Senators in both parties are warning that a political food fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security could cause a partisan government shutdown this month by derailing a second tranche of spending bills that Congress needs to pass by March 22.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Congress came within hours of a partial shutdown last week before it managed to pass a package of six largely noncontroversial spending bills before the Friday deadline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But lawmakers say the next package of bills, which would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), State and Homeland Security (DHS) as well as foreign operations, will be a much heavier lift because of deep partisan divisions over President Biden\u2019s\u2002<\/u><\/a>immigration policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray\u2002<\/u><\/a>(D-Wash.) told The Hill on Tuesday that the DHS funding bill is \u201cthe most challenging one,\u201d an assessment shared by other senators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sen. Lisa Murkowski\u2002<\/u><\/a>(R-Alaska) said \u201cHomeland is absolutely the toughest\u201d of the bunch but pointed out all of them are getting weighed down by fights over policy riders being pushed by House conservatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou got Defense in there,\u201d she noted. \u201cLabor, HHS is not an easy account either, but nobody\u2019s talking about that. We\u2019re all talking about Homeland and how challenging that\u2019s going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Murkowski said DHS funding is \u201csnarled up\u201d with demands for the Biden administration to continue construction of a border wall and adopt the Trump-era policy of requiring migrants to \u201cremain in Mexico\u201d while their asylum claims get processed in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n House Republicans are also pushing to zero out Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas\u2019s\u2002<\/u><\/a>salary; to prohibit funding for the CBP One app, which the Biden administration has used to parole migrants into the country; and to defund memos limiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection enforcement operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Murkowski floated the possibility of separating the appropriations bill funding Homeland Security from the rest of the package to avoid a broader government shutdown after March 22.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think you may have a situation where you could bifurcate this whole thing. If Homeland could not be resolved, you could move through those we have agreement on so that they\u2019re at least in a better place process-wise, and then we deal with Homeland differently,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources familiar with the negotiations say that House Republicans are insisting on a variety of immigration-related policy riders that are unacceptable to Senate Democrats. There\u2019s also a fight over how to spend billions of dollars that would be newly allocated to Mayorkas to deal with the huge surge of migrants across the southern border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s a big mess,\u201d said a Senate Republican aide about the impasse over the Homeland Security funding measure. \u201cIt could jeopardize the larger package.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Senate Democratic source familiar with the negotiations between Senate and House appropriators said that House Republicans don\u2019t want to greenlight the billions of dollars in new funding allocated to the Biden administration to handle the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming across the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Republicans wanted a lot more money in the allocations\u201d for the Department of Homeland Security, but \u201cnow they don\u2019t want to spend it because it might make things better, and they don\u2019t want to make things better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey want policy riders on everything,\u201d the source added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n