|
The ongoing battle over funding Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at U.S. airports gives a detailed view of Republican governance in this era.
Republicans hold a majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also hold the White House. On paper, this control makes it look as if Republicans should be able to put anything they want into law. But the reality is that the extremism of President Donald J. Trump and the MAGA Republicans is so unpopular that those clinging to it are making it impossible for the Republicans to govern.
The fight over TSA funding is a case study of this dynamic. When Congress passed the appropriations bills necessary to fund the U.S. government for 2026, Republicans in the House passed funding for the Department of Homeland Security with a simple majority vote and sent the measure off to the Senate.
But in the Senate, the minority can stop a measure from coming up for a vote unless sixty members agree to move it forward. With this leverage, provided by the so-called filibuster, Democrats refused to give more money to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. Border Patrol is the law enforcement agency of CBP that has been in the news as its agents assault undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.
Back in July 2025, when they passed the budget reconciliation law they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans provided $170.7 billion in additional funding for immigration and border enforcement activities by DHS, as well as for the presence of soldiers with the Defense Department on the border. That money included $29.9 billion for ICE, with funding for an additional 10,000 officers. The law gave ICE a lot of leeway in spending that money. The law also included $7.8 billion for CBP with funds to hire 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.
With White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller directing immigration policy, alongside then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and her associate Corey Lewandowski, ICE and Border Patrol agents terrorized people in American cities. Their regime eventually led to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Daniel Lippman of Politico reported today that the stress of his job—including dealing with Miller’s tirades—has led the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, to be hospitalized at least twice in the past seven months.
As the White House pushed ever-increasing numbers of arrests and as videos circulated of ICE and Border Patrol agents beating individuals up, Americans turned against Trump’s handling of immigration. A survey out yesterday from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization researching popular opinion on topics that touch the intersection of religion, culture, and politics, showed that just 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 61% disapprove. An even lower number—33%—hold favorable views of ICE officers, while 67% like their local police officers.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans think sending ICE officers to places like Minnesota is making those places less safe, while only 38% disagree. And only 36% of Americans want Congress to give ICE more money, although 76% of Republicans favor increased funding for ICE.
Public opposition to more funding for ICE and Border Patrol without significant changes to their behavior has put Democratic senators on solid ground to oppose funding all of DHS without a promise of those changes. “In the wake of the murder of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democrats made it clear, no blank check for ICE and Border Patrol,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explained. Senate Democrats repeatedly tried to pass a measure to fund all of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol, which were already funded with that huge pot of money under the budget reconciliation bill of last July.
But Republicans, under pressure from Trump, repeatedly voted down the Democrats’ attempt to fund the rest of DHS, including TSA, without funding for ICE and CBP, instead demanding Democrats pass the package the House had, the one with full funding for DHS, including for ICE and CBP.
Then, on Sunday, Trump demanded the Senate add to the funding plan the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, a bill that would require people to show not just ID but also proof of citizenship to register to vote and to vote and would severely restrict mail-in voting. It would also require states to hand over their voting lists to the federal government for processing through a government database used to screen for noncitizens applying for federal programs—confusingly also called the SAVE system, although it stands for “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements”—even though that procedure has a rate of false positives as high as 14%. The Brennan Center estimates that the SAVE America Act would kick at least 21 million Americans off voting lists.
To that legislation, Trump has also added provisions targeting transgender Americans, apparently to appeal to his faltering base and pressure Republican senators to vote in favor of the measure.
In order to get his wish list, Trump has called for Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) to get rid of the filibuster, enabling Senate Republicans to push through whatever they want without any Democratic votes, as the Republican majority in the House can do. Yesterday, Trump posted: “When is “enough, enough” for our Republican Senators. There comes a time when you must do what should have been done a long time ago, and something which the Lunatic Democrats will do on day one, if they ever get the chance. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and get our airports, and everything else, moving again. Also, add the complete, all five items, SAVE AMERICA ACT items. Go for the Gold!!! President DJT”
Meanwhile, some TSA agents, unpaid for over a month, began to quit. Others called in sick. And lines in airports began to grow longer and slower. So, apparently on a whim designed to pressure Democrats, Trump sent ICE agents into fourteen airports in eleven cities, where without training to do security checks, they did little to relieve congestion. The contrast of ICE agents standing around collecting paychecks while TSA agents were working without them ended up pressuring Trump, rather than the Democrats.
