Trump wants Congress to come back early, end DHS shutdown, press secretary says

John T. Bennett, CQ-Roll Call on Mar 30, 2026

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump wants Congress to nix a two-week recess and return to the Capitol to address the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown, his top spokesperson said Monday.

“The president is also encouraging Congress to come back to Washington to permanently fix this problem and to fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security entirely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.

The Senate late last week approved a DHS spending measure that, at Democrats’ behest, excluded new monies for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. House GOP leaders rejected that measure, instead approving an eight-week DHS funding measure along party lines.

For his part, Trump signed an executive order to pay Transportation Security Administration employees in order to address long wait times at U.S. airports.

But Leavitt contended that was far from a long-term solution.

“Of course, the president just can’t keep signing presidential memorandums and proclamations every time Congress fails to do its job,” she said.

As Trump has since the weekslong DHS shutdown began, Leavitt pinned all of the blame for the stalemate on congressional Democrats.

She accused Democrats of “holding our entire country hostage” by “picking and choosing which programs and agencies they want to fund just because they don’t like this administration’s policies.”

“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Leavitt said. “They voted seven times against funding DHS, over partisan and political reasons.”

But House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., on Sunday told “Fox News Sunday” that Republicans could have funded TSA by sending Trump the Senate measure — and could come back and do so at any point over the next two weeks.

“Why won’t (Speaker) Mike Johnson allow a vote? Because, tell you something, if he allowed a vote, it would pass. All Democrats would vote for it. Eighty percent of Republicans would vote for it. And TSA and everything else would be funded,” Smith said.

He noted GOP members have boasted that their “big, beautiful” filibuster-proof budget reconciliation law provided new dollars for ICE, the same 2025 law from which Trump pulled to pay the TSA airport workers.

“And then they complain, ‘Well, yes, but we have to fund ICE,’” Smith said. “They complain we have to fund ICE out of one side of their mouth, and out of the other side of their mouth they say we’ve already funded ICE.”