House Votes to Reopen DHS, Ending Historic Partial Shutdown

The House voted to end the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown on Thursday afternoon, marking the end of the longest funding lapse for a single U.S. department in history.  

A bill to fund all DHS components except for those related to immigration enforcement is headed to President Donald Trump’s desk after a 76-day standoff between Republicans and Democrats.  

Negotiations were stalled over disputes tied to immigration enforcement policy. 

The measure passed by voice vote, in which members shout their approval without recording individual votes and estimate which response is stronger. That process allowed a bloc of Republican leadership, who agreed earlier this month to advance the Senate’s plan, to skirt around opposition within their own party. That opposition had led the House to initially reject the Senate’s proposal. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., agreed to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol through the budget reconciliation process, earlier this month. That came after President Donald Trump set a hard deadline for Republicans to fund DHS immigration enforcement component by June 1.   

The House passed the funding package for DHS just before departing for a week-long recess on Thursday evening.  

The move will reopen, in full, DHS components including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). 

While most DHS components have required some employees to continue working without pay – though Trump signed an order to pay TSA workers – around 40% of CISA’s embattled workforce worked throughout the closure’s duration.  

CISA’s Acting Director Nick Andersen told Congress last month that the closure resulted in multiple departures, with some of those being highly skilled and technical roles. 

The spending bill comes just in time before all emergency funding dries up. While on Fox & Friends earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that after April, DHS would have no more emergency funds to maintain the DHS payroll. 

In a statement, the American Federation for Government Employees (AFGE), which is the largest federal worker union, said that while it is pleased that Congress finally passed legislation to reopen DHS it is “unacceptable that it took them this long to do so.” 

“For the past 76 days, tens of thousands of AFGE members at the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, and many other DHS agencies have continued to show up each and every day without the guarantee of a paycheck,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said.  

“Too many times we have seen lawmakers use patriotic federal employees’ livelihoods as leverage for political gains. Federal employees are not political pawns. They are not leverage. They are Americans – and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” he added.