Then, yesterday, Trump suddenly announced he would sign an emergency order to pay TSA agents, suggesting he could have done so all along, although it is not clear where the money will be coming from or whether moving money in the way he suggests is even legal.
As soon as Trump said it would be okay to pay TSA agents, Senate Republicans agreed to pass the measure that was essentially what the Democrats called for (remember, only 36% of Americans want Congress to give ICE more money). At 2:00 this morning, they unanimously passed a measure that funds every part of DHS, including TSA agents, but does not give more money to ICE and Border Patrol until Democrats and Republicans agree on reforms, although Thune vowed that he would see to it that Democrats don’t get the reforms they want.
The Senate passed the measure and left for a two-week break, sending their bill to the House, which could have passed it and then gone home.
But…
As Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) explained, members of the far-right Freedom Caucus took a stand against the bill, apparently because they want more money for ICE and Border Patrol, want the SAVE Act, and want Trump’s approval. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) could ignore them and pass the measure with the votes of all the Democrats and most Republicans. But Johnson depends on the far right to maintain his speakership, so he says he will refuse to pass the Senate’s measure and instead get the House to pass a 60-day continuing resolution to fund DHS at its current levels.
But the Senate fight has shown that Thune does not have the votes to fund ICE and Border Patrol without reforms. Schumer has said a continuing resolution would be dead on arrival, and right now the Senate is on break, meaning TSA agents are facing two more weeks without paychecks. Olivia Beavers of the Wall Street Journal reported that when a representative asked Johnson if the Senate had agreed to come back to deal with a new measure from the House, Johnson answered: “The Senate went dark and did not communicate with us.”
“It’s so maddening,” Casten wrote on social media. “Government workers should be paid. You shouldn’t have to wait on lines in airports, or worry about Coast Guard preparedness, or whether FEMA can handle the next disaster. But you do because of the utter lack of character in [Republican] leadership.”
“What the hell are you guys doing?” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) asked Republicans on the floor of the House. Everyone knows the bill could pass with a large majority if Johnson would bring it to a vote, he said. Freedom Caucus members “don’t care about governing,” he said. “They only care about writing another blank check for ICE…or getting a shout-out on some batsh*t crazy right-wing podcast.”
And so, TSA agents will not get paid unless Trump’s executive order goes into effect, taking the power to appropriate funds, a power that the U.S. Constitution gives to Congress alone, and handing it to the president.
For years, the far right has insisted that it and only it knows how to govern because its ideology is the only legitimate way to look at the world. The fight over funding for TSA illustrates on a micro level how lawmakers who ignore the real world to cleave to an ideology strengthen authoritarianism.
But these days, the dangers of clinging to the far-right ideology are around us at the macro level as well. We are almost four weeks into a war with Iran, started without input from Congress by a president who is now contemplating sending soldiers to fight in a conflict he is eager to put into the rear-view mirror. Trump “is getting a little bored with Iran,” a senior White House official told Jake Traylor of MS NOW. “Not that he regrets it or something—he’s just bored and wants to move on.”
As the strangling of the Strait of Hormuz sends oil prices skyrocketing, though, the global economy is not moving on. Today another dramatic drop in the stock market put the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 10% since February and the Nasdaq 100 down more than 10%, while the S&P 500 is shaping up to have its worst month since 2022.
—
Notes:
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/02/13/save-voter-citizenship-tool-mistakes-confusion/
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/g-s1-115366/senate-dhs-tsa-deal
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/27/todd-lyons-ice-stress-hospital-00848458
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-03-27-2026
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/26/senate-dhs-funding-bill-fails
https://www.ms.now/news/trump-iran-war-messaging-white-house-divide