Border battle could bring shutdown

Another funding deadline looms as lawmakers can’t agree on immigration issues

A dispute over border security funding threatens to force a shutdown of vast swaths of the federal government in less than a week, as Congress and the White House struggled Sunday to reach a deal on long-term spending legislation.

Funding for roughly 70 percent of the federal government — including the departments of Defense, State and Homeland Security as well as the IRS and Transportation Security Administration — will expire Saturday just after midnight unless Congress acts before then.

A prolonged shutdown could have cascading effects on the government and economy. Two-thirds 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 airport security officers, many of whom called in sick in protest during a previous shutdown, sparking nationwide travel delays.

As recently as Friday, congressional negotiators were nearing an agreement to complete a spending bill for all those agencies, with the goal of voting on it as soon as Thursday. (Congress has already passed separate legislation funding the other 30 percent of the government.) But disagreements over immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border — an issue that has derailed legislation throughout this Congress and emerged as a key fault line between the parties in the November elections — stymied the talks, according to multiple people involved in the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Amid rising tension, negotiators for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., over the weekend appealed to the White House — rather than congressional Democrats — to engage in spending talks, revealing the fraught nature of the conversations. The two sides had expected to release text of the bills Sunday afternoon, but as large divisions persisted, that looked very unlikely, said a person with knowledge of the talks.

GOP negotiators were prepared to offer the Department of Homeland Security roughly the same level of funding for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, as the department received in fiscal 2023, plus some extra money for immigration enforcement, multiple people said. But due to inflation, that would represent a significant funding cut in real terms.

The White House rejected that proposal, the people said, saying even that amount of money would put the department at a dangerous shortfall.

“Republicans have always said we will provide all the resources necessary for enforcement, but not a blank check to simply ‘manage’ people into the country and bail out sanctuary cities,” a senior GOP aide said Sunday. “… House Republicans have repeatedly urged the White House for weeks to engage with congressional Democrats to help address the seriousness of the situation to little avail.”

The talks that continued Sunday afternoon, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, focused on where appropriators hoped to direct funding for border security: The White House wanted to preserve funding for detention facilities to house unauthorized migrants, while congressional Republicans were looking to send more money to Border Patrol agents to prevent migrants from crossing into the United States, possibly by shifting funds from detention to border enforcement.