'Homeland Security' has spawned political insecurity since DHS was born

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security flag waves outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building as seen on January 07, 2026 in Washington, DC. According to reports, a federal agent allegedly fatally shot a woman in her car during an incident in south Minneapolis. Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Why did the U.S. Senate strike its tent last week and go home early? Because in spite of a June 1 deadline set by President Trump, Senate Republican leaders were not ready to restore funding for two key components of the Department of Homeland Security.

We have reached the point where the phrase "homeland security" swiftly translates to political insecurity, and that brings the legislative machinery in Congress to a halt as the midterm elections loom.

Anyone following the president's second term thus far will not be surprised that the latest DHS freeze-up concerns the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

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Democrats have refused to provide the votes needed to fund those agencies after being rebuffed in their efforts at reform in the face of major headline-grabbing controversies.

Earlier this month, Republicans thought they had a procedural workaround to get the money flowing to these parts of DHS with their own votes alone. But then the Department of Justice announced a new "Anti-Weaponization" Fund that would use nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to compensate people who said they had been prosecuted or investigated by the department under former President Joe Biden.

Widely expected to be first in line for compensation were many who were prosecuted or investigated for their roles or reactions to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, including those convicted of beating police officers as they defended the House and Senate chambers. That attack by Trump supporters disrupted the official session of Congress that was convened to certify Trump's loss to Biden in the election of November 2020.

This week, that proved too much for many Senate Republicans. Thom Tillis, the retiring GOP senator from North Carolina, called the fund "stupid on stilts." Others who had fled the Capitol that January night fearing for their safety are not prepared to send big government checks to the perpetrators who were convicted in court.

But in the end, while the new compensation fund was a creation of the White House and the Department of Justice and not DHS, it is the latter agency that will still have key components unfunded as the summer begins (and the federal fiscal year ripens into its fourth quarter).

In its relatively brief history, DHS has been the focal point of repeated controversy and political brinksmanship. Even a mention of it now conjures visions of chaos, serving as a reminder to many that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents,overseen by DHS, were involved in the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, masked agents storming into homes without court orders and vast detention centers being built around the country.

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So it may come as a surprise, especially to younger Americans, to learn that DHS was originally conceived in the interest of unity and harmony – and that the phrase "homeland security" was originally meant to be reassuring.

The original idea goes back to 9/11

In the beginning, DHS was intended to carry forward the sense of shared purpose instilled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The loss of nearly 3,000 lives and the screen images of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burning and collapsing into ash had changed the country in a single day.

Horrific as it was, 9/11 unified Americans as nothing else had since the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that brought the U.S. into World War II. President George W. Bush saw his approval rating in the Gallup Poll soar from the mid-40s to more than 90 percent (still the record high in the Gallup).

It was all about the country coming together to protect itself in its moment of unaccustomed vulnerability. In the first hours of the aftermath on Sept. 11, 2001 scores of members of Congress stood together on the steps of the Capitol and sang "God Bless America." That spirit was widely expected to inspire public support and new laws addressing the vulnerabilities the attack had exposed.

DHS was designed to bring intelligence, safety, rescue, relief, and security agencies together under a single authority. It was to solve the problem of separate agencies "stove-piping" their information rather than sharing it – and that intelligence withholding was seen as enabling the terrorists who carried out the attacks.

Knocking down those interagency walls and pooling the existing support for the 22 agencies involved was intended to create critical mass politically. Its most familiar and popular components – such as the U.S. Coast Guard and federal airport security – helped bolster other functions that were more politically problematic like ICE and Border Patrol.

The sprawling behemoth known as DHS, with its breathtaking range of jurisdictions and current 260,000 employees (more than any federal department other than Defense and Veterans Affairs), was created in late 2002 with the passage of the Homeland Security Act. That act itself began as the legislative embodiment of that rare bipartisan moment. But over the course of its journey to passage, it was subject to the same partisan pressures that had dominated Washington in the 1990s and made the term gridlock a cliché.

Unity and harmony faded fast

Former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., speaks on Oct. 31, 2006 in Cherry Hill, N.J. Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

The initial spirit of cooperation broke down over, among other issues, the loss of collective bargaining rights for federal employees reassigned to the new department. President George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress insisted on that provision, and Democrats opposed it.

Disagreements over unionizing federal workers had been around for generations, dividing the Congress mostly along partisan lines. But when the collective bargaining issue was seen to delay the original homeland security bill for months, Republicans used it to portray the opposition as "soft on terror."

