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U.S. President Donald Trump signs a bipartisan bill to stop the flow of opioids into the United States in the Oval Office of the White House on January 10, 2018 in Washington, DC
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Two Bills to Become Law; Lots of Ongoing Work
Mar 25, 2026
Two Bills to Become Law
These two bills have passed both the Senate and the House and now go to the President for signing, or, if he remembers his empty threat from the week before last, go to the President to sit for 10 days excluding Sundays at which time they will become law anyway.
- S. 1884: Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025, which will prohibit certain non-merits-based defenses against returning relevant artwork, passed the House by voice vote so no recorded vote exists.
- S. 3971: Small Business Innovation and Economic Security Act, which will extend some small business related programs, passed 345-41.
Recorded Votes
These bills have only passed the House, so they are not going to become law anytime soon.
- H.R. 4294: MAWS Act of 2026, which would direct the Secretary of Commerce to establish a pilot program with respect to the sale of blue catfish caught within the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, passed 320-66.
- H.R. 1958: Deporting Fraudsters Act of 2026, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to clarify that aliens who have been convicted of defrauding the United States Government or the unlawful receipt of public benefits are inadmissible and deportable even though existing law covers this category of crime in nearly every case, passed 231-186.
- H.R. 4638: Federal Working Animal Protection Act, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide that an alien who has been convicted of harming animals used in law enforcement is inadmissible and deportable even though existing law covers this issue, passed 228-190.
- H.R. 556: Protecting Access for Hunters and Anglers Act, which would prohibit the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture from prohibiting the use of lead ammunition or tackle on certain Federal land or water under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture, passed 215-202.
Legislative Appropriations Recap from the First Branch Forecast
Our colleagues at the First Branch Forecast have been tracking the legislative appropriations process so you don't have to: Recap.
The bottom line is that the legislative branch needs vastly more appropriations than it's likely to give itself and the damage to the functionality of legislative branch will continue to accrue, possibly to a breaking point.
Legislator Updates
- Wall Street Journal report on the record number of members leaving Congress.
- NOTUS report on an AI company co-owned by Rep. Swalwell (D-CA14).
- NOTUS report on Congressional wealth.
Continuing Business
- The House Oversight Committee has formally subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi for a closed session on Jeffrey Epstein.
- The House received a classified briefing on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in advance of a vote next month to renew Section 702.
- DHS remains shut down as neither party has moved from its demands of the other.
Two Bills to Become Law; Lots of Ongoing Work was originally published by GovTrack and is republished with permission.
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U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) testifies during his confirmation hearing to be the next Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 18, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Confirmation on Easy Mode: Sen. Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS
Mar 24, 2026
Since arriving in Congress in 2013 Sen. Markwayne Mullin has been known for disappearing for a few weeks to Afghanistan in a putative effort to rescue Americans still there after withdrawal and tried to draw the president of the Teamsters into a fight during a hearing. Ironically, or possibly appropriately, Sean O’Brien, that same president of the Teamsters, endorsed Mullin’s nomination. He has written several laws supporting Native American communities and pediatric cancer research. A Trump loyalist, on January 6, 2021 in the hours after the riot at the Capitol, Mullin voted to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by omitting Arizona and Pennsylvania’s votes for Joe Biden.
His work experience prior to his political career was primarily in running his family’s plumbing business after his father became ill. He spent four months as a mixed martial arts fighter with a record of three wins. (He’s also gotten a lot richer while in Congress.)
Now he’s awaiting confirmation in the Senate to be President Trump’s next Secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration agencies, FEMA, TSA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the cybersecurity agency CISA. (Outgoing DHS secretary Kirsti Noem was fired by Trump in the aftermath of the immigration agencies killing two Minnesota citizens at protests, and DHS is fiscally shut-down while Democrats are demanding immigration agency reform.)
How have nominees been vetted in the past?
