Congress

From TSA lines to disaster relief, here’s how a DHS shutdown would hurt

Published

5 months ago

February 11, 2026

There’s nothing like the ire of constituents to motivate lawmakers to end a government shutdown. But it could take weeks for the public to start noticing the funding lapse set to hit DHS on Saturday if Congress doesn’t act.

TSA airport screeners, for instance, wouldn’t miss full paychecks until March, and billions of dollars remain in the FEMA coffers used for immediate response to disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could find creative ways to lessen the pain of a shutdown. That could include bankrolling paychecks for DHS law enforcement personnel and active-duty members of the Coast Guard by tapping money from the tax and spending package Republicans enacted last summer, as the agency did during the shutdown last fall.

This could decrease pressure on lawmakers to fund DHS amid negotiations over a crackdown on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics. Congress doesn’t have forever, though, before the pain starts to kick in across the department.

Immigration and border security

The Trump administration’s immigration and border security operations are at the heart of the partisan dispute that could spark a shutdown. Compared to other parts of the agency, though, the federal government’s three immigration-focused agencies aren’t as affected by funding lapses.

About 40 percent of funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is untouched by a lapse. That’s because the agencies receive a combination of mandatory funds, revenue from fees and billions of dollars from the GOP megabill Trump signed into law in 2025.

Of the three, CBP relies most on the cash Congress provides each year in the regular government funding bills. But the agency received $65 billion from the party-line legislation Republicans cleared last summer, in addition to the $75 billion the law included for ICE.

TSA

When airport security screeners start missing pay, many stop showing up to work, causing TSA lines to grow at hubs throughout the country. In prior shutdowns, that started happening about a month in.

This time, screeners would begin missing full paychecks in mid-March, likely spurring longer waits during the peak of spring break travel.

While DHS paid air marshals during the historic government shutdown last fall, that didn’t cover checks for the TSA screeners who keep people and their baggage moving through U.S. airports.

One factor that could motivate TSA agents to show up to work anyway is the $10,000 bonuses DHS officials gave to screeners who demonstrated “exemplary service” after the funding lapse that ran through October and into November.

FEMA

FEMA has about $7 billion left in its disaster relief fund, a sum likely to buoy the agency for at least a month or two. While most of the agency’s disaster aid work continues during a government shutdown, though, FEMA would have to start restricting its reimbursements to states.

During past funding lapses, FEMA deemed roughly 85 percent of its 25,000 employees “essential,” meaning they had to continue coming to work without pay, and it continued processing disaster aid applications from individuals.

Coast Guard

The Coast Guard’s work alongside the military in missions abroad would continue during a funding lapse. But the service could have to halt some work including family support services and efforts to buy new cutters.

During the record-setting shutdown late last year, DHS dipped into a $10 billion pot of money from the GOP megabill to pay about 68,000 workers, including some law enforcement personnel and active duty members of the Coast Guard, to the tune of about $1 billion each pay period.

If DHS shuts down again, department officials could do the same for several months before exhausting the account, which was replenished after the government reopened in mid-November.

Coast Guard contractors and employees who are not active duty were not paid during the fall shutdown, however. And contractors are not guaranteed back pay, even though all federal employees, whether furloughed or not, are eligible for back pay after a shutdown under a law enacted in the wake of the funding lapse that ended in 2019.

Cybersecurity

The Trump administration has previously designated only about a third of federal workers as essential at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during a government shutdown.

That limits the workforce that scans and protects U.S. networks from cyber incursions. It also hinders CISA’s ability to help state and local officials defend against cyber threats and assist other agencies with security patches.

Even before Congress let any federal funding lapse in recent months, the Trump administration had already considerably downsized the agency. Around a third of its employees were eitherlaid off or quitover the last year, then dozens were permanently shifted to other DHS agencies during the shutdown that ended in November.

Secret Service

Most of the Secret Service’s workforce is kept on during a shutdown, sometimes including employees in charge of recruitment, training and communications. But personnel who do jobs in offices like human resources and finance are typically furloughed.

After Trump was shot at a campaign rally in 2024, the Secret Service significantly elevated the level of security it provides to the more than 40 people the agency is tasked with protecting, among them former presidents. During a government shutdown, the agency is more selective about how it spends money to safeguard those people.

Like other DHS agencies, the Secret Service also got money from the GOP’s 2025 tax and spending package that can be used during a funding lapse. That included almost $1.2 billion to cover a wide range of expenses such as training facility costs, technology and bonuses.

Thomas Frank, Paroma Soni, Leo Shane and Andres Picon contributed to this report.

