How the Department of Homeland Security Shutdown Unfolded

The Department of Homeland Security shutdown of 2026 was a 76-day partial funding lapse that ran from February 14 through April 30, 2026, making it the longest shutdown of a single federal department in U.S. history. More than 260,000 employees at TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA, CISA, the Secret Service, CBP, and ICE either worked without pay or were furloughed. The fight was not about spending levels. It was about whether Congress would fund immigration enforcement agencies without first attaching accountability reforms demanded by Senate Democrats after two fatal shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis.

What Triggered the Shutdown

Federal agencies had just come off a 43-day government-wide shutdown that ended when President Trump signed a continuing resolution on November 12, 2025, funding operations only through January 30, 2026.¹ That short runway put DHS on a collision course with a separate political fight already underway.

Two incidents in Minneapolis shaped the dispute. On January 7, 2026, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Macklin Good, 37, during an immigration enforcement operation; evidence indicated she was reversing her vehicle away from the officer when he fired through the windshield. On January 24, CBP agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez fatally shot Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, after he had been disarmed and pinned to the ground.² Investigators found that agents failed to render medical aid and that administration officials had falsely described the victims as violent threats. The shootings occurred during “Operation Metro Surge,” and agents involved had frequently hidden their faces and failed to display identifying information.

Senate Democrats responded by conditioning DHS funding on a set of reforms: requiring agents to show identification and stop wearing masks, banning racial profiling, mandating judicial warrants before entering private property, and funding body-worn cameras.³⁴ On January 29, a six-bill appropriations package failed 45–55 in the Senate, with Democrats insisting DHS funding be separated so immigration terms could be negotiated.⁵ No deal was reached, and DHS funding lapsed on February 14.

Why Congress Could Not Break the Impasse

Two incompatible bills defined the standoff. On February 11, Rep. Rosa DeLauro introduced H.R. 7481, which would have funded the entire department except ICE, Border Patrol, and the Office of the Secretary.⁶ Republicans rejected any approach that carved out immigration agencies. The House instead passed H.R. 7147, which funded all of DHS at current levels including ICE, on a 213–203 vote.³ Senate Democrats blocked it because it lacked the enforcement reforms.

On March 12, a procedural motion to advance the House bill failed 51–46, short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.⁷ Democrats then tried to pass narrower bills for TSA, the Coast Guard, and CISA on their own; Republicans blocked those too. H.R. 7147 failed seven cloture votes between February and late March.⁶ In the middle of the crisis, Trump fired Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5 and replaced her with Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, who was confirmed 54–45 on March 23. At his hearing, Mullin endorsed judicial warrants for entering private property and urged senators to fund the department “as quickly as possible.”⁸

What It Did to TSA and Air Travel

Roughly 61,000 TSA employees, about 95% of the workforce, were classified as essential and required to keep screening passengers without pay.⁹ By March 25, they had worked 87 unpaid days in fiscal year 2026, counting the prior fall lapse, and cumulative unpaid payroll neared $1 billion.

Screeners started walking off the job. The fall 2025 shutdown had already driven 1,110 officers out of TSA, a 25% jump over the same period a year earlier. Another 460 officers left between February 14 and late March 2026, and by the time the shutdown ended, more than 1,100 additional screeners had resigned.⁹¹⁰ Daily callout rates climbed from a 4% baseline to 11% nationwide, with some checkpoints losing 40% to 50% of their officers on a given shift.

Travelers felt it. On March 9, security lines at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport exceeded three hours, and officials recommended arriving four to five hours before flights. On March 22, congestion at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson pushed lines outside the terminal, and at least four major airports stopped estimating wait times. TSA briefly suspended TSA PreCheck and Global Entry on February 22, reversing the PreCheck suspension within hours.¹¹ By March 23, ICE agents had been deployed to 14 airports to assist with basic screening, with about 72 hours of preparation instead of the six months TSA normally requires to certify a new officer.¹²

What It Did to the Rest of DHS

Most of the Coast Guard’s 56,000 personnel kept working. Civilian employees missed multiple paychecks, and the service piled up more than 5,000 unpaid utility bills and fell behind on roughly 18,000 merchant mariner credentials.¹³ Some shipyards, which draw up to 25% of their revenue from Coast Guard contracts, stopped work and asked the agency to leave their facilities. Vice Commandant Admiral Thomas Allan estimated that every day of shutdown required about 2.5 days of recovery.¹⁴

At FEMA, about 84% of staff were classified as essential and worked without pay, with more than 4,000 staffers going unpaid. The Disaster Relief Fund, which operates outside annual appropriations, kept roughly 10,000 frontline responders paid, but its balance fell to about $4 billion by early March, with only $1 billion above a $3 billion emergency reserve. Training courses, including anti-terrorism preparedness for first responders, were postponed. Associate Administrator Victoria Barton testified that the shutdown was “crippling our disaster response and recovery abilities by the day.”¹⁵

CISA was hit hardest in workforce terms. Only 888 of its 2,341 employees were designated as essential, leaving about 60% of staff furloughed or unable to work.¹⁴ The agency reduced operations to 24/7 threat response and suspended proactive vulnerability assessments of U.S. critical infrastructure. Acting Director Nicholas Andersen said “risk is accumulating” and that adversaries had “a real opportunity” to exploit gaps.¹⁵ CISA had already lost about a third of its staff to 2025 reductions.

