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

Online safety coalition urges House to reject KIDS Act compromise

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A coalition of children’s safety advocates is urging House leaders to reject a bipartisan compromise on online safety, arguing it weakens protections for minors and lets tech companies avoid accountability.

In a letter first shared with Blue Light News, the groups urged Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) and ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) to oppose the bipartisan package — known as the KIDS Act — ahead of a potential House vote as soon as next week.

Led by Design It For Us, ParentsTogether, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and the Young People’s Alliance and signed by 90 other organizations, the coalition said the deal struck by Energy and Commerce lawmakers fails to address its chief concern: the omission of a “duty of care” provision that would require tech companies to mitigate harms they know their products cause to young users.

“The Committee rejected our concerns and opted to negotiate a version that let Big Tech off the hook and rush this legislation to the House floor,” they wrote.

The warning comes after the groups previously raised similar concerns when the committee approved a version of the KIDS Act along party lines in March.

The Senate’s version of the Kids Online Safety Act — an expected component of Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s ongoing negotiations over online safety regulations — includes the “duty of care” language. Some House members have raised concerns that it could incentivize social media platforms to overzealously censor content to avoid litigation.

“It pains us that, given how hard we have fought for a strong federal solution to online child protection and for a strong bill to move to the House floor, the KIDS Act is the bill the House is championing,” they wrote, urging lawmakers to oppose the bill.

Parents RISE, a coalition of parents who have experienced child loss or mental health difficulties due to tech platforms, sent a second letter to the same parties laying out similar qualms. “We did not create Social Media Victims Remembrance Day so that our children’s names could be used as cover for a bill that protects the very companies that harmed them,” they wrote.

Tech industry group NetChoice has come out against the KIDS Act over censorship concerns.

Spokespeople for Johnson, Jeffries, Guthrie and Pallone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Congress

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

Published

2 hours 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

5 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.