ICE now has a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA, and U.S. Marshals combined, while FEMA's disaster fund ran dry during a record-length shutdown of the rest of the department — is Homeland Security's money going where the actual security risks are?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Between the 2025 reconciliation bill and the 2026 Secure America Act, ICE and CBP now have a combined budget exceeding $200 billion through 2029 — more than the entire annual budgets of the FBI, DEA, and U.S. Marshals Service combined — funded through reconciliation specifically to bypass the 60-vote Senate threshold and the ordinary appropriations oversight that comes with it, and by design keeps enforcement funded even when the rest of the department shuts down.
Congress gave ICE and CBP this level of funding through the reconciliation process specifically because it couldn't reach 60 votes for it through ordinary appropriations — a real structural choice with real oversight consequences either way, since reconciliation funding arrives as a multi-year lump sum with far less line-by-line congressional control than annual appropriations bills provide, regardless of which policy goals the money serves.
Mass deportation and border security were central, explicit commitments of the 2024 election, and funding ICE and CBP through reconciliation for the duration of the President's term ensures the policy voters chose can actually be carried out without being held hostage to unrelated annual funding fights or a minority of senators using the filibuster to block implementation of an enacted law.
Following the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good during a federal immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota, Democrats withheld the annual DHS funding bill specifically to force accountability reforms and use-of-force guardrails on ICE and CBP — triggering a shutdown of roughly 75 days that hit FEMA, the Coast Guard, TSA, and CISA hard, while ICE and CBP kept operating largely undisrupted because their reconciliation funding sat outside the lapse entirely.
The shutdown's basic asymmetry — ICE and CBP insulated by reconciliation money while FEMA, TSA, and the Coast Guard went unpaid — was itself the central procedural complaint from members of both parties: whatever one thinks of the underlying immigration-enforcement dispute, using annual appropriations leverage to affect only the agencies not already funded through reconciliation is a blunt tool that mostly missed its intended target.
Withholding funding for the Coast Guard, TSA, and disaster response specifically to try to extract policy concessions on immigration enforcement made non-immigration agencies and their employees collateral damage in a fight that had nothing to do with their missions, and the bill that ultimately reopened the department funded those agencies without the enforcement restrictions Democrats sought, showing the leverage strategy didn't achieve its stated goal.
FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund was drawn down to emergency levels during the 76-day DHS shutdown, right as hurricane season approached, and the President's FEMA Review Council has proposed shifting most disaster response and cost-sharing onto states and localities — a framework that risks leaving lower-income and rural communities, which depend most on federal disaster aid, without the resources to respond when the next major disaster hits.
Two separate FEMA reform efforts are underway on parallel tracks — a bipartisan legislative bill (the FEMA Act) that passed committee 57-3, and a separate executive-branch Review Council report recommending FEMA operate as an independent, cabinet-level agency outside DHS — and which track Congress ultimately follows, or whether they converge, remains a genuinely open question with real stakes for how disaster aid reaches affected communities.
FEMA's own workforce depletion and a GAO High-Risk List designation predate this shutdown and reflect years of documented operational dysfunction, not a funding shortfall alone — giving states and localities more direct control over disaster response and mitigation funds, as both the Review Council and the bipartisan FEMA Act propose in different ways, could mean faster, better-targeted local decision-making rather than a one-size-fits-all federal process.
Enforcement operations tied to the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, along with widely documented incidents of agents obscuring their faces and declining to identify themselves during arrests, have prompted bipartisan proposals requiring visible identification and body cameras — basic accountability measures already standard for most other federal and local law enforcement that ICE and CBP have specifically resisted adopting even as their budgets have grown fastest.
Requiring agents to be identifiable and to permit bystander filming — both provisions found in various 2026 congressional proposals — are narrower, more procedural asks than the broader use-of-force and detention-standard reforms Democrats sought in the shutdown fight, and represent an area where agreement may be more achievable precisely because they don't touch the underlying enforcement policy itself.
Agents conducting operations against individuals connected to violent gangs or organized criminal networks have real, documented safety reasons for obscuring their identity from retaliation, and standard-issue body cameras and mandatory public identification requirements can be operationally impractical or dangerous in fast-moving enforcement situations — concerns proponents of reform have not fully addressed in current bill language.
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 — the legal foundation letting companies and the government trade cyber-threat data without antitrust or liability exposure — was allowed to lapse twice in 2025 alone, including once during a government shutdown, leaving critical-infrastructure operators with measurably weaker legal protection for exactly the kind of threat information-sharing that helps prevent attacks on power grids, hospitals, and water systems.
The law's repeated lapses happened despite near-universal agreement among Trump administration officials, congressional leaders of both parties, and industry cybersecurity experts that it should be renewed — a rare case where the substance isn't contested at all, and the failure is purely one of legislative process and competing priorities crowding out a genuinely uncontroversial bill.
Congress has consistently reauthorized the law each time it lapsed, most recently extending it through September 2026, and the fact that a ten-year law with a built-in sunset requires periodic congressional reconsideration is itself a reasonable, deliberate check — Congress retains the opportunity to update the law's protections and oversight requirements each time it comes up for renewal rather than the protections running on autopilot indefinitely.