Congress

Leon Black tells House Oversight he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes

Published

14 minutes ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Leon Black told the House Oversight Committee on Friday that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes during the years he paid the convicted sex offender tens of millions of dollars, according to a copy of the billionaire investor’s prepared remarks.

“I don’t understand why people — including members of this committee — would accept baseless speculation about me without regard to the facts and spin such ugly and vicious narratives that are demonstrably false,” Black said in his opening statement, obtained by Blue Light News.

Lawmakers, however, filed into Black’s scheduled transcribed interview Friday morning already suspicious of their witness. House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters he believed Black’s testimony had “the potential to be the most groundbreaking” of anything the panel has heard so far in its long-running Epstein investigation.

Comer also said the committee had reason to believe that Black had signed nondisclosure agreements with some of Epstein’s victims.

Black, a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, did acknowledge in his prepared remarks that he was aware of Epstein’s 2008 sex crime conviction at the time of their association but that “Epstein told me that it was an isolated incident resulting from a fake ID.”

“Five years after his conviction, I gave Epstein a second chance, as did many others,” he continued. “I wish I had not.”

Black also told lawmakers that he knew Epstein for 18 years before he began paying him in 2013 for tax and estate planning. At that time, Black said, he saw Epstein surrounded by some of the world’s most powerful people — among them former President Bill Clinton, tech mogul and philanthropist Bill Gates and then-White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler.

And he appeared to suggest that he saw Epstein as legitimate, in part, because of those who chose to associate with him: “Epstein appeared to me and to many others to have redeemed himself: [H]e served on several prestigious boards, hobnobbed with leading people in academia, the arts, business executives, and numerous world leaders.”

Clinton and Gates have already spoken with Oversight investors about their ties to Epstein; Ruemmler has agreed to sit for an interview with the panel in July.

Black said he ultimately fired Epstein in 2018 “after growing tired of his relentless pursuit of more and more money from me for professional services, his mistruths and misrepresentations … and his failure to repay most of a $30 million demand loan that I had made to him.”

He also acknowledged the allegations of sexual misconduct that have been levied against him in litigation, which he called “demonstrably baseless” and “entirely fabricated.”

In one recent case, the judge found that the law firm that had been representing Black’s accusers and the plaintiff in the case were “engaged in serious, sanctionable misconduct in this case.” However, the lawsuit — brought by a woman who claimed to have been raped by Black when she was 16 — was allowed to proceed.

“There are numerous allegations of real abuse by women — by survivors — against Mr. Black,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, told reporters Friday morning.

Congress

Capitol agenda: House GOP agenda gets tenuous Trump lifeline

Published

3 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump handed Speaker Mike Johnson a lifeline Thursday to get Republicans’ agenda back on track next week.

But hard-liners’ festering discontent over Trump’s stalled election bill could jam the chamber again.

For now, members plan to return Monday and press forward on a long list of major legislation before Independence Day recess, including fiscal 2027 funding bills, the annual defense policy bill, a kids online safety bill and negotiations for a third reconciliation measure lawmakers want to stuff with party priorities.

Trump Thursday instructed the band of GOP hard-liners to lift their procedural block of House floor business. Still, some are doubling down in new ways.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who engineered this week’s impasse through a blockade of procedural votes, said if leaders want her support to advance legislation next week, they’ll need to attach the SAVE America Act to the defense policy bill.

Senior House Republicans feel joining the bills would kill the must-pass defense legislation that typically wins bipartisan support. And Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that attaching the two measures would also sink the defense bill in the Senate.

Meanwhile, another hard-liner, Rep. Chip Roy, responded to Trump’s call to lift the House gridlock with a new list of legislative demands for House leaders.

Johnson, for his part, focused on the positive. He told reporters at the Capitol after meeting Trump that he and the president are “on exactly the same page” about stopping “any blockade in the House.”

He also said Congress would be transmitting the housing affordability bill it cleared this week to the White House, after the president abruptly reversed course Wednesday on a signing ceremony for the bill and demanded Senate passage of the controversial election overhaul first.

What else we’re watching:

— HISPANIC CAUCUS BRACES FOR CHAIR’S SUCCESSOR: Hispanic Caucus members are still reeling from Chair Adriano Espaillat’s electoral defeat this week. But they’re warily preparing to welcome his successor — with some conditions. Darializa Avila Chevalier — a Democratic Socialist who ousted Espaillat in New York’s primary Tuesday, said Thursday in a statement she plans to join the CHC when she gets to Congress, which is all but guaranteed in November.

