Congress Faces DHS Funding Crisis Again, ICE and CBP Exempt

Why it Matters

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security is marking up the FY2027 DHS bill on June 5, with the ink barely dry on last year's funding and with the scars of a months-long partial shutdown still raw. Congress failed to pass a full-year FY2026 DHS spending bill before funding lapsed on February 14, 2026, leaving FEMA, TSA, CISA, and the Coast Guard shuttered or working without pay for weeks while ICE and CBP, drawing on separate reconciliation funds, operated without the policy constraints a normal appropriations bill would impose. The last FY2026 DHS bill was only signed into law around May 18, just weeks before this DHS hearing 2027 markup. The compressed timeline is not background noise; it is the entire context.

What's at stake is whether Congress can restore basic budget discipline over the department responsible for border security, disaster response, and domestic counterterrorism or whether it will again stumble into a funding crisis that leaves federal employees unpaid and oversight mechanisms gutted.

The Budget

The Trump administration's FY2027 budget request, released in April 2026, proposed $63 billion in discretionary budget authority for DHS, a decrease of $2.2 billion, or 3.3%, from the FY2026 continuing resolution level. The White House sought to offset part of that reduction with $1.68 billion in additional TSA Passenger Security Fee collections, while simultaneously pushing a broader 10% cut to non-defense discretionary spending across the government.

That math creates an immediate problem for the subcommittee. The FY2026 shutdown demonstrated in real time what happens when FEMA, TSA, and CISA go dark: DHS officials testified before multiple congressional committees in April 2026, warning of "growing shutdown backlogs" and flagging that the agency would run out of funds to pay employees the following month if the lapse continued. A budget that cuts the non-enforcement side of DHS further, even modestly, will face hard questions from both sides of the aisle about operational readiness.

Setting the Stage

The Homeland Security appropriations bill that subcommittee Chair Mark Amodei (R-NV) originally reported out of this subcommittee in June 2025 never received a standalone floor vote. The FY2026 DHS funding saga instead played out through two competing House-passed vehicles: H.R. 7744, sponsored by full committee Chair Tom Cole (R-OK) and passed 221–209 in March, and H.R. 8029, sponsored by subcommittee Vice Chair Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) and passed on a narrow 218–206 party-line vote in late March. Both bills remain stalled in the Senate.

That dynamic of a Republican majority that can barely pass DHS funding on party-line votes, with two competing vehicles sitting in Senate limbo, is the institutional backdrop for this fiscal year 2027 budget markup. The subcommittee is, in effect, trying to get ahead of a replay.

The Oversight Fight

One of the sharpest fault lines heading into this committee hearing in June 2026 is the fate of DHS oversight offices. Federal News Network reported in January 2026 that the FY2026 DHS spending bill would "effectively shutter" the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman by zeroing out its $28.6 million annual budget. Nonprofits filed lawsuits over the cuts. Whether the FY2027 bill restores or continues to eliminate these offices will be a flashpoint, particularly for Democratic members with border-district constituencies.

Ranking Member Lauren Underwood (D-IL) and members, including Veronica Escobar (D-TX), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), and Henry Cuellar (D-TX), who represents a border district and serves as the subcommittee's ranking member, are positioned to press hard on enforcement oversight, detention conditions, and the ICE/CBP funding structure. DeLauro's Democratic alternative FY2026 bill, which omitted ICE and CBP funding entirely and attracted 114 Democratic cosponsors, including Escobar and Ed Case (D-HI), signals how far apart the two parties remain on the core architecture of DHS spending.

The Bottom Line

The subcommittee's draft bill, which has not yet been formally introduced or assigned a bill number, will set funding levels for CBP ($18B+ range), ICE (approximately $11B), TSA ($10B+), the Coast Guard ($10B+), FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund (historically $26B+), CISA ($2B+ range), and the Secret Service. The general provisions title, which in past years has carried sweeping immigration policy riders (mandatory GPS monitoring for non-detained aliens, ICE detention capacity mandates, prohibitions on sanctuary jurisdictions), will be as contested as the topline numbers.

The shutdown experience also injected a new structural question: whether the FY2027 bill should include contingency pay provisions for DHS law enforcement personnel. H.R. 5398, a shutdown contingency bill cosponsored by subcommittee members Dan Newhouse (R-WA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX), proposed covering pay for law enforcement, administrative, and Coast Guard personnel through January 2027 if no regular appropriations bill is enacted.

Amodei's subcommittee also includes freshman member Jefferson Shreve (R-IN), who joins a panel where most members have already lived through one DHS funding collapse this Congress.