Lawmaker says Senate Republicans blocked funding for TSA, Coast Guard and FEMA; urges narrowing dispute to ICE and CBP

A lawmaker on the Senate floor accused Senate Republicans of blocking the reopening and funding of several federal agencies and urged narrowing contentious negotiations to the immigration agencies at the center of the dispute.

The lawmaker said Republicans "are blocking the reopening of these critical agencies," and named the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the U.S. Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as being held "hostage" while broader talks continue. The speaker also named ICE and CBP as the agencies that, in their view, were the focus of the substantive disagreement.

The speaker said they had proposed narrowing the floor dispute "all the way down to the one agency that we're fighting about" so that the remainder of the government could be funded. "Let's narrow it to just that and fund the rest of the government," the lawmaker said.

The speaker added that the floor effort to adopt that narrowing was blocked by Senate Republicans and urged those Republicans to "walk onto the floor and offer unanimous consent to open the coast guard, to open TSA, to fund FEMA," saying they "guarantee you there will not be a democratic objector." The transcript also records the speaker referencing "SAISA," a term not clarified in the record.

The remarks in the record are framed as the lawmaker's assertions about the floor proceedings and include no formal motion or vote recorded in these segments. The speaker did not identify themselves by name in the provided transcript.

Next steps were not recorded in this excerpt; the lawmaker called for Senate Republicans to offer unanimous consent as a way to fund the agencies not central to the dispute.