As the House crushed Republican resistance to a Trump-backed funding package to end the latest partial government shutdown, lawmakers in the upper chamber weren’t confident that Congress could avoid being in the same position in the coming weeks.

President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., brokered the deal to end the shutdown last week. That funding truce included a move to sideline the controversial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill in favor of a short-term extension to keep the agency open.

The House’s passage of the package, which funds 11 out of 12 government agencies under Congress’ purview, sets the stage for tense negotiations between the White House and Senate Democrats over reforms to DHS.

But several Senate Republicans are questioning whether two weeks, which had shrunk to just nine days as of Wednesday, would be enough time to avert another partial shutdown — this time only for DHS.

‘I think it’s gonna be very difficult to get the funding bill done for DHS in two weeks,’ Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital.

Scott was one of a handful of Republicans in the upper chamber that rejected the compromise plan and the underlying original package because of bloated spending on earmarks and concerns that Senate Democrats would effectively try to kneecap Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations across the country.

‘We’re going to be in a worse spot,’ Scott said. ‘I mean… all their earmarks got done, and then now they’re going to want to, you know, they want to [get] busy de-fanging and defunding ICE.’

Congressional Democrats wanted to relitigate the bipartisan DHS bill after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. The demand forced Trump to intervene and thrust the government into a partial shutdown on Friday.

While the funding deal made it across his desk, it won’t get Congress out of the jam it’s in, given the short amount of time lawmakers have to negotiate the bill, which is consistently the most difficult spending bill to pass year in and year out. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., noted that once negotiations began, Congress had a ‘very short timeframe in which to do this, which I am against.’

‘But the Democrats insisted on, you know, a two-week window, which, again, I don’t understand the rationale for that,’ Thune said. ‘Anybody who knows this place knows that’s an impossibility.’

Some Senate Democrats did not want to weigh in on a hypothetical scenario just days away, but Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., contended that because of the events in Minnesota, ‘there should be some motivation across the aisle to do something on, you know, all these issues.’ 

‘I mean, I think [DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem should be fired, leadership needs to be changed at ICE, their budget needs to be the right size,’ Kelly said. ‘We got to get them looking like normal police officers.’

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, struck a more positive tone. 

She told Fox News Digital that Congress would be in a much better position, considering that lawmakers will have passed 11 out of the 12 bills needed to fund the federal government. 

‘We’ll now start the negotiations on DHS, and I hope we’ll be successful, but I don’t see how you can compare where we are today,’ Collins said.

Thune believed that Noem’s announcement that ICE agents in Minneapolis would begin wearing body-worn cameras could act as a sweetener for Democrats. There is already $20 million baked into the current bipartisan DHS funding bill for body cameras. 

Schumer rejected that olive branch from Noem, arguing that it didn’t come nearly close enough to the portfolio of reforms Democrats wanted for the agency. And he reaffirmed that Senate Democrats wanted actual legislative action on DHS reforms, not an executive order. 

‘We know how whimsical Donald Trump is,’ Schumer said. ‘He’ll say one thing one day and retract it the next. Same with Secretary Noem.’

‘So, we don’t trust some executive order, some pronouncement from some Cabinet secretary. We need it enshrined into law.’

When asked if lawmakers would need to turn to another short-term funding patch, Schumer argued that ‘if Leader Thune negotiates in good faith, we can get it done. We expect to present to the Republicans a very serious, detailed proposal very shortly.’

But Thune has said for several days that it would be the White House in the driver’s seat, and ultimately it would be Trump who could broker a new deal. 

‘But at some points, obviously it has to be the White House engaged in the conversation with the Senate Democrats, and that’s how that thing’s gonna land,’ Thune said.

House Republicans who are spearheading the charge of another ‘big, beautiful bill’ say they only have a short window of time to pass a massive piece of legislation aimed at lowering costs for Americans across the board.

‘We need to see good movement within the month of February that puts us on a path to achieve this by late spring, early summer,’ Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital.

President Donald Trump led Republicans through passing the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act last year, sprawling legislation that made good on versions of several Trump campaign promises like reducing taxes on tipped and overtime wages, extending his 2017 tax cuts, and surging more money toward his immigration crackdown.

The budget reconciliation process makes such a feat possible by lowering the Senate’s threshold for passage to line up with the House’s own simple majority line, empowering the party holding the levers of power in Congress to pass sweeping fiscal changes to U.S. law.

A large contingent of Republican lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., have said they want to use that process again sometime this year. Pfluger’s RSC, the largest caucus in the House GOP, released a framework last month with recommendations on a bill that would lower costs in areas like housing, healthcare and energy.

Pfluger told Fox News Digital that affordability would likely be a ‘major driver’ of another such GOP bill, but said he was still working on getting input from other areas of the House Republican Conference.

‘I’m sure that there will be refinement as we hear feedback from the different groups. But we do believe that it’s a solid framework. We believe that it’s a winning issue based on good policy,’ Pfluger said.

But both he and House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, have acknowledged they will need to work fast — particularly with the 2026 midterm elections coming in November.

‘I would be embarrassed as a leader and as a conservative if our conference and Republicans in Washington won’t rally in these 10 or 11 months we have before November, where we still have this window of opportunity to strike,’ Arrington said in a forthcoming episode of the RSC’s ‘Right to the Point’ podcast, which Fox News Digital got an exclusive first look at.

He said elsewhere in the podcast that Republicans ‘probably have a three-month window’ to take meaningful action, lining up with Pfluger’s own prediction that action should happen by springtime.

