Senate Democrats block homeland security funding bill as department shutdown looms – live | Trump administration
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Senate Democrats block DHS funding bill as department shutdown looms
Senate Democrats blocked a funding bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) open on Thursday. The legislation failed to clear the 60 vote threshold needed, and fell almost entirely along party lines in a 52-47 vote. Senator John Fetterman was the only Democratic lawmaker who voted for the bill.
This means that a department shutdown is all but inevitable, when the stopgap measure expires on Friday.
A reminder that the DHS appropriations bill that failed in the upper chamber today was the same legislation that Senate Democrats rejected just weeks ago, in favor of a short term measure to negotiate guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the wake of surge of agents in Minnesota and the fatal shooting of two US citizens in Minneapolis.
Key events
Sara Braun
A US judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon from reducing Senator Mark Kelly’s retired military rank and pension pay because he urged troops to reject unlawful orders.
The preliminary ruling by Richard Leon, a George W Bush appointee, is the latest setback for Donald Trump in his campaign of vengeance against perceived political enemies, which has drawn opposition from judges across the ideological spectrum.
Kelly, a retired navy captain and former astronaut who represents Arizona in the US Senate, was one of six congressional Democrats who appeared in a November video that reminded service members of their duty to reject unlawful orders. In the clip, Kelly stated: “Our laws are clear: you can refuse illegal orders.”
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth issued a censure letter on 5 January, asserting that Kelly had “clearly intended to undermine good order and military discipline” in violation of military rules that apply to active and retired personnel. Kelly filed his lawsuit against Hegseth’s attempt to reduce the military veteran’s rank and pension a week later.
In his ruling, Leon wrote that defense secretary Pete Hegseth had “trampled” on Kelly’s first amendment rights and “threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees”.
He admonished Hegseth for his handling of the issue, writing that “rather than trying to shrink the first amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our nation over the past 250 years”.
Senate Democrats block DHS funding bill as department shutdown looms
Senate Democrats blocked a funding bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) open on Thursday. The legislation failed to clear the 60 vote threshold needed, and fell almost entirely along party lines in a 52-47 vote. Senator John Fetterman was the only Democratic lawmaker who voted for the bill.
This means that a department shutdown is all but inevitable, when the stopgap measure expires on Friday.
A reminder that the DHS appropriations bill that failed in the upper chamber today was the same legislation that Senate Democrats rejected just weeks ago, in favor of a short term measure to negotiate guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the wake of surge of agents in Minnesota and the fatal shooting of two US citizens in Minneapolis.
When it comes to the stalled negotiations on Capitol Hill to pass a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Trump said that Democrats’ demands – which include requiring federal immigration officers to no longer wear masks in the field – would make law enforcement “totally vulnerable”.
“They have some things that are really very hard to approve,” Trump said.
When asked what the administration’s message is to climate scientists and experts who say the rollback could have a catastrophic impact on people’s health, the president simply said: “I tell them, ‘don’t worry about it’. Because it has nothing to do with public health. This was all a scam, giant scam.”
The endangerment finding is based on substantial research that determined the negative impact of greenhouse gases on public health and welfare.
As he announced the repeal of the endangerment finding, Lee Zeldin said that the determination was used by the Obama and Biden administrations to “steamroll into existence a left wing wishlist of costly climate policies, electric vehicle mandates and other requirements that assaulted consumer choice and affordability”.
After Zeldin finished speaking, Trump said that his EPA administrator’s remarks were “long”.
‘The science couldn’t be clearer’: US scientist group criticizes Trump’s rollback of key climate finding
In response to today’s announcement the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) critcized the decision.
“The science couldn’t be clearer,” FAS wrote in a statement. “Unchecked emissions of greenhouse gases are increasing the frequency and toll of disasters like flash flooding in Texas, catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles, and stifling heat domes that repeatedly blanket huge swathes of the country. Revoking the endangerment finding would shove science aside in favor of special interests – and at the expense of American health and wellbeing.”
Dharna notes that Thursday’s rollback comes a year and a half after Trump requested $1bn from oil bosses on the campaign trail – promising to scrap environmental rules if elected.
The president notes that the endangerment finding “had no basis in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law”. However, my colleague Dharna Noor notes that the determination was based on a large body of peer-reviewed research and has repeatedly defended and upheld in federal courts.
She reports that since it was codified, the evidence showing greenhouse gas emissions endanger society has only gotten stronger, said Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of EPA’s office of air and radiation at EPA.
“Science did not change when Donald Trump was inaugurated,” said Goffman, who helped write and implement the Clean Air Act and worked directly on the endangerment finding.
