Congress is back after a two-week recess, and it has plenty to do, though resolving the Department of Homeland Security funding fight isn’t on the near-term agenda. Before lawmakers do much, though, they may have to face war powers votes aimed at reining in President Trump’s military campaign in Iran and may also have to deal with calls to expel some of their own members. Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell announced Monday that he will resign from Congress, a day after he dropped out of the California gubernatorial race in the wake of multiple allegations of sexual assault and misconduct.
DHS funding fight: The Department of Homeland Security on Friday ordered furloughed employees to return to work after President Trump directed the department to use funds from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act to pay all DHS employees. But the department remains partially shut down, future paychecks for employees are in limbo and Republicans are still split over a Senate plan to end the funding lapse that started almost two months ago, on February 14.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced on April Fools’ Day that they had reached a deal to move ahead with a two-track plan, funding most of DHS via a bipartisan appropriations bill and then using a Republican-only reconciliation bill to provide money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
Many House Republicans angrily rejected that approach, insisting that they won’t vote for a bill that excludes funding for immigration enforcement. Now Johnson, who initially opposed the Senate plan before endorsing it, reportedly intends to leave it stalled as House Republicans wait for the Senate to move ahead with the reconciliation bill, which President Trump has said he wants on his desk by June 1. Trump said in a social media post Friday that “Reconciliation is ON TRACK, and we are moving FAST and FOCUSED in keeping our Border SECURE, and getting funding to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to continue our incredible SUCCESS at MAKING AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!”
But that part of the plan is also fraught with potential problems.
“Senate Republicans are charging ahead with a plan not to find spending offsets to pay for the cost of the legislation, which would help keep Democrats from forcing tough Senate votes on a wide variety of hot-button issues as part of the reconciliation process,” Politico’s Meredith Lee Hill reports. “But that decision will rankle House GOP fiscal hawks who wanted to include a raft of spending cuts and additional policies beyond immigration enforcement funding.”
Trump’s deadline leaves Republicans with seven weeks to decide what should be included in their reconciliation bill and resolve their differences on many of the details involved.
Republicans plan a tax pitch: With Tax Day coming up on Wednesday, President Trump and Republicans will be working to tout the sweeping cuts they passed in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act — though that message is complicated by surging oil and gas prices and the potential for further fallout from Trump’s war in Iran. The president himself told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News yesterday that gas prices may not fall before November’s midterm elections. Asked whether he thinks the price of oil and gas will be lower before the elections, Trump said he hopes so. “It could be. It could be the same, or maybe a little bit higher. It should be around the same.”
The average price of a gallon of regular gas in the U.S. is now $4.13, according to AAA, up from $3.63 a month ago and $3.19 a year ago. A government report Friday showed that those rising energy prices have driven overall inflation to a two-year high.
After ceasefire talks with Iran ended Sunday without a deal, Trump is betting that a new U.S. Navy blockade of Iranian ports will pressure Tehran to reopen the vital waterway for shipments of oil and other goods or resume negotiations.
The bottom line: Congress is back, but the DHS shutdown looks likely to stretch on for weeks, officially at least.