The House passed a short-term funding bill Friday night to keep the Department of Homeland Security operating through May 22, prolonging the longest government shutdown in U.S. history as lawmakers headed into a two-week recess with no end in sight to the 48-day impasse.

The vote was 213-203, with three Democrats joining all Republicans in support. The measure now goes to the Senate, where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the House GOP’s offer is “dead on arrival” in the upper chamber.

The House action came after Republican leadership rejected a bipartisan Senate deal passed early Friday morning that would have funded most of DHS except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Protection. House Speaker Mike Johnson called the Senate measure “infuriating” and a “joke,” accusing Democrats of being “willing to inflict pain on the American people simply so they can defund the agency responsible for removing criminal illegal aliens.”

The prolonged shutdown has created unprecedented chaos at airports nationwide, with “the highest wait times in TSA history, with some wait times greater than four and a half hours,” according to Ha Nguyen McNeill, the TSA’s acting administrator. She testified to Congress this week that more than 510 TSA officers have quit since the beginning of the shutdown and at some airports, 40 to 50% of their workforce is calling out of work on certain days.

McNeill told lawmakers that many TSA workers are “sleeping in their cars, selling their blood and plasma, and taking on second jobs to make ends meet” while “being expected to perform at the highest level when in uniform to protect the traveling public.”

The standoff stems from the killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents on January 24, 2026, after which Democrats in the Senate announced they would no longer support the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bill, which funds CBP.

The partial shutdown affecting only the Department of Homeland Security began on February 14, 2026.

President Trump attempted to ease the immediate pressure Friday by signing a directive to pay TSA workers using funds from last year’s tax and spending legislation. The president announced Thursday that he would take unilateral action to ensure TSA workers would be paid, with the department saying “TSA officers should begin seeing paychecks as early as Monday, March 30.”

But the presidential intervention failed to break the legislative deadlock between the two chambers. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he texted with Speaker Johnson Thursday night about a potential House vote on the Senate bill. However, in reality, Thune and GOP staff had spent hours drafting the text of the bill, which finally passed the Senate in the early morning hours of Friday with no roll call vote.

The House Rules Committee advanced Johnson’s alternative measure Friday afternoon in what observers described as a contentious session. During a two-hour meeting on Friday afternoon, the House Rules Committee adopted a rule along party lines for the 60-day measure that would deem the underlying bill automatically passed without a separate final-passage vote.

Rules Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., called the Senate’s proposal “nothing more than unconditional surrender masquerading as a solution.”

The divide has exposed tensions within the Republican Party. The immigration enforcement cuts raised the hackles of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, with Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who chairs the group, saying they would only support a version of the bill that adds back ICE and CBP funding, plus a federal voter identification requirement.

Democrats argued that Republicans were prolonging unnecessary suffering. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats sent a counterproposal to Republicans to fund DHS “while at the same time rein in ICE with commonsense guardrails” calling it “a reasonable, good-faith proposal.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., blamed House Republicans for prolonging the 42-day government shutdown, saying “This could end and should end today.”

Republicans plan to pursue funding for ICE and border enforcement through a separate budget reconciliation process that would require only a simple majority in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a joint statement that Republicans will be “fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security on two parallel tracks: through the appropriations process and through the reconciliation process.”

Neither chamber is set to return to Washington until the week of April 13, and without agreement between the House and Senate, DHS will remain shut down.

On March 29, the shutdown surpassed the 2025 United States federal government