Welcome to Washington: Congress Braces for What Could Be the Ugliest Shutdown Yet

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem may be an albatross around the necks of Republicans this year. She is one of President Trump’s least-popular cabinet secretaries, with her favorable rating 20 points underwater, according to recent polling from YouGov. Her unpopularity, coupled with the public support for reforms at ICE and Border Patrol, means this looming shutdown may be the ugliest yet for Democrats and Republicans alike. Welcome to Washington, where Congress is staring down a deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security by this Friday. Every other part of the federal government is funded through the end of the fiscal year, though the DHS matter has bedeviled lawmakers for weeks since the shooting deaths of two American citizens in Minnesota. Senate Democrats are making demands in exchange for allowing the spending bill to advance through their chamber, where it takes 60 votes to bring an end to debate for spending legislation. Some of those reforms include forcing deportation agents to identify themselves, requiring judicial warrants for searches, barring agents from entering schools and polling places, and requiring agents to wear body cameras and remove their masks. While some of those proposed reforms are popular according to the YouGov poll — with 56 percent of Americans believing agents should not wear masks and only 34 percent believing ICE makes America safer — Republicans are digging in. The top Republican on the subcommittee charged with writing the DHS budget, Senator Katie Britt, says Democrats are not only making unrealistic demands — they are actively dodging negotiations. “We’ve attempted to reach out to Democrats, who are incredibly hard to meet,” Mrs. Britt told reporters on Thursday. “Obviously we can’t find a happy medium if we don’t have a conversation.”“Just continuing to tweet and have a press conference and then tweet and not have a conversation — it doesn’t seem like that’s an actual topic for the next step,” she added, referring to Democrats’ list of demands. “If it took them a week to come up with a list of demands, imagine then [the time it takes] trying to find common ground.”“We’re running out of time,” Mrs. Britt declared. The politics of a DHS shutdown serves Democrats well, to be sure, given the polling data and the recent special election results in heavily Hispanic areas across the country. The Senate minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, implied to The New York Sun that he and the House minority leader, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, are on the same page in respect of blocking any more short-term funding bill for DHS, as Democrats agreed to last week. “There is chaos and there is a rogue force — ICE — that is rampaging through these cities and causing huge amounts of damage. We Democrats have heard the cry of the American people: ‘Fix this!’” Mr. Schumer told reporters. This difference between what could be this DHS shutdown and the six-week-long total government shutdown last year is that Democrats are uniformly behind Mr. Schumer’s position. Last year, the Democrats seemed to stumble into a shutdown in a haphazard way as a lapse in health insurance subsidies was looming at the end of 2025. Now, even the most moderate Democrats — including Senators Angus King, Catherine Cortez Masto, and John Fetterman, all of whom refused to vote to shut down the government last year — independently got behind the DHS funding blockade shortly after Alex Pretti was killed at Minneapolis. With Democrats united in blocking any funding deal without serious reforms and Republicans proclaiming that their counterparts are not negotiating in good faith, a partial shutdown of the federal government is nearly guaranteed. Neither side seems swayed by the fact that the Department of Homeland Security provides essential services, including air travel safety and emergency natural disaster response. Mrs. Britt says the only option left may well be a short-term funding package — known as a continuing resolution — for the Department of Homeland Security. Based on her lack of conversations with Democrats, however, she tells the Sun that she can only hope they get on board to avoid the consequences of a shutdown. “We are one week out and there’s not even been a conversation at any level,” Mrs. Britt said. “I certainly encourage Democratic leadership to reach out to the White House and to have that conversation.”

Welcome to Washington: Congress Braces for What Could Be the Ugliest Shutdown Yet

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