Since then, the need to maintain the most critical functions of DHS – including the Transportation Security Administration – has led to other showdowns and serial shutdowns. The longest of these, the longest full federal shutdown in history, lasted 43 days in the fall of 2025.

Often, as in the case of the "compensation fund," the roadblock issues have had little or nothing to do with homeland security in the sense most Americans understand it.

The creation of DHS and then the office of the Director of National Intelligence two years later increased the flow of information among the many agencies that had gathered more than they shared before 2001. In the prevention of another terror attack on the scale of 9/11, DHS has known some degree of success. But the combining of so many critical agencies has made the DHS itself an almost irresistible weapon of political pressure used by either party in service of its competing loyalties and partisan demands.

In 2015, Republicans threatened to vote against funding DHS in protest of the pro-immigration moves being made by the president at the time, Barack Obama. Now, with the immigration issue cutting the other way under Trump, the funding for DHS has been hung up by Democrats' demands for reforms at ICE.

That episode in 2015 recalled the Republican strategy for the midterm congressional elections of 2002. At the time, one of the most influential voices in Washington belonged to Karl Rove,the White House strategist and seasoned campaign operative whom the second President Bush had called "the architect" of his election campaign. Rove had also been an aide in the 1972 campaign of President Richard Nixon and was known for hardball tactics; and after 9/11 he saw the pending Homeland Security Act as a political opportunity.

President George W. Bush (L) speaks to the news media as chief strategist, Karl Rove sits behind him, at the White House on Oct. 1, 2002. in Washington, D.C. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The 2002 bill was written to allow the president to waive full civil service protections and collective bargaining rights for DHS employees, including those who had these benefits in their current federal jobs. Democrats considered this an unnecessary swipe at unions and employee rights and civil service protections, so the bill was delayed while that debate raged on. One of the Democrats involved was Georgia's Max Cleland, a triple-amputee veteran of the Vietnam War who had served in the cabinet under President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s before winning a Senate seat in 1996.

Cleland eventually and reluctantly accepted a compromise on the employee rights issue and voted for final passage (along with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, among others). Nonetheless, his Republican challenger in the 2002 midterm election, Saxby Chambliss, ran an ad focused on the delay in the bill's passage. The ad at one point showed a picture of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and then pictured Cleland, questioning this commitment to fighting terrorism. Although widely condemned as deceptive, the ad hit home in Georgia.

Chambliss won that November, benefiting from a highly unusual surge of enthusiasm for the party of the president in a midterm election cycle. Bush's GOP picked up seats in the House and Senate in 2002, breaking what had been a 50-50 tie in the Senate and making Bush the first president to gain ground in both chambers in a midterm election since FDR in 1934.

Cleland and other Democrats had no doubt that the White House strategy in that 2002 Homeland Security Act debate had been engineered to make them somehow "soft on terrorism" in that campaign year. Cleland died in 2021 at 79, but his last campaign remains a kind of touchstone for political consultants and ad makers. And it remains a cautionary tale for officeholders who oppose any aspect of legislation that can be labeled "homeland security."

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Chaos and dysfunction

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and funding for DHS is only as strong on Capitol Hill as its least popular component. Right now, that is surely ICE. In the second Trump term, the immigration crackdown ordered by White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller has generated significant pushback even before the tragic events in Minnesota. Democrats, already opposed to what Miller was doing, have blocked funding – not only for ICE but, for months, its parent DHS as well – which affected all its other functions and employees.

Even now, Republicans refuse to negotiate reforms for ICE or the Border Patrol, so Democrats are blocking their funding. Senate Republicans have turned to a time-consuming procedural tactic called "budget reconciliation" that they can use to break this blockade, but they will need all their troops in line in the restive weeks ahead. Getting a clean funding measure for ICE and the Border Patrol with no Democratic reforms looked plausible earlier this month; and it may still happen.

But once again, the desire to press ahead with competing agendas under the aegis of homeland security is getting in the way of funding the department charged with protecting that security.

Trump and some Republicans in Congress also wanted this reconciliation bill to include a billion dollars for a new ballroom adjacent to the White House. Some Republicans also want to add separate legislation requiring more documentation of citizenship for voting. But both the ballroom and the election law changes have made some in the president's party uneasy.

Now, with the compensation fund arriving atop these other challenges, even more Republicans are feeling heightened concern.

The GOP had begun this Congress feeling secure about its Senate majority, if only because the 2026 Senate election map leans toward states that Trump won in 2024.

But recent polls show the Senate outlook far less certain, as the fight with Iran grinds on and prices rise for gas and groceries.

And as the GOP's Hill majorities look less secure, the political future for the government functions known as "homeland security" is, once again, anything but secure.