Lawmakers Race to Prevent Another Government Shutdown

Henrietta Treyz, Co-Founder at Veda Partners, discusses the political and economic stakes tied to a Supreme Court decision on IEEPA tariff powers as well as the hurdles lawmakers face to deter another government shutdown at the end of this month.

The absence of Homeland Security funding as part of yesterday’s minibus bill release bill signals lawmakers aren’t close yet to funding all of the government by the Jan. 30 deadline.

Lawmakers released two more full-year funding bills yesterday, and were hoping to package the Homeland Security measure with the Financial Services and State Department funding as they kept their momentum going to fund the government. But the bill, considered to be one of the most challenging to negotiate, has hit snags.

The difficulties of negotiating the Homeland Security bill have been exacerbated after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis last week. Democrats are pushing to rein in ICE and President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown after the fatal shooting.

“Clearly we need some accountability” over ICE, Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told reporters last Thursday.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security subcommittee, said Democrats aren’t looking for “sweeping” changes to ICE.

“We’re simply talking about essentially going back to the way that ICE was operating when they cared about legality,” Murphy said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday. “We just need to get back to a Department of Homeland Security that is prioritizing the law and prioritizing keeping people safe.”

A new DHS policy restricting lawmakers’ access to ICE facilities isn’t likely to help negotiations either. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem argued ICE facilities aren’t subject to a federal law that allows members of Congress to visit facilities without prior notice.

The new policy is justified, Noem wrote in a Jan. 8 memo filed Saturday in a Washington DC federal court, because agency staff will carry it out using funding from the GOP tax and spending reconciliation bill enacted last summer. Read More

Hiccups in the immigration enforcement funding don’t necessarily doom DHS or other agencies to another funding lapse. Both sides have publicly said they want to finish appropriations for the ongoing fiscal year by Jan. 30 or at least pass a partial stopgap funding bill to cover bills that don’t get to Trump’s desk this month.

“We went through the longest government shutdown in American history last year. I don’t think we need to repeat it,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday. “We need to go ahead and get our appropriations bills done, keep the government operating.”

It’s unclear when appropriators would release the Homeland funding measure and whether it would be included in their last minibus which would include the Defense, Labor-HHS-Education, and Transportation-HUD funding bills. Those bills make up the lion’s share of discretionary spending.

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