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.
This scale of funding was routed specifically to avoid the ordinary appropriations process and the oversight that comes with it. 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. This was 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.
Reconciliation funding arrives as a multi-year lump sum with far less line-by-line control — a real structural tradeoff whatever the policy goal. 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. 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.
Voters chose this policy in 2024, and durable funding is what lets an enacted mandate actually get implemented. Mass deportation and border security were central, explicit commitments of the 2024 election. 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.
A funding fight over accountability didn't actually reach the agency it was aimed at. 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. That triggered a roughly 75-day shutdown 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 — enforcement insulated, everything else exposed — was the real bipartisan complaint. 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. Using annual appropriations leverage to affect only the agencies not already funded through reconciliation is a blunt tool that mostly missed its intended target.
The strategy of holding non-immigration agencies hostage didn't extract the concessions Democrats wanted. 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. 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.
Shifting disaster costs onto states now, with the fund already drained, risks leaving the neediest communities exposed. FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund was drawn down to emergency levels during the 76-day DHS shutdown, right as hurricane season approached. 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 without the resources to respond when the next major disaster hits.
Two different FEMA reform tracks are moving in parallel, and which one wins — or whether they merge — is still genuinely open. 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. 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 dysfunction predates this shutdown, and shifting more control to states could mean faster, better-targeted decisions. 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 could mean faster, better-targeted local decision-making rather than a one-size-fits-all federal process.
Record ICE detention numbers just confirmed what the fatal shootings already showed: enforcement is scaling up with less accountability, not more. DHS finally published detention data on July 20, 2026, after a three-month delay — the longest in its recent history — showing ICE arrests at a record level, with detainees who have no criminal record now making up 37% of the detained population, up from just 6% in January 2025. That data followed backlash over two more fatal shootings during immigration enforcement operations, in Texas and Maine, on top of the earlier deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minnesota — while agents obscuring their faces and declining to identify themselves during arrests remains widely documented.
A narrower, more procedural set of asks may be the realistic path forward while the bigger fight stays stuck. 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. That narrower scope represents an area where agreement may be more achievable precisely because it doesn't touch the underlying enforcement policy itself.
Most ICE arrests involve people charged with or convicted of a crime, and agents have real safety reasons for the practices critics object to. Agents conducting operations against individuals connected to violent gangs or organized criminal networks have real, documented safety reasons for obscuring their identity from retaliation. A DHS spokesperson has pointed to most ICE arrests being of people charged with or convicted of a crime, even as detainees without a criminal record have grown as a share of the detained population.
A critical cyber-information-sharing law lapsed twice in one year, weakening protection for power grids and hospitals in the process. 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. That left 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.
Almost nobody disputes this law should be renewed — the failures have been purely about process, not substance. The law's repeated lapses happened despite near-universal agreement among administration officials, congressional leaders of both parties, and industry cybersecurity experts that it should be renewed. This is 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 reauthorized this law every time it's come up, and a periodic sunset is a reasonable, deliberate check. Congress has consistently reauthorized the law each time it lapsed, most recently extending it through September 2026. A ten-year law with a built-in sunset requiring periodic congressional reconsideration is itself a reasonable, deliberate check, rather than running the protections on autopilot indefinitely.