In general, under other administrations, nominees had to go through a rigorous background check process focusing on taxes, personal and organizational affiliations, any legal issues and family issues. Nominees have had to fill out an SF-86, a form that allows for security clearances. This standard was already weakened in the first Trump Administration when Trump ordered his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to be given security clearance despite issues with his SF-86 form, and in the second Trump Administration the vetting process has been slimmed down even further. Nominees also respond to detailed questions in writing from senators on the committee handling the nomination.
Committee Hearing and Vote
March 18th’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Mullin’s nomination had three separate tracks.
Most of the GOP senators focused on the fact that DHS remains unfunded 30+ days after its last funding ended.
Sen. Paul (R-KY), the committee chair, took a different tack: he said that Mullin’s approving comments about Paul’s 2017 attack from a neighbor showed that Mullin was a bad choice for an agency that has been notable for its aggressive use of force since the start of the current administration. Also in the course of their back and forth, Mullin claimed that dueling was legal. It’s murder, actually.
(In its earlier years, Congress was a pretty violent place. Legislators often attacked each other physically and in 1838 Rep. Graves killed Rep. Cilley in a duel!)
The third track, coming primarily from Sen. Peters (D-MI), challenged Mullin on his tendency to embellish facts. This track ended up going in a different direction than was perhaps expected. Peters was asking about comments Mullin had made suggesting he had been in combat, yet Mullin has never served in the military in any capacity.
Mullin’s response was that it was related to a “classified” trip he took while serving in the House which involved some kind of very difficult training. Something was wrong with the story: the House does not have the power to classify secrets since classification is a power of the president. Mullin tried to refuse to provide any more information to the senators, but Sen. Paul called his bluff and asked for details to be provided in a room meant for classified topics, called a SCIF. When they came out, Sen. Lankford (R-OK) said that Mullin’s trip was about a whistleblower and was covered by a non-disclosure agreement, not classification. This whole thing was extremely unusual.
A nominee to lead an agency with substantial law enforcement powers and some national security responsibilities who doesn’t know the difference between classification and a non-disclosure agreement, favors violent resolution to disputes (and thinks it’s legal), and tries to avoid actually answering questions about things he brought up himself might have been disqualifying in the past. It’s obviously not anymore.
In the end, Mullin’s performance made no difference. Thursday, March 19, the committee voted to send his nomination to the Senate floor. Sen. Paul was the only Republican voting no, but Sen. Fetterman (D-PA) voted yes, as both had indicated they would in advance, which was enough to pass the committee. Mullin will be approved by the full Senate sometime next week probably. Whether he gets any votes besides Fetterman’s from the Democrats is currently unknown. All Republicans except Paul are expected to vote yes, and that will be enough.
Confirmation on Easy Mode: Sen. Mullin’s nomination to lead DHS was originally published on GovTrack.us and is republished with permission.
Amy West is the GovTrack research and communications manager.
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A deep dive into the growing uncertainty in the U.S. legal immigration system, exploring policy shifts, backlogs, and how procedural instability is reshaping the promise of lawful immigration.
Getty Images, Halfpoint Images
When Immigration Rules Keep Changing, the System Stops Working
Mar 23, 2026
For generations, the United States has framed legal immigration as a kind of social contract. Since 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act ended the national-origin quota system, the U.S. has formally opened legal immigration to people from around the world without racial or national-origin preferences. If people from across the globe sought to reunite with family or bring needed skills to the American economy, they were told they would be welcomed. If they sought U.S. citizenship, the country would provide a clear route to reach it.
Follow the procedures, submit the forms, pay the fees, pass the background checks, and your time will come. Legal immigration has never been easy or quick. But the promise has always been that the path exists.
For decades, that process has been central to the country’s immigration narrative. The paperwork is complex, the wait is long, and the costs can be substantial, but the underlying premise has been simple. Follow the rules and the system will eventually produce an answer.
Increasingly, that premise is breaking down.
