The Trump administration spent more than half of the balance in the nation’s disaster relief fund this week, pointing to that dwindling aid as means to pressure Democrats into yielding in DHS funding negotiations.

A FEMA spokesperson said Friday that the agency sent out more than $5 billion this week for recovery projects, including for disasters “that happened more than 15 years ago.” The withdrawal substantially shrinks cash in the disaster coffer that held $9.6 billion as of last week and appears to contradict Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s weekend announcement that FEMA “is scaling back to bare-minimum, life-saving operations only.”

Accusing Democrats of “playing political games” with disaster aid amid the DHS shutdown, the FEMA spokesperson warned of “dire consequences” as the disaster relief fund “is being rapidly depleted.”

It has been almost two weeks since DHS funding lapsed, and still top lawmakers and the White House are trading offers on policies to curtail the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, which Democrats are demanding as a condition of voting to fully restore agency operations.

Republicans delivered a private counteroffer late Thursday, 10 days after Democrats on Capitol Hill sent their last proposal. A White House official granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations also cited diminished disaster relief Friday, challenging Democrats to “make a move … before more Americans are harmed.”

Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have offered plans to fund FEMA and other non-immigration agencies at DHS amid the negotiations over immigration enforcement policy. But top Republicans have rejected that idea.

Bill Clinton plans to testify that he did nothing wrong and had “no idea” about the crimes Jeffrey Epstein was committing — nor did he see anything that “ever gave me pause” — according to his prepared opening statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing — I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” the former president said in his statement, which he posted on X.

The prepared remarks also lambasted the Republican-led committee for demanding testimony from his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spent over six hours answering questions Thursday during her own deposition.

She testified that she does not recall meeting Epstein and denied any knowledge of his sex trafficking offenses with longtime co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Whether you subpoenaed 10 people or 10,000, including her was simply not right,” he said in the statement.

In contrast to Hillary Clinton’s opening statement, which referenced Epstein and Maxwell’s “criminal activities,” Bill Clinton’s statement makes no mention of Maxwell.

The former president said he is in Chappaqua testifying in compliance with a congressional subpoena because “no person is above the law, even Presidents — especially Presidents.”

He continued, “I hope that by being here today, we can bring ourselves a little further away from the brink and back to being a country where we can disagree with one another civilly–where the search for truth and justice outweighs the partisan urge to score points and create spectacle.”

Bill Clinton has maintained he was an acquaintance of Epstein’s but stopped communicating with him at least a decade before the late financier’s arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Neither he nor Hillary Clinton has been accused of wrongdoing.

The White House made a new Homeland Security funding proposal to congressional Democrats late Thursday as a partial shutdown of the sprawling department enters its third week.

The two sides have struggled to make progress since the funding lapse began Feb. 14, with the Senate failing Monday to advance legislation that would restore the flow of cash to agencies dealing with matters ranging from immigration enforcement to airport security to cyber infrastructure.

“Democrats need to make a move to end the shutdown before more Americans are harmed by a lack of funding for critical services like disaster relief,” a White House official said, describing the latest proposal as a “serious counter offer.”

Two other people granted anonymity to discuss the private negotiations confirmed that the White House sent its latest offer Thursday. No congressional action is expected until the middle of next week at the earliest, with the Senate out of town until Monday and the House not voting until Wednesday.

The White House official’s warning about disaster relief comes after President Donald Trump pointed to a recent snowstorm that clobbered parts of the Northeast in urging Democrats to end the partial shutdown during his State of the Union speech. FEMA officials said earlier this month that the main federal disaster fund “has sufficient balances to continue emergency response activities for the foreseeable future,” but expected new disbursements could drain it quickly.

Democrats have vowed to block DHS funding until they get changes to Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics after federal agents killed two people in January in Minneapolis. Enforcement agencies like ICE and Border Patrol, however, have been largely unaffected by the shutdown due to funding put in place last year by the party-line GOP megabill.

Democrats haven’t yet weighed in on the latest White House offer. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this week that Republicans have not meaningfully changed their position as talks have continued.

“They’re just trying to pass paper back and forth with no real changes,” Schumer told reporters.