Contents

• DHS Net Discretionary Annual Appropriations
• DHS: Beyond Net Discretionary Appropriations

Generally, 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 FY2018,² requested by the Trump Administration for FY2019, as well as the funding levels proposed in Senate and House Appropriations Committee-reported legislation for FY2019 and enacted in P.L. 116-6, which included the FY2019 DHS Appropriations Act as Division A. It also includes information on DHS funding from two enacted 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 examines net discretionary annual appropriations for DHS—a perspective on the net impact of legislation funding DHS on congressionally tracked budget totals—and also provides a more inclusive look at the resources available to DHS components to perform their missions.

DHS Net Discretionary Annual Appropriations

Table 1 shows congressional action on net discretionary annual FY2019 appropriations for DHS distributed by departmental component.

Each grouping of three lines in Table 1 presents an analysis of a component's net discretionary annual appropriations.³ Lines below each component name indicate two baselines commonly used to make comparisons of appropriations—the FY2019 requested funding level and the FY2018 enacted funding level in thousands of dollars of net discretionary budget authority. To the right of each component name is the funding level reported by the Senate and House Appropriations Committees and enacted for FY2019. Below each bold number is first the difference between that bold number and the two baselines. The dollar difference is also expressed as a percentage in the next column to the right. The components are ordered from largest to smallest by FY2018 enacted annual funding level.

Supplemental appropriations are not reflected in Table 1, 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.⁴

Some of the changes reflected in Table 1 are the result of different approaches to funding specific missions of the department or restructuring of components, rather than simple reductions or increases in funding relative to the request or prior-year enacted levels. For example, the Administration chose to reorganize the Office of Health Affairs and Domestic Nuclear Detection Office into the new Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Senate Appropriations Committee elected to fund those activities in the un-reorganized structure, as the authorizing committees had not ratified the reorganization at the time the bill was marked up, while the House Appropriations Committee recommended funding the reorganized structure. P.L. 116-6 funded the reorganized structure.

In addition, the enacted level for the newly renamed Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Protection Agency is lower due to a transfer of the Office of Biometric Identity Management to the Management Directorate. Enacted P.L. 116-6 would fund the DHS Office of Inspector General wholly through appropriations, rather than including a $24 million transfer from the Disaster Relief Fund, as had been requested by the Administration.

For the first time in DHS annual appropriations, committee-reported legislation funds activities of certain components with unobligated balances of prior appropriations transferred from other components. As can be seen in Table 2, the Senate Appropriations Committee funded some FEMA and Management Directorate activities with transfers from unobligated balances in the Disaster Relief Fund, while an amendment adopted in House Appropriations Committee full committee markup would fund Coast Guard acquisitions with unobligated balances from the Science and Technology Directorate. P.L. 116-6 funded a portion of the Disaster Relief Fund with $300 million of its unobligated balances.

DHS: Beyond Net Discretionary Appropriations

While the total net discretionary budget authority, when adjusted for the effect of rescissions, provides the "score" that is measured against the bill's discretionary spending allocation, it does not represent the total budget authority provided to DHS. "Net" discretionary appropriations are the net balance of discretionary appropriations minus any offsetting collections. Such collections are addressed in the appropriations legislation, and provide significant resources to some components of DHS, such as the Transportation Security Administration and National Protection and Programs Directorate. They 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.⁵ Congress controls the reprogramming 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 complete picture of the resources available to eight DHS components:⁶ 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 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—the seven operational components—and the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), which was renamed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is considered by some to have an operational role. These are also the largest eight components of DHS in terms of gross discretionary budget authority.

In Figure 1, these eight components are listed along the bottom axis. Each component's funding level as a section of the figure has five bars, representing the different phases of the appropriations process: prior-year enacted, current year requested annual appropriations, Senate committee action, House committee action, and enacted. The bottom segment of each bar represents net discretionary budget authority—the same amount for each as represented in Table 1.

On top of these bases are several other segment types, representing fee revenues, offsetting collections, mandatory spending,⁷ 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.⁸ Unlike in Table 1, supplemental appropriations are reflected in Figure 1—although those provided for FY2018 are too large to be accommodated at the same scale as the rest of the figure. Therefore, the full length of this bar is truncated, but labeled with its actual value. A small inset graphic shows the scale of supplemental appropriations relative to the other appropriations.

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 significance of the size of the emergency supplemental appropriations provided for FY2018; the inclusion of border barrier funding in the House bill in excess of what was initially requested by the Administration, the opposition of the Senate Appropriation Committees to proposed reductions in funding to the Coast Guard, as well as House and Senate Appropriations Committee opposition to proposed cuts to FEMA; and an increase in discretionary spending to support the TSA's budget in the absence of the Trump Administration's proposed fee increase.

The table also reflects supplemental appropriations provided for disaster relief and border operations in P.L. 116-20 and P.L. 116-26 respectively. It does not reflect the Administration's supplemental request for border operations, as the public documentation of the request does not provide complete information at the component level. No formal public request was made by the Administration for FY2019 disaster relief and recovery funding.

Figure 1. Department of Homeland Security Budget Authority by Selected DHS Component, FY2018-FY2019 (billions of dollars of budget authority controlled for reprogramming through appropriations committee reports)

Sources: CRS analysis of P.L. 115-141, its explanatory statement as printed in the Congressional Record of March 22, 2018, pp. H2544-H2608, S.Rept. 115-283, H.Rept. 115-948, H.Rept. 116-9, P.L. 116-20, and P.L. 116-26. Notes: Totals do not reflect the impact of rescissions. Adjustments include emergency, disaster relief, and overseas contingency operations (OCO) designated funding.

Table 2 provides a complete breakdown of the total budget authority outlined in Figure 1 for all DHS components, arranged by FY2018 enacted net discretionary budget authority.

Some DHS components do have access to funding beyond the budget authority controlled for reprogramming through the detailed tables appropriations committee reports. Much of DHS's mandatory spending is not reflected in these tables. This includes spending on flood insurance claims, as well as trust funds for the Coast Guard and the Secret Service. Likewise, the detailed 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.

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Footnotes