Comparing DHS Component Funding, FY2025: In Brief

Contents

• Introduction
• FY2025 DHS Appropriations Overview
• Annual Appropriations
• DHS Budgetary Resources: Beyond the Score
• DHS Appropriations: Comparing Scores
• Emergency-Designated Funding in Annual Appropriations Measures

Introduction

The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act includes all annual¹ appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and provides resources to every departmental component. Its accompanying conference report or explanatory statement provides guidance for the department, including how DHS should distribute those appropriations among various programs, projects, and activities, and what additional resources Congress anticipates being available in terms of offsetting receipts and fee revenues that fund specific programs. Together, these documents form a snapshot of a significant portion of the DHS budget.

This report reviews that snapshot at the DHS component level, comparing

• the budget authority outlined in the FY2024 annual appropriations measure and its explanatory statement;²
• annual appropriations requested by the Biden Administration for FY2025;³
• funding levels included in House-passed H.R. 8752 (118^th Congress); and
• amounts enacted through the terms of the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (P.L. 119-4, Division A).

The report makes note of advance and supplemental appropriations provided through various measures for FY2024 and FY2025, and identifies such funding distinctly, to allow for clear comparison of the annual appropriations packages independent of those resources. The report makes special note of "net discretionary appropriations" for DHS—which provides a perspective on the net impact DHS funding has on congressionally tracked budget totals.⁴

For other in-depth analyses of the FY2025 DHS appropriations request and the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) response, see

• CRS Report R48074, DHS Budget Request Analysis: FY2025, by William L. Painter;
• CRS Report R48126, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations: FY2025 Provisions, by William L. Painter; and
• CRS Report R47688, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations: FY2024 State of Play, by William L. Painter.

For background on DHS structure and function, see CRS Report R47446, The Department of Homeland Security: A Primer, by William L. Painter.

FY2025 DHS Appropriations Overview

Annual Appropriations

The following table presents a comparative summary of the FY2025 DHS appropriations throughout the appropriations process. The Senate Appropriations Committee majority released a draft of its bill, but it was not marked up, and therefore is not included in the table.⁵

DHS Budgetary Resources: Beyond the Score

There are multiple ways of looking at the budgetary resources a federal department or agency has available to use. Some of the common perspectives are:

• The total resources available to it—which includes all budgetary resources available to an agency, including those provided through appropriations acts (discretionary appropriations) and those provided through other laws (mandatory, or direct, appropriations), including spending authority from offsetting collections;
• Budgetary resources provided through the annual appropriations process only (discretionary appropriations)—either in regular, continuing, or supplemental appropriations acts; and

A measure's "score" for the purpose of enforcing congressional and statutory budgetary rules.

The broadest public tabulations of these perspectives are from budget materials from the executive branch, such as the budget request and its accompanying justification documents. These are developed by federal agencies under the guidance and review of the Office of Management and Budget.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) develops and provides budgetary information to Congress, including cost estimates of proposed or enacted legislation. Cost estimates prepared by CBO are typically used as the basis for enforcing congressional budget enforcement rules during the consideration of legislation. OMB and CBO methodologies differ in nuance, but are based on the same principles.

Some of the broadest and most detailed budgetary information prepared by Congress is the detail tables included in appropriations committee reports and explanatory statements. These not only include information on the explicit content of the measure, and how it scores under CBO's methodology, but also interpretations of the expected resources available to agencies through other sources. These detail tables are the basis of much of CRS's analysis of appropriations legislation.

In the event a full-year CR is enacted—as was the case for FY2025—there is no final detail table upon which to base the analysis traditionally provided in previous editions of this report. However, some analysis is still possible based on plain language interpretation of the CR.

Table 2 provides information on the FY2025 appropriations process, on the basis of information provided in the detail table from H.Rept. 118-553, which accompanied the FY2024 DHS appropriations measure passed by the House; the full-year CR in Division A of P.L. 119-4; and Division C of P.L. 118-47, the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2024, which is the basis for most of the amounts provided in the CR. The table also provides a breakdown of the resources available to DHS, distributed by component, and further broken down by funding type, to the extent possible.

Each component's funding level is broken down in Table 2 across four columns, representing the different phases of the appropriations process: FY2024 enacted,⁶ requested annual appropriations for FY2025,⁷ the House-passed bill for FY2025 from the 118^th Congress, and enacted appropriations from the full-year CR for FY2025 and supplemental appropriations measures.⁸ The components are ordered from largest to smallest by FY2024 enacted annual net discretionary budget authority.

Some caveats:

• 1. In the absence of detail tables, except where noted, CRS developed these tables with the assumption that offsetting collections, like appropriations covered by the CR, would continue at the FY2024 level.
• 2. With no detail table to provide an authoritative statement of fee-funded programs and other mandatory spending, for some components, gross totals of resources could not be developed. The table includes "n/a" where this is the case.
• 3. Even when detail tables are available, some DHS mandatory spending is not included in them. This includes spending on flood insurance claims, as well as trust funds for the Coast Guard and the Secret Service.⁹
• 4. The detail tables do not reflect reimbursements between components for services provided, such as payments from partner agencies to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers for the cost of training programs.¹⁰

With those caveats in mind, resource totals for each component and for the department are provided in bold when adequate data is available. An additional total at the bottom in italics provides a gross discretionary total for the department—this could be developed for FY2025, whereas a more complete resource total could not without data on fee-funded programs.

