The House passed a short-term spending bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security for two months, rejecting a deal passed by the Senate just hours earlier that would have funded most of the agency but withheld money for immigration enforcement.
The 60-day continuing resolution would revive 2025 funding levels through May 22 and would fulfill the budgets for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol, two areas that were omitted from the Senate deal. The spending bill passed along party lines late Friday night, making it all but guaranteed that the partial government shutdown will drag into its seventh week.
The temporary spending extension was cobbled together during a meeting between House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House conservatives who were angered by the Senate plan, which they said was done without their input.
The bill passed in a 213-203 vote, narrowly overcoming the simple majority needed to advance the chamber. Only three Democrats voted in favor. All members of Utah’s delegation voted to approve the spending proposal.
Instead, Democratic leaders have pushed to vote on the Senate deal that they argued was negotiated in a bipartisan manner.
“The only thing standing between ending this chaos or not are House Republicans, there’s a bipartisan bill that emerged from the Senate with uniform support, and it should be brought to the floor immediately,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told reporters on Friday.
The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration, where Democratic leaders have vowed to oppose — making it dead on arrival. The legislation would need 60 votes to advance the upper chamber, requiring at least seven Democrats to buck party lines.
Senate Republicans have indicated they’d prefer the House to pass what they approved early Friday morning, with one GOP leadership aide telling the Deseret News that because of “the staunch opposition from Senate Democrats, the clearest path to ending this harmful shutdown is for the House to adopt what the Senate just overwhelmingly approved.”
The Senate left on Friday for a two-week holiday recess, and it’s unlikely lawmakers would return early. If the House similarly declines to reconvene before its scheduled return, the DHS shutdown is set to last until at least April 13.
Meanwhile, a pair of bipartisan lawmakers in the House are quietly working on a backup plan with the anticipation that the latest House effort would fail to pass the House.
Under that plan — led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y. — all of DHS would be funded while also implementing a number of reforms. Those proposed reforms would include mandated body cameras, required public identification, a ban on masks, increased penalties for doxing agents, judicial warrants for criminal arrests, standardized training for agents, and more.
Whether that could pass both the House and Senate, or how quickly, is still unclear.