Across multiple visa categories and legal statuses, immigrants who have spent years navigating the formal process are finding themselves caught in an environment of shifting policies, administrative pauses, reversals, and uncertainty. The problem is no longer just that the process is slow. Instead, the process itself is becoming opaque.
For many applicants, the financial commitment alone is substantial. Filing fees, required medical exams, document translations, and legal assistance can easily exceed $5,000 over the course of an application. Families often structure their lives around these timelines. Job offers, housing decisions, schooling for children, and long-term financial planning are frequently tied to expected milestones in the immigration process.
When those milestones suddenly move or disappear, the consequences ripple outward.
Part of the challenge is sheer scale. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services currently carries a backlog of more than 8 million pending cases across the immigration system. Even when policies are stable, that backlog means applicants often wait years for decisions on visas, work authorization, and green card petitions.
But the backlog alone does not explain the growing uncertainty. In recent months, policy shifts and administrative pauses have created additional instability for people already navigating the legal process.
One example came in December when the State Department paused visa processing for applicants from dozens of countries. The pause was presented as a security review, but for families and employers already waiting in line, it created immediate uncertainty. Applicants who had already submitted paperwork, paid fees, and waited months for interviews suddenly found themselves stuck without any clear timeline for when the process would resume.
For many applicants already inside the system, the most immediate impact is the loss of the ability to work legally. When immigration processing pauses or policies change midstream, employment authorization tied to those applications often lapses while cases remain unresolved. People who followed the rules, paid the required fees, and maintained a valid status can suddenly find themselves unable to continue working in jobs they already hold, whether running a small business, repairing cars, or writing software, simply because the process they relied on has stalled.
The consequences are not abstract. Families who have structured their lives around the expectation of lawful employment can lose their primary source of income overnight. Rent, mortgages, and school tuition do not pause simply because an immigration application does. Employers face sudden disruptions as well, losing workers they have already hired and trained, even though the underlying immigration case is still pending.
For the people involved, it surely feels like the rules changed halfway through the process, because they did. They entered the system under one set of expectations, complied with every requirement, and waited in line as instructed. Then the process stopped moving.
In this environment, even basic questions become difficult to answer. Can someone continue working while waiting for a decision? Should a family keep paying legal fees to pursue an application if the policy framework may shift again? Is a delay temporary, or does it signal a deeper structural change in the program itself? And these days, if someone seeking permanent resident status makes the wrong decision on any of these - whether due to acts of omission or commission - it can result in the family members being placed on an ICE list of people targeted for deportation.
But the broader issue is institutional credibility.
A functioning system requires more than rules written on paper. It requires confidence that those rules will remain stable long enough for participants to act on them. When the framework shifts repeatedly, sometimes affecting people who have already invested years and resources in the process, it creates the perception that compliance offers no clear advantage. If individuals follow established procedures, the institutions administering those procedures will behave in a consistent and predictable way. When that expectation erodes, participation itself becomes riskier. Applicants begin to wonder whether the rules they follow today will still apply tomorrow.
None of this means immigration policy cannot change. Democracies revise laws and regulations in response to elections, court decisions, and evolving public priorities. Immigration policy in particular has always reflected political debate about how many newcomers the country should admit and under what conditions.
But there is an important difference between policy change and procedural instability.
Policy change establishes new rules going forward. Procedural instability alters the environment for people who are already in the system, often after they have invested significant time, money, and personal planning in reliance on the existing framework.
The result is a system that begins to resemble a moving target rather than a structured queue.
At a moment when immigration remains deeply contentious in American politics, restoring clarity to legal pathways would serve multiple purposes. Supporters of immigration reform often argue that expanding lawful avenues reduces pressure on unauthorized migration. Critics frequently emphasize the importance of enforcing existing rules.
Both arguments depend on the same foundation. A legal process must function consistently enough for people to trust it.
Without that consistency, the debate risks losing a critical distinction between lawful participation and rule breaking. When the system itself becomes unpredictable, the promise that following the rules will lead where you want them to begins to lose meaning.