Figure 1 uses the data in Table 2 to provide a visual representation of the resources available to seven DHS operational components to the extent possible—the seven largest components of DHS in terms of net discretionary budget authority:

• U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP),
• U.S. Coast Guard (USCG),
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),
• Transportation Security Administration (TSA),
• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),
• U.S. Secret Service (USSS), and
• Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

In Figure 1, these seven components are listed along the bottom axis, showing the same four stages for each as in Table 2.

The base (medium blue) segment of each bar represents net discretionary budget authority. Atop those bars are additional bars that represent other funding types:

• offsetting collections (orange),
• programs paid for directly by fees (gray),
• mandatory appropriations (yellow),
• funding covered by disaster relief (light blue),¹¹ and
• supplemental appropriations, including advance appropriations (green).¹²

Atop the column describing the Biden Administration's request, black segments indicate requested emergency-designated funding for the respective components.

Among the changes Figure 1 illuminates are

• the relative magnitude of disaster spending (which encompasses the mandatory, disaster relief-designated, and supplemental funding for FEMA) compared with other DHS funding priorities—despite the volume of disaster relief-designated and emergency supplemental appropriations, a $13 billion shortfall is anticipated in the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) in FY2025, with the major disasters portion of the DRF being exhausted in June (absent further supplemental appropriations);¹³
• the Biden Administration's proposal to use emergency-designated funding (noted as black segments atop the request column) to cover some of the core budget of several components (absent the use of that designation, the Biden Administration's request would score $2.79 billion higher);
• the relative importance of fee revenues and offsetting collections across operational components, from no role at USSS and CISA, to a modest contribution to ICE, to significant portions of the CBP and TSA budgets; and
• the Biden Administration's proposal to provide additional offsetting fee revenue to support TSA—a one-time increase was provided for FY2024—and how appropriations measures must include additional discretionary funding to maintain the proposed budget in the absence of authorization to provide those additional revenues.

Figure 1. Budget Authority for DHS Operational Components FY2024-FY2025

Sources: See Table 2. Notes: Data do not reflect the impact of rescissions or advance appropriations not available in a given fiscal year. Some values are not visible due to scale. Final data on fee-funded programs for FY2025 was not available at the time of publication.

DHS Appropriations: Comparing Scores

It is often useful to present comparative analysis to put proposed and enacted annual funding levels for DHS components in context. Table 3 shows the projected net discretionary annual FY2025 appropriations for DHS distributed by departmental component in comparison with three common baselines described below.

The table presents an analysis of component-level net discretionary annual appropriations—appropriations provided from the Treasury that are not offset by other incoming resources or given special exemption.¹⁴ Comparisons are drawn between three common baselines that are also shown in Table 2: the FY2024 enacted funding level, the FY2025 requested annual funding level, and the FY2025 annual funding level in the House-passed bill. The first column of figures shows the FY2025 annual net discretionary amount for each component in the continuing resolution. Changes from that level are reflected in thousands of dollars, and then as a percentage. As in Table 2, the components are ordered from largest to smallest by FY2024 enacted annual net discretionary budget authority.

Supplemental and advance appropriations are generally not reflected in Table 3. The purpose of this table is to provide comparative perspectives on annual appropriations levels, as well as to improve understanding of comparative annual appropriations levels across the department, rather than to survey total resources provided by Congress.

Emergency-Designated Funding in Annual Appropriations Measures

It is atypical for the DHS annual appropriations measure to include emergency-designated appropriations. Three recent proposals indicate an increased willingness in some corners to consider such proposals, at least in the current constrained budget environment.

• 1. The Biden Administration's FY2024 budget proposal included a request for a $4.7 billion emergency-designated contingency appropriation contingent on certain levels of migrant activity at the U.S.-Mexico border. If the Administration's proposal had been enacted, ongoing activities that had been funded in the FY2023 DHS annual appropriations act could have been funded as emergency requirements in FY2024 if migrant activity at the U.S.-Mexico border reached certain thresholds.¹⁵ Although the proposal was not enacted, an identical proposal was also included in the Administration's FY2025 request.

After the Administration's initial proposal, the Senate Appropriations Committee-reported Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2024 (S. 2625) included $4.3 billion in emergency-designated funding distributed across nine of DHS's 15 components.

• 1. The Administration also proposed $2.79 billion in emergency-designated annual appropriations in its FY2025 budget request, noting in its congressional justification that "This 'shifted base' funding concept was included in 2023 appropriations and was also part of an agreement associated with the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA)."¹⁶

Such funding was not included in either the DHS appropriations measures enacted for FY2024 or FY2025 DHS appropriations.

Footnotes