Trump says they’re repealing the “ridiculous” endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emissions standards imposed “unnecessarily” on vehicle models between 2012 and 2027 and beyond.
He says this will save American consumers “trillions of dollars” and lower the cost of a new vehicle by “close to $3,000”, though he doesn’t say how.
Trump announces move with EPA to repeal finding foundational to US climate rules
Trump and Zeldin have now arrived. They’re here to announce “the single largest deregulatory action in American history … by far”, Trump says.
Trump announces that they are “officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding”, which he dubs a “disastrous Obama-era policy” that he says damaged the auto industry and drove up prices for consumers.
Dharna Noor
Climate leaders gathered outside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters yesterday to condemn the Trump administration’s plans to repeal the legal finding underpinning all federal climate regulations, and promised to fight against the rollback.
“This is corruption, plain and simple. Old-fashioned, dirty political corruption,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, senator for Rhode Island, at the rally.
This is an agency that has been so infiltrated by the corrupt fossil fuel industry that it has turned an agency of government into the weapon of the fossil fuel polluters.
The rescinding of the 2009 endangerment finding will be finalized by Donald Trump and the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, this afternoon. The seminal ruling established the legal basis to regulate planet-warming pollution under the Clean Air Act.
We’re waiting to watch Trump’s announcement here, and we’ll bring you any key lines that come from it when it gets under way. Right now it’s just the podium and a placard bearing the words:
Largest deregulation in US history.
During the Senate homeland security hearing with top federal immigration officials earlier, senator John Fetterman, of Pennslyvania, told his fellow Democratic lawmakers not to allow the Department of Homeland Security to shut down at the end of the week as they try to negotiate an ICE overhaul with the Trump administration.
He pointed out that Trump’s sweeping domestic policy legislation, which was passed last year, had already provided ICE with $75bn. So in effect, Fetterman argued, shutting down the DHS would just punish other agencies under the department, including TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, and CISA.
He told senators:
I want to remind everybody that you have … ICE has plenty of money, and that vote to shut DHS down will have no functional impact on ICE because they have that $75bn from the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), the Trump administration smuggled thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran after the regime’s brutal crackdown on demonstrations last month in an effort to keep dissidents online following Tehran’s internet blackout.
Citing US officials, the WSJ reports that the US covertly sent roughly 6,000 of the satellite-internet kits into Iran, the first time the US has directly sent Starlink into the country.
Donald Trump was aware of the deliveries, officials told the paper, but they didn’t know if he or someone else directly approved of the plan. The White House declined to comment on the report.
George Chidi
Fulton County commission chairman Robb Pitts addressed the possibility that the FBI seizure of elections records last month may be a pretext for the state to attempt to take over the county’s elections apparatus ahead of the 2026 election.
“What I think is going on is a serious attempt to overturn and to take control of the election in Fulton County, Georgia,” Pitt said. “The president himself has mentioned some 15 other states that he has an interest in. And Georgia would be at the top of that list, for a number of reasons.”
Pitts said he had been in contact with leaders in Detroit and Philadelphia, two other cities that the president has attacked, questioning the integrity of their elections. “They’re watching very closely what’s happening here,” he said.
Pitts noted that state senator Greg Dolezal, a Republican running for lieutenant governor, yesterday called for the state board of elections to take over Fulton County’s election administration, citing the FBI raid.
The world is watching Fulton County because of what is at stake in 2026 and 2028, he said. “This is campaign season,” Pitts said of Dolezal’s comments. “I’m sure there’ll be others … But that’s not going to happen here now in Fulton County, Georgia. We have had successful elections.”
Hennepin county says it still does not cooperate with ICE
In response to Tom Homan’s announcement that the immigration crackdown in Minnesota is ending, the Hennepin County sheriff’s office – which oversees the state’s largest county – said it will still not “conduct civil immigration enforcement,” adding that its policies remain “unchanged”.
Homan has touted cooperation between local law enforcement and federal agents, particularly by securing access to county jails to arrest people at the moment of their release. But Trump’s border czar has not specified which counties have agreed to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In response to questioning from the committee’s top Democrat, senator Gary Peters, both Todd Lyons and Rodney Scott said that neither of them gave information to homeland security secretary Kristi Noem for her to label Alex Pretti as a “domestic terrorist”, after he was fatally shot by immigration agents in January.
“How would she possibly come to that kind of conclusion?,” Peters asked the officials. Lyons and Scott both said they couldn’t speculate on Noem’s comments.
