GOP’s DHS funding battle turns up the heat on House-Senate Republican civil war

Republicans in the House and Senate are in a battle over how to move forward with funding the Department of Homeland Security after the two chambers took diametrically opposed paths last week in approving bills to fund the embattled DHS.

The standoff has left both sides bickering, and there’s a tinge of bitterness, among House Republicans who were surprised by the Senate bill and thought they were being jammed; and Senate Republicans miffed at the House GOP’s outright rejection of their measure.

Brian Darling, a GOP strategist and former Senate aide, said the Senate is “trying to bully the House into passing something they don’t want to pass.”

“It was a last-minute that they passed in three in the morning through [unanimous consent] and threw it over to the House, expecting that the House would have no choice but to pass the bill and the House said no,” he said.

Senate Republicans are ready to move on from the 45-day standoff by passing as much Homeland Security funding by regular order and taking care of ICE and Border Patrol through a budget reconciliation package, which could avoid a Democratic filibuster.

They think the House had the votes to pass the Senate measure, though Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would have had to have depended on Democrats to get it through his chamber.

“I think we sent the bill over there because it was set up so that if some Republicans wanted to vote no, they could have voted no but ultimately we think it would have passed,” Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Monday.

The bill passed by the Senate funded much of DHS, but did not include money for Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and parts of the Border Patrol.

The measure’s passage appeared to take many House Republicans by surprise, and they reacted with anger at the end of last week. Johnson quickly signaled he had no intention of moving the bill.

“The Republicans are not going to be part of any effort to reopen our borders or to stop immigration enforcement,” Johnson declared at a press conference Friday. “The Senate Democrats have foisted upon this appropriations practice their radical and crazy agenda. They want to reopen the borders and they want to stop the deportation of dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”

Republicans in the House ended up passing an eight-week stopgap measure to fund all of DHS, legislation that is dead on arrival with Senate Democrats.

Johnson told House GOP colleagues during a conference call Friday that the Senate Republicans stopped communicating with his team after passing the partial Homeland Security funding bill in the early hours of Friday morning.

Tensions between Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) reached a boiling point during the DHS standoff, a dispute that reflects Thune’s and Johnson’s divergent political goals with the midterm election only a few months away.

Thune, who feels confident about keeping the Senate Republican majority and his job as leader, wants to preserve the Senate’s institutional power.

Johnson, on the other hand, has to worry about keeping restive conservatives in his conference and faces long odds in remaining Speaker after the midterm election as Republicans are expected to lose the House majority.   

“Thune and Johnson are definitely on different pages,” Darling said. “The House is in grave danger of flipping to the Democrats. The Senate is not as much. It’s very hard for Democrats to take the Senate. It’s possible but it’s much harder. It’s an uphill battle for Democrats to do that.

He said Senate Republicans, who are favored to keep their majority, are taking a more cautious and pragmatic approach to the Homeland Security funding fight while House Republicans, with their majority in grave peril, are digging in and fighting.

“I think Republicans in the Senate are just trying to make sure they don’t lose the chamber whereas Republicans in the House are just digging in and fighting,” the GOP strategist said.

Senate Republicans opted not to ask for unanimous consent during a pro forma session Monday to instead pass a House-approved bill to extend funding for the entire Department of Homeland Security, including ICE and Border Patrol, as Democrats have vowed to block it.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) attended the pro forma session to object to the House bill in case it came up.

Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, who has served several stints as a fellow in the Senate, called the Senate-passed Homeland Security bill a “reasonable bill,” noting that it was unanimously approved.

He said unless Johnson agrees to put in on the floor, the spending standoff “drags on interminably.”

He called the relationship between Thune and Johnson “problematic.”

“The Senate really does operate on the gang system where you get a number of senators in the same ballpark on a controversial issue and there’s always leeway” to cut a deal “and that good floor leaders really understand that’s the way it works.

“Many times it’s not the bill they as party leader wants but they recognize the chamber has to do something,” he said of Thune’s handling of the Homeland Security bill.

“The situation in the House is much more chaotic,” Baker added. “All these people don’t know each other. There’s fairly large turnover and it will be even bigger in 2026 and the MAGA faction is more influential in the House than the Senate.”

Thune told reporters early Friday morning that GOP senators felt they had to salvage what they could from a bad situation after it became clear that Democrats would not vote to fund ICE and Border Patrol under any circumstances. 

Thune warned that trying to pass all of Homeland Security funding through the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster is an unwieldy process. 

“One of the reasons I think it was important to get these other agencies funded here is if you try to do it all in reconciliation it implicates a lot of committees of jurisdiction and any time you draw more committees in it gets a lot more complicated,” he explained. 

Even so, Hoeven on Monday said Senate Republicans are moving ahead with a plan to fund all of DHS for the next three years under the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster. 

“We’re coming back with reconciliation. We’re going to send [the House] that actually funds DHS for the next three years. We’re not going through this again with the Dems, OK?” he said. 

Republican senators would like to see President Trump put some pressure on House Republicans to put the Senate-passed Homeland Security funding bill up for a vote but Trump hasn’t given them much help.

The president instead has urged Thune to either abolish the Senate filibuster to clear away Democratic obstruction or to force Democrats to hold the floor in continuous debate — something known as the talking filibuster — to make it more arduous for them to block Republican bills.

Asked Monday if he was caught off-guard by the Senate passing its Homeland Security funding bill in a late-night compromise with Democrats, Trump again urged Thune to use a straight majority vote to end the filibuster.

“They should terminate the filibuster and they should vote. They’re playing it too soft, Trump told reporters Monday.

Effectively changing the Senate’s rules with a simple-majority vote is so controversial that doing so is referred to within the chamber as the “nuclear option.”

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