The Secret Service kept 94% of its roughly 8,200 employees working, though Deputy Director Matthew Quinn said reform efforts, recruitment, and new contracts were delayed.¹⁶ At CBP, agents kept working, but service contracts lapsed, grounding aircraft, patrol boats, and vehicles and taking border surveillance equipment offline.¹³

How the White House Kept Paying Workers

On March 27, Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing DHS to use funds with “a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations” to pay TSA employees, citing 31 U.S.C. 1301(a).¹⁷ The administration reportedly planned to draw from money appropriated under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed the previous summer. Rep. DeLauro challenged the legality, questioning “what funding it is using to pay these workers after falsely claiming it could not do so.”¹⁸

On April 3, Trump issued a broader memorandum titled “Liberating the Department of Homeland Security From the Democrat-Caused Shutdown,” extending pay to all DHS employees and declaring the shutdown “an emergency situation compromising the Nation’s security.”¹⁹ DHS payroll runs roughly $1.6 billion every two weeks, and internal memos warned that the redirected funds would be exhausted after the first pay period in May.²⁰ Secretary Mullin also recalled all furloughed employees to active duty, though they faced the possibility of another furlough once the money ran out.

How the Shutdown Ended

The shutdown ended on April 30, 2026, its 76th day, when the House approved by voice vote a bipartisan funding bill the Senate had passed more than a month earlier.²¹ Trump signed it the same day. The law funded TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA, CISA, the Secret Service, and other non-immigration DHS offices through September 2026. It excluded ICE and Border Patrol, and it did not contain the enforcement reforms Democrats had sought.²²

Immigration funding moved on a separate track. Speaker Mike Johnson, who had called the bipartisan bill a “joke” and initially refused to bring it to the floor, relented after Senate Republicans launched a budget reconciliation process to fund ICE and Border Patrol with only GOP votes.²³ That package, the Secure America Act (Senate Bill 2), directed roughly $70 billion to ICE and Border Patrol through fiscal year 2029. It passed the Senate in early June, with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) the only Republican voting against, and cleared the House 214–212 on June 9. Trump signed it on June 10, 2026.²⁴

What It Left Behind

Secretary Mullin told Fox News after the shutdown ended that DHS would need about six months to clear the backlog and would feel “ripple effects for months.”¹⁰ The concrete damage included more than 1,100 TSA screeners gone, 18,000 merchant mariner credentials awaiting processing, and degraded staffing at CISA. Preparations for the FIFA World Cup that was set to begin on June 11, along with the America 250 celebrations and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, were pushed back; TSA was “running right up to the wire” on counter-drone technology for World Cup venues, and any officer hired during the shutdown could not be certified in time for the tournament.¹⁵

On May 1, 2026, Senator Mark Kelly and five co-sponsors introduced the Federal Worker Credit Protection Act (S. 4478), which would bar credit agencies from reporting adverse information on federal employees’ credit reports during a shutdown and for 30 days afterward. The bill included a clause making its protections retroactive to February 1, 2026, to cover DHS employees harmed during the lapse.²⁵ The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, condemned the use of workers as “political pawns” and called for structural reforms to keep future shutdowns from being used as negotiating leverage.²⁶

1
Husch Blackwell. Congress Ends Shutdown: What the New Funding Law Means for Major Industries
2
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (Democrats). Minnesota Oversight Report
3
BBC News. US Government Shutdown: What Is Happening and Why
4
Government Executive. GOP Plan to Fund Immigration Enforcement for 3 Years
5
Spotlight PA. DHS Funding Senate Vote
6
GovTrack. H.R. 7481: Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2026
7
Politico. Senate Rejects DHS Funding Bill as Shutdown Nears One-Month Mark
8
NPR. Markwayne Mullin Confirmed as Homeland Security Secretary
9
TSA. Oversight Hearing: DHS Shutdown Impacts
10
Politico. Six Months to Catch Up: What the Shutdown Cost DHS
11
CNN. TSA Shutdown: Airports and Wait Times
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PBS NewsHour. TSA, Coast Guard, FEMA Leaders Testify on Effects of Partial Government Shutdown
13
Federal News Network. DHS Officials Warn About Growing Shutdown Backlogs
14
Time. DHS Shutdown Funding Impacts
15
House Committee on Homeland Security. TSA, Coast Guard, CISA, FEMA Underscore Long-Term Damage Caused by DHS Shutdown
16
Federal News Network. How a DHS Shutdown Affects Different Components and Employees
17
The White House. Memorandum for the Secretary of Homeland Security
18
Federal News Network. Trump Signs Order to Pay TSA Employees Amid Shutdown Standoff
19
The White House. Liberating the Department of Homeland Security From the Democrat-Caused Shutdown
20
Government Executive. DHS Again to Stop Paying Employees as Shutdown Continues
21
PBS NewsHour. Trump Signs Homeland Security Funding Bill, Ending Record Shutdown
22
Politico. Congress Ends Record-Shattering DHS Shutdown
23
Federal News Network. House Approves Bill to Fund DHS and End the Record Shutdown
24
Time. House Passes Secure America Act
25
Government Executive. Dems Introduce Bill to Protect Feds’ Credit Scores During Shutdowns
26
AFGE. As Longest-Ever Government Shutdown Ends, New Bill Would Protect Workers’ Credit