Introduction

The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act includes all annual appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), providing 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 FY2023 annual appropriations measure and its explanatory statement;¹
• annual appropriations requested by the Biden Administration for FY2024;²
• funding levels included in the House-passed H.R. 4367 and H.Rept. 118-123;
• funding levels recommended by the Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) in committee-reported S. 2625 and S.Rept. 118-85; and
• funding levels provided in the second consolidated appropriations measure (P.L. 118-47) and described in its accompanying explanatory statement.

The report makes note of advance and supplemental appropriations provided through various measures for FY2023 and FY2024, but identifies such funding distinctly, to allow for clear comparison on the annual appropriations packages. The report makes special note of "net discretionary appropriations" for DHS—a perspective on the net impact the legislation that funds DHS has on congressionally tracked budget totals.³

For other in-depth analyses of the FY2024 DHS appropriations request and the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) and SAC responses, see

• CRS Report R47496, DHS Budget Request Analysis: FY2024;
• CRS Report R47663, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations: FY2024 Provisions; and
• CRS Report R47688, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations: FY2024 State of Play.

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

FY2024 DHS Appropriations Overview

Annual Appropriations

DHS Budgetary Resources: Beyond the Score

Discussion regarding annual appropriations often centers on one of two numbers:

• the total level of appropriations or "gross budget authority" provided in the bill; or
• how the bill "scores" against budget limitations—the net discretionary budget authority, shown in bold in Table 1.

The gross budget authority amount includes all the budget authority in the bill: discretionary appropriations, including those designated as disaster relief or emergency requirements, regardless of offsets from collections or rescissions;⁴ changes in mandatory programs directed by the bill; and appropriated mandatory spending. This is a representation of the total budget authority that the bill would provide the department in the fiscal year if enacted.

The "score" is a total of the net discretionary budget authority provided in the bill. The Congressional Budget Office generally determines that net value, taking into account

• the offsetting effects on that gross total of certain collections or rescissions,
• appropriations to fund mandatory programs (in the case of DHS, U.S. Coast Guard Retired Pay is an appropriation made to fulfil an existing legal obligation, so it is not "scored" as discretionary spending), and
• disaster relief or emergency designations of certain amounts.

The remaining level represents the "adjusted net discretionary budget authority" provided in the bill. It does not include programs with appropriations in permanent law. Many of those are listed as "fee-funded" programs, as their resources are often from fees collected in special funds for a specifically authorized purpose.

A significant portion of the total resources available to DHS is "controlled" through DHS appropriations bills and reports.⁵ Special tables at the end of appropriations conference reports and explanatory statements include a higher level of detail on the funding provided to the department, usually at various program, project, and activity (PPA) levels. These tables—known as detail tables—serve as a level of control for interpreting statutory authorities in the bill that regulate the ability to transfer funding between appropriations or to reprogram money within an appropriation.

As the detail tables represent the most complete picture of the DHS appropriations measure and its effect on the DHS budget, Table 2 uses their data to provide a breakdown of the resources available to DHS, distributed by component, and further broken down by funding type. This provides a more complete description of each component's overall resource level than a review of the net discretionary appropriations alone.

Each component's funding level is broken down in Table 2 across five columns, representing the different phases of the appropriations process: prior year (FY2023) enacted,⁶ current year (FY2024) requested annual appropriations, the House-passed bill, the SAC-reported bill, and the enacted bill. The final column shows enacted appropriations, including advance appropriations made in FY2022 that will be available in FY2024.

Two caveats:

• 1. Some DHS mandatory spending is not included in the detail tables. This includes spending on flood insurance claims, as well as trust funds for the Coast Guard and the Secret Service.⁷
• 2. 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.⁸

Note: The Administration's proposed $4.7 billion in emergency-designated contingent appropriations is shown in Table 2 under the Office of the Secretary and Executive Management (OSEM). Although the Office of the Secretary would have originally received those funds if certain thresholds of border activity were reached in a timely fashion, they were to be distributed to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to support their activities. Given the uncertainty of whether specific distributions of those funds would be made, and at what level, their potential practical impact cannot be reflected in either Table 2 or the ensuing figure. Neither the HAC-reported nor Senate-reported DHS appropriations measure included the contingent appropriations, and they were not included in the enacted measure.

Figure 1 uses the data in Table 1 to provide a visual representation of the resources available to seven DHS operational components—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 five stages for each as in Table 1.

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 (dark blue),⁹ and
• supplemental appropriations, including advance appropriations (green).¹⁰

Atop the column describing the SAC-reported bill, black segments indicate 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;
• the Administration's proposal to provide additional offsetting fee revenue to support TSA, and how appropriations measures needed to include additional discretionary funding to maintain the proposed budget in the absence of authorization to provide those additional revenues; and
• FY2024 advance supplemental appropriations provided in Division J, Title V of P.L. 117-58 (the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act).

Figure 1. DHS Budget Authority by Selected Components, FY2023 and FY2024

Source: 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.

DHS Appropriations: Comparing Scores

It is often useful to present comparative analysis to put proposed annual funding levels for DHS components in context. Table 3 shows net discretionary annual FY2023 appropriations for DHS distributed by departmental component in comparison with two 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.¹¹ Comparisons are drawn between two common baselines that are also shown in Table 1—the FY2024 requested annual funding level and the FY2023 enacted funding level. The first column of figures shows the FY2024 enacted annual net discretionary amount for each component. Changes from that level are reflected in thousands of dollars, and then as a percentage. The components are ordered from largest to smallest by FY2024 enacted annual net discretionary budget authority.

FY2023 and FY2024 supplemental and advance appropriations are 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 annual appropriations measures to include emergency-designated appropriations. However, the Biden Administration's budget proposal—with the inclusion of a $4.7 billion emergency-designated contingency appropriation—could be said to have opened the door for atypical approaches in FY2024. 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.¹² Those contingent emergency appropriations are not included in this reports' analysis for two reasons: (1) the precise level of budget authority that would have been provided was contingent upon an unpredictable outside factor, and (2) the potential budget authority was not allocated by component—funding distribution would have been done by the Secretary of DHS based on need.

SAC-reported S. 2625 included $4.3 billion in emergency-designated funding distributed across 9 of DHS's 15 components. Table 4 lists those components and the appropriations receiving emergency-designated budget authority in the SAC-reported bill.

Ultimately, the FY2024 enacted DHS appropriations measure did not include any emergency or contingent emergency appropriations.