Comparing DHS Component Funding, FY2020: In Brief

The homeland security appropriations bill includes all annual appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), providing resources to every departmental component.¹ This report reviews the budget authority provided to DHS for FY2019² and requested by the Trump Administration for FY2020, as well as the funding levels proposed by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees in their reported legislation for FY2020. In the process, it also includes information on DHS funding from two enacted FY2019 supplemental appropriations measures: P.L. 116-20, a disaster relief supplemental; and P.L. 116-26, a supplemental appropriations bill funding humanitarian and security operations at the U.S.-Mexico border. The report provides a look at the resources available to DHS components that are described in appropriations committee reports, and examines "net discretionary annual appropriations" for DHS—a perspective on the net impact of legislation funding DHS on congressionally tracked budget totals.

DHS Budgetary Resources: Looking Beyond the Score

Discussion regarding annual appropriations often centers around the appropriations provided in the bill or how the bill scores against budget limitations. However, these discussions do not represent the total budget authority provided to DHS, or controlled through appropriations bills and reports. The use of offsetting collections reduces the score of the bill, and provides significant resources to some components of DHS, such as the Transportation Security Administration. Discretionary scores of bills do not include mandatory spending, resources derived directly from fee collections without annual congressional action, or resources covered by adjustments to the discretionary spending limits.³ Congress controls the reprogramming of many of these resources through detailed tables provided in appropriations committee reports, conference reports, and statements of managers.

Figure 1 uses the data drawn from these detailed tables to provide a more comprehensive picture of the resources available to seven DHS components:⁴ U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), U.S. Secret Service (USSS), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). These are the seven largest components of DHS in terms of net discretionary budget authority.

In Figure 1, these seven components are listed along the bottom axis. Each component's funding level as a section of the figure has four bars, representing the different phases of the appropriations process: prior-year (i.e., FY2019) enacted, current year (i.e., FY2020) requested annual appropriations, and House and Senate appropriations committee action. The bottom segment of each bar represents net discretionary budget authority.

On top of these bases are several other segment types, representing fee revenues, offsetting collections, mandatory spending,⁵ funding from unobligated balances directed by the appropriations measure, and funding covered by adjustments to discretionary spending limits under the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA; P.L. 112-25) in annual appropriations.⁶

Figure 1 allows for a visual comparison of changes in individual component funding, and provides a more complete description of each component's overall resource level than a review of net discretionary appropriations. Among the changes it illuminates are:

• the ongoing efforts by the Administration to increase funding for border barriers (through CBP) and immigration enforcement (through ICE), seen in the FY2020 request;
• the relative size of the investment in the costs of major disasters (FEMA), compared to other elements of the DHS budget;
• the House and Senate appropriations committees' increase in funding for cybersecurity (CISA) and rejection of proposed cuts to the USCG;
• the shift of the Federal Protective Service from CISA to the Management Directorate (the latter agency does not appear on Figure 1); and
• an increase in discretionary spending to support the TSA's budget in the absence of the Trump Administration's proposed fee increase.

Figure 1. Department of Homeland Security Budget Authority by Selected Component, FY2019-FY2020

Source: CRS analysis of H.Rept. 116-9, P.L. 116-20, P.L. 116-26, H.Rept. 116-180, and S.Rept. 116-125. Notes: Totals do not reflect the impact of rescissions.

Table 1 provides a complete breakdown of the total budget authority outlined in Figure 1 for all DHS components, arranged by FY2019 enacted net discretionary budget authority.

Some DHS components have access to funding beyond the budget authority controlled for reprogramming through the "detail tables" in appropriations committee reports. Although some of the mandatory spending for DHS, including fee-funded programs, is reflected in the tables, much of DHS's mandatory spending is not, and is therefore not reflected in Figure 1 or Table 1. This includes spending on flood insurance claims, as well as trust funds for the Coast Guard and the Secret Service. Information on this type of mandatory spending can be found in the Administration's budget request.

Likewise, the detail tables do not reflect reimbursements between components for services provided, such as payments from partner agencies to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center for the cost of training programs. Information on these resources can be found in the DHS annual budget justifications submitted to Congress.

DHS Appropriations: Comparing Scores

It is often rhetorically useful to describe the comparative difference in funding for given DHS components. This is frequently done by comparing the net discretionary funding level for components. Table 2 shows congressional action on net discretionary annual FY2020 appropriations for DHS distributed by departmental component.

Each grouping of three lines in Table 2 presents an analysis of a component's net discretionary annual appropriations—appropriations provided from the Treasury that are not offset by other incoming new or returning existing budget authority.⁷ Lines below each component name indicate two baselines commonly used to make comparisons of appropriations—the FY2020 requested funding level and the FY2019 enacted funding level in thousands of dollars of net discretionary budget authority. To the right of each component name in bold is the funding level reported by the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee for FY2020. Below each line of bold numbers are two analytical lines showing the change that bold number represents compared to the two baselines: these changes are reflected in thousands of dollars, and then as a percentage. The components are ordered from largest to smallest by FY2019 enacted annual net discretionary funding level.

FY2019 supplemental appropriations provided for disaster relief and border operations in P.L. 116-20 and P.L. 116-26, respectively, are not reflected in Table 2 as the purpose of the table is to provide comparative perspectives on annual appropriations levels at various stages of the process, as well as to improve understanding of comparative annual appropriations levels across the department, rather than to survey total resources provided by Congress, which can be seen in Figure 1 and Table 1.⁸

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