Congress struggles to fund DHS as child safety bills get a boost

[GERBO] Let’s get started with what’s been the dominant issue on the Hill over the past couple of weeks — the funding lapse for the Department of Homeland Security, which is now six weeks deep, and it appears there’s no end in sight to this impasse.

Congress in the midst of a recess now. TSA employees, though, have started receiving back pay this week following an executive order, but there’s been some reports of inconsistency in terms of who’s getting paid, how they’re getting paid, and so on. 

The competing House and Senate versions of the bill, Lindsey, before both left the Hill, haven’t been reconciled. We know a lot of this is contingent upon figuring out what to do with funding immigration enforcement operations that have gone on around the country. 

What are the key differences here, and where does this actually come down to? Where does the impasse lie?

[MCPHERSON] The impasse has been with Democrats filibustering. The House first passed a full-year DHS funding bill back in January, and the Senate Democrats have been filibustering that because they want additional immigration enforcement reforms before they would agree to fund ICE or Customs and Border Patrol, which has been working with ICE on enforcement. 

And so that’s been going on for weeks. Since February 14th, the department has been shut down. And Republicans finally realized Democrats weren’t going to come to a deal with them — or at least Senate Republicans did — and they decided in the Senate to pass, late Thursday night before they left for the recess, a bill that basically would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security except for ICE and except for much of Customs and Border Patrol. 

It funds the customs portion of the agency, but not the Border Patrol functions. 

And then the House, their bill was, they didn’t like that it defunded ICE and Border Patrol. So they passed an eight-week stopgap running through — basically extending all current funding for what would have been current funding from the previous fiscal year for the Department of Homeland Security through May 22nd.

[GERBO] We see members of both parties kind of peel off in the other direction. There have been Democrats that have voted for the Republican side in some of these Senate battles. And then Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House — he’s got a slim margin there, but it appears that he may be under pressure from the president to get this done. 

Even though probably the biggest public-facing aspect of this — these three, four-plus hour lines we’ve seen in some places like Houston and Baltimore due to agents calling out and not coming into work — the tide there has pulled back a little bit now that those agents are getting paid. But yet still, as you point out, the rest of the department and its core other functions still remain without funding as this continues to drag on.

[MCPHERSON] Right, so there’s plenty of other agencies under DHS that are partially shuttered. There’s a cybersecurity agency — I think they have about 60% of their staff working, the rest are furloughed. 

Other agencies that are affected: the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, obviously TSA, they’re getting paid now, but they’re still trying to catch up, those employees. Like you said, that back pay has been inconsistent so far. So there’s a lot of damage to kind of recover from, and they’re working through that and hoping that the rest of the department can get funded soon.

[GERBO] Another path that Congress is trying to find — that you’ve reported on pretty extensively — is putting in protections for consumers, and specifically children, as they interact with social media platforms. 

They may have gotten a boost in recent days as juries in New Mexico and California have handed down rulings trying to hold those social media companies accountable. In New Mexico, a jury found Meta liable for $375 million in civil penalties for violating the state’s consumer protection laws, due to misleading users about the safety of its platforms. 

And then in California — and Los Angeles specifically — a jury found Meta and Google collectively responsible for six million dollars in damages for designing their platforms to hook young users, to get them addicted, without regard for their well-being. 

That’s given a boost, Lindsey, as you’ve reported, to some members of Congress who for years have tried to get some sort of child protection laws as children — minors — engage with social media, but haven’t had much traction in getting those going.

[MCPHERSON] Right. There are a lot of bills that deal with this kids’ online safety issue, but the main one that I’ve been covering for a while now is the Kids Online Safety Act. The Senate passed this back in July 2024 in a 91-3 vote. It’s been rewritten several times. 

The House Republicans — one of their main arguments against the Senate version has been that they didn’t think it would survive court scrutiny. Lawmakers have told me that they’re hoping that these court cases prove there is a path to hold companies liable for the way they design their products. And so that is the key provision that is different between the House and Senate versions — this “how do you hold them liable?” 

They have a provision called the duty of care that would basically force the social media companies to design their platforms to reduce against specific harms — you know, whether it be content that promotes suicide, depression, illicit drug use, and sexual exploitation and all that stuff — so that they’re supposed to design their content to not feed stuff like that to children.