Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin is jumping back into the thick of GOP infighting on Capitol Hill as he tries to speed up funding for the embattled agency he took over in the middle of a partial government shutdown.
Mullin, who left the Senate in March to run the Department of Homeland Security, has been away from the Capitol for just a handful of weeks, but his personal stake in reopening the agency has him reprising a role he often played as a senator: mediator for congressional Republicans.
Both House and Senate leaders say that Mullin has checked in regularly on DHS funding, and despite it becoming a sore spot between the chambers — Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is holding up the bulk of agency funding as leverage over the Senate — Mullin appears to be navigating the impasse without taking sides.
“He’s been engaged in trying to be able to get things moving, which is helpful,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), Mullin’s former Oklahoma colleague and a senior member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
House Republicans have grudgingly accepted a two-part plan to reopen DHS, deferring to Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-SD) decision to pass funding for immigration enforcement through reconciliation, a time-consuming budget process that sidesteps the filibuster.
But House conservatives have threatened to derail that approach unless unrelated priorities, such as defunding Planned Parenthood or voter ID requirements, get attached.
More pressing for Mullin is that Johnson won’t hold a vote on funding for the rest of the agency until lawmakers get closer to pushing reconciliation across the finish line. That funding, which covers airport security, the Coast Guard, and disaster relief, has passed the Senate twice and is awaiting House action.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said House Republicans have been “working closely” with Mullin to end the shutdown and that the House would “expedite” a reconciliation blueprint that survived a Senate “vote-a-rama” on Thursday. The blueprint, which funds Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, for three years, is slated for a House floor vote next week.
“We’re working to get it resolved,” Scalise said, telling the Washington Examiner he’d spoken with Mullin as recently as Wednesday. Thune, for his part, spoke with Mullin on Tuesday.
The shuttle diplomacy is right in Mullin’s wheelhouse. Before President Donald Trump tapped him to replace Kristi Noem as DHS secretary, Mullin served as Senate Republicans’ liaison to the House and took an active role in negotiating parts of the GOP tax law last year.
He’s far from the only Trump Cabinet official who has sway with lawmakers. On other occasions, the White House has dispatched Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, both former senators, to settle congressional disputes.
But Mullin, who served five terms in the House, is the rare Republican to have healthy relationships in both chambers of Congress, and he appears to be straddling that line successfully in the current funding fight.
Mullin has publicly warned that DHS will run out of emergency funding the first week of May — far sooner than the June 1 deadline Trump has set for sending immigration funding to his desk. And Senate Republicans hope that sense of urgency will prod the House to pass the “everything but immigration” bill for DHS in the coming days.
“[Mullin has] made it clear, I think, as you know, he said it publicly, that they’re going to run out of money here pretty soon,” Thune told the Washington Examiner. “So, I think that message is being delivered and hopefully will be received, and we can get moving forward with making sure those agencies are funded.”
At the same time, House leadership denies that Mullin is pressuring them to act as part of negotiations.
“No, absolutely not,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said when asked if Mullin was encouraging Republicans to move the Senate-passed bill. “I haven’t heard that from Markwayne.”
For a time, Democrats expressed openness to funding ICE and CBP, two agencies that became politically toxic after officers fatally shot two protesters in Minneapolis, but negotiations over how to reform DHS fell apart last month, prompting Republicans to go it alone.
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Publicly, Mullin has attempted to keep the spotlight off GOP disputes, picking fights with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and blaming Democrats for the two-month shutdown.
When asked about his outreach to Republicans, a DHS spokesperson said that Mullin is in “constant communication with leaders on Capitol Hill, his 22 agency heads, and the White House to deliver on President Trump’s promise to protect the homeland.”