The House on Thursday passed legislation to fund a broad swath of the government including the Department of Homeland Security, narrowly mustering the votes amid a Democratic revolt over spending for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The package, which also would fund the Pentagon and the health and transportation departments, rejects the deepest spending cuts that President Trump requested, including a 50 percent reduction to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a 40 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, which would instead receive a $415-million boost. It also rejects Mr. Trump’s request for a $840 million increase in funding for ICE, leaving funding for the agency roughly flat.
It contains the final set of spending bills that must be enacted before next Friday in order to avoid a government shutdown. The legislation still must pass the Senate before it can be sent to Mr. Trump, but it appeared to be on track to clear Congress.
The approval of the package accomplished what is now considered a remarkable feat on Capitol Hill: the successful negotiation and passage of a series of individual government spending bills, without resorting to rolling them all together into a huge take-it-or-leave-it package, or punting altogether and relying on a stopgap, emergency measure to keep funding flat.
But it came over the bitter protests of Democrats, who said they would not vote for legislation that provided funding for ICE — or not without major changes — on the heels of the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, by a federal immigration agent.
In the end, the vote to pass the homeland security funding legislation was 220 to 207, with 206 Democrats voting against it, and seven voting for it. Republican leaders agreed to allow a separate vote on that bill to allow Democrats to register their unhappiness with the measure without imperiling the rest of the spending package. One Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, also opposed the bill.
The other three, less divisive spending bills, passed on a vote of 341 to 88.
Top Democrats including Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, opposed the homeland security bill.
“We have a broken immigration system that should be fixed in a comprehensive and bipartisan manner,” Mr. Jeffries and his deputies said in a joint statement. “Unfortunately, House Republicans have rejected the effort to address the serious concerns raised by the American people about the lawless conduct by ICE. For this reason, we are voting no on the Homeland Security appropriations bill.”
Democratic negotiators had proposed a series of changes in an attempt to rein in ICE that were rejected out of hand by Republicans.
“They rejected proposals to block funds from being used to detain and deport U.S. citizens,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said. “They blocked our attempts to ensure members of Congress can exercise our lawful oversight of ICE facilities uninhibited.”
Still, some of the tougher checks on the Trump administration included in the spending bills, agreed to by a bipartisan group of appropriators in both the House and Senate, target the Department of Homeland Security. They agreed to reduce funding for the office of Secretary Kristi Noem by $29.5 million and require her to pay for any travel on government aircraft — in this case private jets the Coast Guard bought — out of the budget for her own office.
The bipartisan spending legislation would keep funding for ICE about the same as the previous year, when the agency was operating off funds provided in a stopgap measure.
It also would require the Department of Homeland Security to detail how it is spending the $190 billion Republicans allocated to it in their marquee domestic policy bill, which included $75 billion for ICE.
“In the event of a lapse in funding, ICE would be able to sustain regular operations for multiple years” using that money, “while the other agencies under this bill would likely be forced to furlough workers and reduce operations,” said Ms. DeLauro, who despite having helped to negotiate the homeland security legislation ultimately voted against it.
The measure would provide $839.2 billion in funding for the Defense Department, in line with what Congress approved in the annual defense policy bill, and $8 billion above Mr. Trump’s budget request.
Lawmakers also crammed into the legislation a slew of extensions of measures that were set to expire, including the National Flood Insurance Program and the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides duty-free access to the U.S. trade market for about three dozen African nations.
And though appropriators in both parties banded together to thwart the largest cuts Mr. Trump had requested, the spending package made small trims across many government agencies, an outcome that Republican leaders heralded.
“As with our previous packages, this outcome reflects the reality of serious governing: shared contributions and shared compromise,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said. His panel, he added, “held the line on spending, putting forward twelve negotiated bills that actually reduce spending relative to what would have been spent in a continuing resolution.”
Robert Jimison contributed reporting.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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