Republicans’ emerging plan to allow President Trump to go around Congress to fund the Homeland Security Department for the remainder of his tenure is the latest example of how they have ceded the legislative branch’s central power to the White House.
With Congress in a bitter stalemate over money for the administration’s immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has already tapped a slush fund included in the tax cut and domestic policy law enacted last year to fund key components of the department, which has been shuttered for seven weeks.
Now, Republicans say they intend to use special filibuster-proof legislation to provide money for the entire Homeland Security Department for the next three years. Doing so would allow them to dodge the Democratic opposition to funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, which Democrats have refused to do without restrictions on the officers carrying out the president’s deportation campaign.
“We are taking this off the table,” Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, said on Monday as he disclosed the Republican intent to rely on the budgetary approach. “That’s enough of this with the Democrats.”
Using the complex budget process known as reconciliation to fund a whole agency, as the G.O.P. is suggesting, would be a significant departure from traditional congressional practice. It would also open the door to lawmakers increasingly taking this escape route in the future when partisan differences emerge over spending priorities. And it would provide the White House with more freedom to spend how it wishes, further weakening the ability of lawmakers to demand answers or hold the executive branch accountable.
“That is a terrible way to run the government and to do appropriations,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said of the Republican plan. “Reconciliation requires no compromise with the other party. If that becomes the sole way we fund the core functions of government, that is a bad idea.”
The prospect of an end run around the filibuster for homeland security spending is the latest case of both parties trying to expand what they can squeeze through the budget reconciliation process and twist a law meant to make it easier to reduce deficits into a filibuster-avoidance weapon, often resulting in even larger deficits.
Democrats boosted agency funding through reconciliation during the Biden era to battle the pandemic, then Republicans last year beefed up Pentagon and homeland security funding in their huge budget bill. Now they are threatening to escalate matters again.
“It is clearly not the way reconciliation or the budget was supposed to work,” G. William Hoagland, a longtime top budget adviser to Senate Republicans who is now at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said about the Republican plan. “If you are an appropriator, you are going to say this is taking all your jurisdiction. I think it is very problematic.”
Republicans say, however, that they have no choice given what they portray as Democratic intransigence on homeland security funding. Republicans attributed the fight to a desire by Democrats to appease their left wing and find a wedge issue for the midterm elections.
“Democrats got their issue, I guess, and in the process they are irreparably damaging the appropriations process and this institution,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader, said last week. “I hope they are satisfied.”
The Republican proposal comes as the Trump administration has already sought to usurp the role of Congress as the chief arbiter of federal spending. The White House last year embarked on an intense effort to pare federal spending without congressional approval. It has unilaterally withheld spending from multiple congressional projects while it has clawed back billions of dollars more from other disfavored initiatives, all with little resistance from the Republicans controlling Congress.
Now there are real questions about whether the president has the authority to use a pool of money to pay Transportation Security Administration workers to ease chaos at the nation’s airports under an executive order issued last week. But since his action alleviated a political crisis confronting lawmakers as they left on a two-week recess, few are pressing the matter.
The funding route envisioned by Republicans for the Homeland Security Department would come at the expense of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, which have already seen their power diminished substantially in recent years. They have been fighting to reclaim some, recording success this year in passing 11 of 12 bills. Despite intense polarization throughout Congress, members of the panels have historically shown an ability to overcome it and find common ground on spending priorities.
Even Mr. Hoeven, one of those supporting using the budget process to bankroll the department, suggested that doing so would be a step backward for the appropriations process.
“We’ve worked these things out before,” he said.
It is also an acknowledgment by Republicans that they could lose control of the House and Senate in November and want to front-load money for the department in case Democrats take over and pull back congressional support for Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration push.
But the Republican plan is far from a certainty, particularly with the slim margin in the House and some hesitation in the Senate, where a few Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former party leader, have expressed reservations about funding agencies this way.
“Budget reconciliation, for its part, is only a supplement to steady, annual appropriations — not a substitute,” Mr. McConnell warned earlier this month.
Republicans would also have to take multiple politically treacherous steps to achieve their goal, including first passing a budget that would have to balance new spending with cuts in other popular programs. They would then have to expose themselves to two sessions where Democrats would be able to offer unlimited amendments to create tough votes for Republicans with midterm elections just a few months away. There is a reason members of both parties are usually wary of taking up budget plans in even-numbered years.
“You get very targeted vote-a-ramas in a campaign year,” Mr. Hoagland said of the grueling sessions in which scores of politically charged amendments can be offered in marathon, often overnight Senate sessions.
The budget push would also put Republicans in the position of using a circuitous route to fund an immigration crackdown that polls have shown to be increasingly unpopular, cutting into new support in the Hispanic community that boosted the party in the last election.
Reconciliation bills are subject to strict review by the Senate’s internal umpire, the parliamentarian, who can strike provisions that seem more aimed at achieving policy ends than fiscal goals. It would be a tough test to get all of the elements that Mr. Trump has demanded, like new voter registration and identification rules, through that gantlet.
Republicans could always vote to overrule the parliamentarian. But that would be tantamount to gutting the filibuster and defeat the purpose of the whole procedural exercise, which is to steer around minority opposition without seeming to bend the rules.
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
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