Senate Republicans’ reconciliation package in its current form includes billions of dollars for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), effectively providing funding for those agencies until the end of fiscal year 2029.
If the reconciliation package becomes law, the funding — combined with the money from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) — will be enough for ICE to operate at quadruple capacity for the next three and a half years. And the funding for Border Patrol, again combined with OBBB, will be more than enough to run it for the next three and a half years.
Using the party-line reconciliation process to fund these controversial agencies sets “a very bad precedent,” experts tell TPM, threatening future appropriations negotiations and undermining congressional oversight. It is yet another example of congressional Republicans weakening their own power by trampling on Congress’ power of the purse.
Funding ICE and CBP through the reconciliation process is “undercutting the appropriations process,” William Hoagland, senior vice president for the Bipartisan Policy Center, told TPM.
In the upper chamber, the annual appropriations process is subject to the filibuster. Any appropriations bill needs 60 votes to actually become law, which means that, in effect, the process has to be bipartisan.
In contrast, reconciliation requires a simple majority vote in both chambers. For this Senate, that means as long as Republicans can get 50 votes within their own caucus, then Vice JD President Vance can act as tie-breaker. Separating out funding for specific agencies through the reconciliation process, instead of annual appropriations, effectively does away with the bipartisan nature of the funding process.
It “sets a precedent where, in the future, if there are sticking points that are partisan, what might happen is that they agree on all the bipartisan stuff and then let the partisan piece go to a follow-on reconciliation bill,” Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told TPM.
This would, of course, only work when there is trifecta control of Congress and the White House, Linden cautioned, adding that it may come with political ramifications and costs if those partisan sticking points are unpopular.
Lawmakers are also giving up their own ability to oversee the use of these funds and their power of the purse to rescind them if they’re not being used in the way Congress intended, Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress explained.
“It’s almost like a blank check for those agencies, because there’s no guidance,” Hoagland told TPM.
“When you do it through reconciliation, you don’t have a report, you don’t have direction, it’s just money,” he added. “And so the ramifications here is you’re basically giving the administration and those agencies no guidance. They’ve got money now, they can use however they want.”
Looking at it long term, Linden said the decision to fund ICE and CBP through the reconciliation process either becomes “a one-off that doesn’t happen again, because everybody kind of agrees this is a bad precedent” or “it sort of accelerates the Senate towards a 50-vote threshold for appropriations.”
“Nobody wants to go down that slippery slope,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) told TPM on Tuesday when asked about the three-year funding. “If we want to save the appropriations process, we can’t use this as a back door.”
