White House and congressional negotiators on Monday began to privately acknowledge they may run out of time to prevent at least a brief partial government shutdown this weekend, as talks to fund the Department of Homeland Security — along with nearly three-quarters of the federal government — came up short of final agreement.
Representatives for President Biden and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have been locked in days-long deliberations on how to fund border security and immigration enforcement operations at DHS, which is already staring at a shortfall under its current budget.
But even after the sides appeared to reach a tentative agreement late Sunday night, those talks, like similar conversations over the weekend, failed to yield results by Monday afternoon, according to multiple people familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss fragile negotiations.
Funding for roughly 70 percent of the federal government — including the departments of Defense, State and Homeland Security as well as the Internal Revenue Service — will lapse at 12:01 a.m. Saturday unless Congress acts before then. House rules say members need 72 hours to review legislation before a vote, and the spending bills to resolve the impasse weren’t released by early Monday evening. If the bill text doesn’t come out until late Monday or Tuesday, the House probably wouldn’t vote until Friday, leaving very little time for the Senate to follow suit.
Lawmakers might be able to wrap up the spending bills not long after the deadline, blunting the impact of a partial shutdown that mostly takes place at night or on a weekend. But a prolonged closure could have cascading effects on the government and economy. More than half of IRS employees would face furloughs at the height of tax filing season. The roughly 1.3 million active-duty U.S. military service members would remain on the job without pay. So would Transportation Security Administration screeners, many of whom called in sick in protest during a previous shutdown, sparking nationwide travel delays.
Biden administration officials sounded an optimistic tone Monday: “This is obviously an administration that is hopeful and hopes that Congress gets to the bottom of this and gets to a point where we keep the government open,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing with reporters.
But on Capitol Hill, the mood darkened, as debates over immigration policy clouded the overall funding picture.
Former president Donald Trump’s rhetoric around the subject — he helped kill a bipartisan compromise on border security last month and said Sunday that undocumented migrants were “not people” and were “animals” — has fueled distrust at the bargaining table. Johnson and other leading Republicans have endorsed the former president and are said to consult with him on immigration policy.
“We’re back to where we were in December and January when we were trying to do the border deal, where the Republicans are back to asking for things that won’t actually do anything for the border,” said one Democratic aide with knowledge of the talks who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private negotiations.
Border issues have complicated other funding measures, as well. Biden, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) remain at an impasse about U.S. spending to support Ukraine, talks that have gone awry over Republican attempts to link the money to border security. Bipartisan talks in the Senate reached a sweeping immigration and border security compromise that was intended to satisfy GOP requests, but House lawmakers rejected it, as did Trump, and the Senate then voted it down last month.
The federal spending picture was not supposed to be this fraught. Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) agreed last spring to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling in exchange for limiting federal spending in 2024. Some House Republicans detested that deal, which they hoped would generate deeper spending cuts. Disagreements over spending ultimately led a band of rebels to oust McCarthy from the speakership in October.
Johnson has abided by those spending amounts, though, and agreed with Schumer in January to a top-line spending figure — $1.7 trillion — for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Congress already passed, and Biden signed, the first leg of a government funding package worth $459 billion earlier this month. Negotiators have mostly agreed on measures to fund the rest of the federal government but are stuck on the Homeland Security provisions — which might be difficult to pass on their own because of the political frenzy around immigration.
Jean-Pierre declined to discuss the status of the negotiations Monday with reporters but said the Department of Homeland Security “needs a bill that adequately funds operational pace.”
The number of migrants arriving along the Mexican border has fallen significantly since December, when authorities tallied 250,000 illegal entries, the highest monthly total ever.
A crackdown by Mexican authorities has slowed the pace of arrivals so far in 2024, but DHS officials expect a seasonal increase in illegal crossings this spring. That would put new strains on U.S. border agents and detention facilities.
The bipartisan bill that failed in the Senate last month included nearly $14 billion in supplemental funding for immigration and border security, including $6 billion for ICE detention and deportation operations. The funds would have allowed the agency to boost its detention capacity from 40,000 to 50,000 beds, according to administration officials.
Instead, ICE officials are facing a $700 million budget shortfall, and the agency has started drafting emergency plans to cut costs by releasing thousands of detainees. With fewer available detention beds, ICE has warned that it will also have to cut back on the number of people who cross the border illegally that it can accept from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
That would increase the odds that migrants who enter the United States illegally will be released into the country, rather than detained and deported, regardless of whether they have strong asylum claims.
Jean-Pierre said the department has deported or returned more migrants during the past 10 months than during any year since 2013: “They have maximized their operations.”
But deportations have soared because record numbers of migrants are entering the United States. Authorities have tallied about 2 million illegal crossings along the Mexican border on average since Biden took office, the busiest stretch in history.
Asked if the White House became involved in the budget negotiations too slowly, Jean-Pierre pushed back.
“That is something that is the basic duty of Congress,” she said. “It is their job to keep the government open.”
Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
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