Once that promise weakens, rebuilding confidence in the system becomes far more difficult than maintaining it in the first place. Or perhaps an uneven system with stops and starts that frustrates the people in it so much that they no longer want to be here is an intentional message being sent by those in charge.
Brent McKenzie is a writer and educator based in the United States. He is the creator of Idiots & Charlatans, a watchdog-style website focused on democratic values and climate change. He previously taught in Brussels and has spent the majority of his professional career in educational publishing.
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Travelers wait in a TSA Pre security line at Miami International Airport on March 17, 2026, in Miami, Florida. Travelers across the country are enduring long airport security lines as a partial federal government shutdown affects the Transportation Security Administration officers working the security lines.
(Joe Raedle/Getty Images/TCA)
A New Norm of DHS Shutdown & Long Airport Lines
Mar 22, 2026
If you’ve ever traveled to France, chances are you’ve come up against this all-too-common phenomenon. You get to the train station and, without warning, your train is out of service. Or a restaurant is oddly closed during regular business hours.
“C’est la grève,” you may hear from a local, accompanied by a shrug. It’s the strike.
There’s a joke in France about their time-honored tradition of labor protests: A tourist asks a waiter what the signs are about at a protest across the street. The waiter hardly looks up and simply says, “Thursday.”
Strikes, protests, work stoppages and closures are so frequent in France, there are multiple apps and websites devoted to letting locals and tourists alike know what will be open and what will be closed, and those in the know check daily.
A strike today at schools in Dijon, Lyon and Rennes; an ongoing transport strike in Rouen; closures at the Louvre. One site promises: “Thanks to our service, unexpected problems are a thing of the past. You’ll no longer be stuck waiting for your train, and you can plan a backup solution!”
Americans may hear this and smugly scoff at a society that’s turned such dysfunction into a revered art form. But our pride is increasingly undeserved.
Last week I flew between Newark and Austin. As you may have seen on the news, the security lines were hours long and, in some cases, snaked out the airport doors and onto the street.
This wasn’t because of a protest or a strike, however, but yet another government shutdown, the third in just six months.
Starting in October last year and lasting for 43 days, we endured the longest shutdown in U.S. history due to an impasse over Affordable Care Act subsidies. Then, earlier this year, a partial shutdown over delays in a funding package linked to immigration. And now, going on more than a month, we’re in another partial shutdown over Department of Homeland Security funding.
The shutdown has meant about 50,000 Transportation Security Administration officers have been working without pay. Many have picked up second jobs, while others are calling in sick and more than 300 have simply quit.
Acting Deputy TSA Administrator Adam Stahl says we’re rapidly approaching a breaking point:
“If the call rate does climb,” he said of agents calling out of work, “there could be scenarios where we may have to shut down airports. This is a serious situation.”
You’d think Congress would want to fix this quickly in an election year, but all evidence to the contrary. Republicans and Democrats remain in a stalemate over DHS funding, with both parties blaming each other and using strikingly similar language to do so.
“Democrats need to end their political posturing, stop using our TSA agents as political pawns, and fully fund DHS,” said Sen. Katie Britt.
Sen. Raphael Warnock said, “I think it’s simply wrong for my Republican colleagues to use these hard-working Americans as leverage, as pawns, in what they are presenting as a false choice to the American people.”
But while both parties finger-point, all the average American sees is a dysfunctional government getting more dysfunctional by the day, with basic pursuits — like air travel — feeling more like capricious and unreliable luxuries.
While inching through security in Austin, someone asked me what the lines were about. “The shutdown,” I said. He didn’t even know we were in one again.
We deserve better from our government. But if this is just our new normal — where on any given day we’re left wondering what parts of our government are open and running — we may, like the French, need to get ourselves an app for that.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
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Trump’s ‘Just for Fun’ War Talk Shows a Dangerous Trivialization