Democrats Promise Payback As Republicans Sidestep the Appropriations Process

Senate Democrats have a warning for their Republican counterparts on Capitol Hill: If you go around the appropriations process and approve funding for parts of the Department of Homeland Security using a party-line budget process, we’ll do the same for our priorities once we’re back in power.

“We’ve warned them about that,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS. “They should be on notice. That is opening the door big-time to doing that.”

“Once you have established a precedent, the other side is going to take a careful look and see if it benefits them,” added Sen. Dick Durbin, another senior appropriator.

Typically, annual appropriations bills funding the government are passed on a bipartisan basis. However, since Democrats have refused to fund two agencies – Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection – without legislative reforms to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, Republicans are instead forging ahead with a reconciliation package totaling about $75 billion that would fund ICE and CBP for three years.

Senate Republican leaders maintain that they were forced into this position by the Democrats’ refusal to fund DHS, which has been partially shut down for two months due to a dispute that began after several people were killed by federal immigration agents in January.

“This is advance appropriating. So these are dollars that we would spend in the out years anyway,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune explained to reporters Wednesday.

The reconciliation process allows the Senate to pass legislation related to spending and revenue with a simple majority vote, avoiding a filibuster. Republicans used it to pass their tax cut law last year. Democrats also used it to approve their health and spending bill under President Joe Biden.

In recent years, however, the reconciliation process has been increasingly used to bypass the traditional appropriations process, allowing narrow partisan majorities to fund government agencies and enact policy changes. Democrats, for example, boosted funding for the IRS by $80 billion in their 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. After Donald Trump won the White House in 2024 and Republicans took back control of Congress, the GOP rescinded the IRS funding in 2025 and used it to help pay for their own priorities.

Republicans, meanwhile, included additional defense and immigration spending in their reconciliation package last year. And they’re discussing including tens of billions of dollars more for defense and the Iran war in yet another reconciliation bill later this year.

The trend has alarmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, opening the door to more tit-for-tat partisan fights in a Congress already consumed by rancor.

“I do think it’s a dangerous game we’re involved in,” Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said. “I think those of us who care about the appropriations process need to know that it’s very clear both parties are carving out exceptions for their favorite stuff, but this is not the way to do normal funding. So I’m hoping that these will be the exceptions rather than the rule.”

Sen. Thom Tillis agreed that his party could find itself in a similar situation.

“There’s always an equal and opposite reaction,” the North Carolina Republican told NOTUS. “They’ll use this as a precedent for doing the same thing in reverse.”

Of course, Democrats would first need to win control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. They are favored to capture the House of Representatives in November, and they have a shot at flipping the Senate as well. But they’d have to wait until 2029 for a Democrat to win the White House before they could sign any major legislation into law.

Still, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is very bullish about his party’s chances of winning control of the Senate this year, isn’t ruling out a reconciliation bill that would boost appropriations for agencies Democrats view as priorities, including ones dealing with health care, education and climate.

“We believe very strongly that we have to get some things done when we win the majority,” Schumer told NOTUS in an exclusive interview this week. “We’re campaigning on a bunch of them already, but I’m not going to get into speculation as to the best way.”