The biggest news out of Congress this week came with Thursday’s unanimous voice vote in the House that ended the 76-day shutdown of DHS. But that rare bipartisan unity could have been just as much a result of exhaustion as it was actual agreement after the day lawmakers had Wednesday. House Republicans managed to approve the Senate’s ICE/CBP funding framework, extend FISA authorization, and pass a farm bill on Wednesday – but they fought long and hard to barely squeak by along party lines with almost as much opposition from within the GOP as from without.

Smooth Sailing on the Shutdown and the Illusion of Calm Seas

The partial shutdown of DHS due to the February 14 funding lapse was the longest in US history. But now it’s over. On Thursday, April 30, a unanimous voice vote in the House cleared the full-year funding bill for most of DHS (everything but ICE and CBP) that cleared the Senate by unanimous voice vote back on March 27. Soon, all those unpaid employees of the unfunded sections of DHS will get paid again and life can go back to something like normal – at least until September. Now both chambers of Congress are taking off for a couple of weeks. The Senate returns May 11, and the House May 12.

Light work, huh? Not quite.

Notice that month-long gap between passage in the Senate and the House. It’s just the hint of the iceberg lurking beneath what otherwise might seem like calm congressional seas. Lawmakers have been working on DHS funding, among other things, all year – and almost none of that work looked like yesterday’s unanimous vote. With Democrats demanding a list of ten reforms for ICE and CBP before they’d fund “another penny” to either agency and Republicans refusing to pass a DHS spending bill that didn’t include the two agencies, there wasn’t much in the way of unity for months. Recall that most of DHS outside ICE and CBP, which already had several years’ worth of funding thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, have been working without receiving paychecks or having their departments funded. It even got to the point where some offices risked losing utilities over unpaid bills. Callouts were at an all-time high, and many people left the department entirely for new, more reliable jobs.

DHS and its employees had to deal with this for 76 days – the longest any part of the federal government had ever gone unfunded (though President Donald Trump did manage to get them paid once by executive order). How, then, did we go from both inter- and intra-party fighting to unanimous consent in both chambers? The two-pronged approach. Both Republicans and Democrats were exhausted from the fight, but both refused to give ground on the issue of ICE and CBP.

The solution was to split the issue. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate agreed to pass a DHS funding bill that excluded the two agencies. This they did back in March. House Republicans – including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) – were initially reluctant. “It was haphazardly drafted,” Johnson said of the Senate bill, insisting that a different version be drafted that wouldn’t “orphan two of the primary agencies of DHS.” After some cajoling from his colleagues in the Senate and the president, Johnson came around – but the more hardline in his party, primarily the Freedom Caucus, weren’t so easy to convince. Not until the Senate and the House GOP agreed on a framework for a reconciliation bill to fund ICE and CBP with or without Democrat help were they willing to get behind the plan to pay for the rest of DHS.

Hell in the House – This Week’s Work Didn’t Come Easy

That brings us to the day before: Wednesday, April 29. House lawmakers voted 215-211 along party lines to approve the Senate’s reconciliation blueprint to fund ICE and CBP. Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-CA), who normally caucuses with the GOP, voted present while all present Republicans supported and all Democrats opposed it. And it took holding the vote open more than five hours to make that happen. There were numerous holdouts – and six Republicans who voted no before finally coming around to yes.

That still doesn’t actually fund the two agencies, by the way. Rather, the Senate and House will have to agree on a bill through reconciliation once they’re back from recess – and President Trump wants it done by June 1, which doesn’t leave them much time for haggling back and forth. What barely passed by party line after many hours on Wednesday was simply the agreement to work together later and the general outline of what that bill might look like.

Many rank-and-file Republicans in the House wanted to see ICE and CBP funded before agreeing to the other bill for the rest of DHS, but Wednesday’s hard-won framework was, it seems, close enough.

But that’s not all. Overall, it has been a hell of a week. The House also passed on Thursday a 45-day extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). The program – which allows the government to collect the communications of foreigners, even when interacting with US citizens – was set to expire at the end of Thursday. This extension sets up another debate on the controversial spy program when the House and Senate come back in mid-May – or, at least, shortly thereafter. This was far from unanimous, though it wasn’t quite party line either, clearing the House 261-111.

The Senate passed the same 45-day extension by unanimous voice vote earlier in the day, but rejected Speaker Johnson’s long-term fix, which would have authorized it for three years.

Also on Thursday, the House passed the 2026 Farm Bill with a vote of 224-200 – though for months it was uncertain if GOP leaders would ever drum up enough support to clear it. The bill contains sweeping updates to food and agriculture programs, including the addition of rotisserie chickens to SNAP eligible foods and the refusal to restore $187 billion cut from the program by the OBBBA. As well, the Farm Bill is a hard-fought but major victory for MAHA Republicans (and some like-minded Democrats) as it removed provisions that would protect pesticide makers from legal liability over the potential health risks of their products.

Of course, if these changes to the Farm Bill don’t pass muster with at least a handful of Senate Democrats, all that work will have been for naught – much like the SAVE America Act seems to be. The House passed this voter ID and election security bill back in February. Senate Democrats, however, are still keeping it suppressed – with even some supporters saying it’s “dead in the water.” But after a hectic week, especially in the House, lawmakers have cut out for a couple of weeks – so clearly that’s a problem for another day!