• dhork@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Maybe that’s the long-term plan, Democrats simply refuse to fund DHS at all. Take a page from the Republican playbook and drown it in the bathtub, or force Republicans to kill the filibuster ahead of an election which may put Democrats in the majority in the Senate.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      I mean, pretty famously, we didn’t. Bad communication between agencies and poor airport security paved the way for 9/11. But given our intention of defunding just about every other federal agency, DHS’s domino was going to get knocked down eventually.

      What’s more frustrating is that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is effectively bankrolling CBP and ICE indefinitely. So we’re going to defund the bureaucratic administration while pumping billions of dollars into a Presidential paramilitary force.

      Overall, more than 90% of the Department of Homeland Security’s 272,000 employees would continue working during a lapse, according to the agency’s September shutdown plan covering the first five days of an impasse. More than 93% of ICE and CBP workers would remain on the job.

      Only about 44,500 staffers would continue to be paid through other appropriations, according to the shutdown plan. However, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said last fall that 70,000 law enforcement personnel, including in CBP, ICE and other divisions, would receive their paychecks.

      So we’re putting the middle-management on furlough while the goons with the guns just get to run around snatching people, beating them, disappearing them, and executing them. And this is what we’re going to call a “shutdown”.