— COMER TO GRILL EPSTEIN-LINKED INVESTOR: Investor Leon Black will speak to House Oversight Friday for an interview Chair James Comer has called “the big one” in his panel’s investigation of the Jeffrey Epstein case. “It’s going to be hard for him to deny the questions we’re going to ask,” Comer told reporters this week.

Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, Riley Rogerson and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Congress

The Lincoln Memorial should be green with envy: This reflecting pool stayed clear

Published

7 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Still blue waters, abundant waterfowl, promenading tourists and barely a whiff of mildew — that is the vision President Donald Trump has struggled to turn into reality this month at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

But that has long been the reality just a mile-and-a-half down the National Mall, where another reflecting pool floats just under Capitol Hill — and under the radar — without a scummy green film floating on top.

As the algae-tinged drama has played out at the Lincoln Memorial, little attention has been paid to its sister pond which is slightly smaller, more obscure and managed by a different entity — the Architect of the Capitol, not the National Park Service.

Both are expensive and challenging to maintain, but the trapezoid-ish Capitol Reflecting Pool hasn’t faced the same intractable problems that have plagued the long and skinny pool to the west.

“Anytime you have a water feature in general … they are beautiful, they’re amazing, but they’re problematic because they degrade faster over time than pretty much anything else you’re going to have,” Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin said in an interview Wednesday. “They require pumps, require pipes — corrosion, animals, diseases, bacteria, algae. There’s a lot of things that go along with that.”

Austin’s agency drains the Capitol pool each fall and sometimes in the spring to evaluate the basin and make repairs. Employees go in with heavy equipment to “remove the sludge that collects throughout the year,” according to a 2017 AOC report.

Then masons repair cracks and other issues with the concrete basin and plumbers tackle pipe and pump problems before refilling the pool. The draining, repairing and refilling can all happen within a week, depending on the extent of work needed, according to an internal AOC bulletin.

The Capitol Reflecting Pool is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 25, 2026.

In contrast, draining and refilling the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool typically takes about a month.

There is no evidence that the National Park Service or White House sought the AOC’s expertise with reflecting pool maintenance before embarking on the recent renovations across town, which included spraying the floor with an “American flag blue” rubberized coating.

The Park Service has some experience with the Capitol pond: It managed the body until 2011, when Congress assumed control for itself in an omnibus spending bill — scuttling NPS plans for a shallower pool with an overnight draining system.

Instead, the Architect of the Capitol proceeded with a $7.3 million renovation that included draining the pool, thoroughly cleaning it and making repairs to the concrete.

Today, families of ducks call the Capitol Reflecting Pool home, and AOC craftspeople even fabricated and installed ramps to help ducklings make their way in and out of the water. (Some congressional fiscal hawks briefly balked at the expenditure.)

This week, a trio of dead ducks found at the Lincoln Memorial pool increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s renovation, including the use of high-concentration hydrogen peroxide in the water to combat a recent algae bloom.

On Thursday, eyewitnesses who posted on social media reported the water appeared closer to sparkling, though some residual algae was spotted.

The White House did not address questions about whether it had consulted with the legislative branch on how to maintain a water body before embarking on the Lincoln Memorial project.

“Today, the Reflecting Pool is crystal clear and is reflecting perfectly,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement, calling it a feat “only an expert builder like Donald J. Trump could accomplish.”

Austin also declined to weigh in on why the water at the Lincoln Memorial has been so much more troublesome than the Capitol’s.

“I will not say that our full reflecting pool is without problems, because it certainly does have some issues,” he said. “It’s also smaller, so that’s part of it, too. And it was kind of formulated in different ways, so it’s kind of hard to compare apples to apples on this one.”

The Capitol Reflecting Pool is seen outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 25, 2026.

The Capitol’s pool, sandwiched between two parking lots and the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial was completed in 1971, making it about half the age of the Lincoln Memorial’s. It has not always been without blight, however.

In 2020 there was an algae bloom during a stretch of particularly hot weather. And in 2008, when the pool was still under NPS control, at least two dozen dead ducks were removed from the water after avian botulism took hold. These days, some cracked stone can be spotted along the perimeter.

Several lawmakers who exercise oversight of the Capitol campus declined to say much to compare and contrast the two reflecting pools.

“I want to thank the Architect of the Capitol for keeping it clear and keeping it clean,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview this week when asked if his time on the Legislative Branch Appropriations subcommittee gave him any insight into the pool.

“Size matters,” added Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), a member of the House Administration Committee.

Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the Legislative Branch Appropriations subcommittee, said he believed the Trump administration’s rushed approach to the Lincoln Memorial rehab was the most obvious distinction between the health of the two pools.

“I mean, anybody with an eighth-grade science class could have predicted that this was not going to go well,” he said.