Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, testified before the Senate Budget Committee on Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security is in dire straits following a more than two-month partial shutdown that has starved it of discretionary funding.
Vought stated that DHS has been “disintegrating” since funding lapsed on February 14 due to Democrats’ opposition to immigration enforcement tactics under the Trump administration.
“As of right now, the Department of Homeland Security is disintegrating because the Secretary Markwayne Mullin and I are having to figure out ways to temporarily fund people’s paychecks so that we don’t have people quit and embark on new careers,” Vought testified.
Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection are largely funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the funding dispute has affected other agencies within DHS. These include the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The Senate passed a funding bill for DHS on March 27 that included discretionary appropriations for all agencies except ICE and CBP in a concession to Democrats. However, that measure has stalled in the House.
Republicans in Congress are considering a reconciliation proposal to fund DHS, which would allow them to bypass a Senate filibuster.
“We’re in a crisis right now because of the fact that the Democrats did not fund the Department of Homeland Security for a month, and as a result, we had a Department of Homeland Security that was disintegrating,” Vought said. “The Senate then had to take steps to pass everything but ICE and the CBP.”
“So now we’re in a situation where we have to, on the mandatory side, pass a reconciliation bill to fund those two law enforcement agencies because the Democrats wouldn’t do it through the normal appropriations process,” Vought added. “This process has to be tight. It has to be timely, and we fully expect to get that done between now and June.”
Vought warned that more workers will quit if Congress does not soon restore the agency’s funding.
“They will indeed, and some of the things that we were seeing the weekend Secretary Mullin took office was incredibly concerning,” he said. “We have to have a funding mechanism for the entirety of the Department of Homeland Security, including those two important law enforcement agencies.”
He also emphasized that the funding lapse is putting the country at risk in preventing 9/11-style terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters.
“We are not prepared for a natural disaster from a funding standpoint,” Vought said. “All of the law enforcement agencies, including TSA, are affected. Right now, we are temporarily using a fund from the ‘one big beautiful bill’ to pay salaries so that the secretary of homeland security doesn’t have a complete walkout on his hands.”
