 60-day point of the war with Iran unless something very different happens in the coming weeks. And that is the marker that many Republicans, who have up until this point, have firmly been behind the president, have opened the door and said, maybe we ought to take another look at where we are with the war. So last week we had another War Powers Resolution that fell in the Senate. And Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said he will continue to bring up these resolutions until something changes. But what will likely change once we hit that point at the end of this month is that some GOP lawmakers will say, OK, we actually do need to go on the record and say, are we going to continue this? Because that is really a requirement of Congress. Now, Democrats have been making the argument that Congress should have weighed in a long time earlier. But I think that is where we’re probably going to see some kind of change if the war is continuing and we don’t see one of these extensions of a ceasefire and we’ll have to of course see what happens with the Strait of Hormuz and all of the things that are going along with the war. So we will be seeing something, I think, change by the end of this month.

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