Pfluger said he hoped to get the first key step done this month after sending instructions on what kind of cuts to enact to various House committees.

But Republicans are currently dealing with a one-seat majority in the House until a special election to replace former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., takes place in March.

That could get reduced back down in April after a special election for a blue-leaning seat to replace New Jersey’s new Gov. Mikie Sherrill. Republicans won’t get more breathing room until early August, when California holds a special election for the GOP-leaning seat that was held by the late Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif.

Their first reconciliation bill notably passed with all but two House Republicans on board.

‘We have a path. We’ve dug that path, and we should just do it for the things that we can all agree on,’ Arrington argued.

He said a second bill ‘doesn’t have to be as big and comprehensive, it needs to be targeted on the things that were either left undone, things that fell out, that we should put back in… like not allowing tax dollars to go to transgender procedures and not allowing the fungible federal dollars to support states that use their state Medicaid dollars to fund illegals.’

But it’s not yet clear that such policies could make it in or gain the support of moderate Republicans who are wary of an election cycle that’s expected to be an uphill climb for the GOP.

Pfluger, however, told Fox News Digital that he hoped they could even get some Democratic support if the bill stayed focused on affordability measures.

‘I believe that we are going to produce something that is going to make it very difficult for Democrats to vote against,’ he said. ‘I would hope that we would have something on the board that would get Democrat support in some cases.’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., doesn’t have confidence that top congressional Democrats want to fix Homeland Security funding as Congress gears up for tense negotiations in the coming days. 

With the partial four-day government shutdown now over, Democrats and Republicans are readying to relitigate the controversial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bill, which threatened to completely derail a previous bipartisan funding deal. 

And with nine days on the clock to figure out a way forward, Thune doesn’t believe that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., are prepared to actually reach a bipartisan deal on the bill. 

When asked if he viewed Jeffries, who rebelled against Schumer’s funding deal with President Donald Trump, as a good-faith partner in the coming back-and-forth, Thune said, ‘He’s just not.’

‘He and, for that matter, Leader Schumer, both are afraid of their shadows, and they’re getting a lot of rollback and pressure from their left,’ Thune said. ‘So, I don’t think they want to — particularly in [Jeffries’] case, I don’t think he wants to make a deal at all.’

Schumer on Tuesday said that Democrats would have a proposal ready for Republicans to review that same day, but Thune noted that no such list had been handed over to his side of the aisle. 

There may still be lingering discourse between the top Democratic leaders, too, after Jeffries turned his back on the Trump-Schumer funding deal. However, both met on Tuesday night, and Schumer affirmed that they were on the same page.

Meanwhile, DHS is currently operating under a two-week continuing resolution (CR) that maintains previous funding levels until Congress can pass legislation to fully fund it. But Thune and other Republicans believe that the truncated time period just isn’t long enough to actually hash out a deal. 

And it’s an open question whether Congress will again need to temporarily extend the funding patch, or allow the agency to shut down.

Compounding frustrations among Republicans is that the original DHS bill was the product of bipartisan negotiations and included several guardrails and reporting requirements targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that would limit or block funding if they weren’t met. 

‘I think they want to litigate, have the issue as a political issue,’ Thune said. ‘Whether or not there’s a solution remains to be seen, but at least what they’re saying publicly suggests that that’s not their objective.’ 

House conservatives are quietly grumbling about the deal President Donald Trump entered into with Senate Democrats to keep the government open and running — particularly regarding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Some Republican lawmakers are concerned that the plan will leave them forced to swallow concessions on immigration enforcement policies that they would not normally entertain while the GOP holds all the levers of power in Washington, albeit with slim majorities.

‘I don’t think we have any more leverage,’ one House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly told Fox News Digital. ‘We just shot ourselves in the foot, and nine days later we’ll do it again.’

The compromise between Democrats and the White House funds 97% of the federal government through Sept. 30, but only keeps DHS running until Feb. 13.

That’s because House and Senate Democrats walked away from an initial compromise that would similarly fund DHS through the end of fiscal year (FY) 2026, in exchange for added guardrails on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) like a new body-worn camera mandate and required training on de-escalation and public engagement.

The earlier plan passed the House, mostly with only GOP support, but was rejected by Senate Democrats in the wake of unrest in Minneapolis over Trump’s immigration crackdown. Federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens there during anti-ICE demonstrations, with tensions escalating thanks to those fatal encounters and angry rhetoric by progressive local officials.

Trump’s new deal for DHS with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is aimed at giving time for more bipartisan negotiations on a longer-term funding plan.

But the move frustrated some House Republicans all the way up to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who told his conference on a lawmaker-only call Friday that he was ‘frustrated’ by the compromise but that congressional Republicans needed to stick by Trump’s decisions as the leader of their party.

He also told reporters during a Tuesday morning press conference, ‘This is not my preferred route. I wanted to keep all six bills together.’

‘But listen, the president agreed with Schumer that they would separate Homeland, and we’ll do that, and we’ll handle it,’ Johnson continued. ‘The Republicans are going to do the responsible thing.’

Frustrations about Trump negotiating away their leverage were brought up again by House conservatives during a GOP lawmaker-only meeting on Tuesday morning, two sources told Fox News Digital.

One senior House Republican said they’d heard such complaints but commended Trump for acting responsibly in a difficult situation.

‘I think there were no good options. We obviously don’t want a shutdown, Democrats are very capable of that, they’ve demonstrated they’re willing to do that,’ the senior House Republican said.

‘They backed out on their end of the deal, and politically, they made a calculus, so the president had to be the bigger person. So, yeah, of course there was leverage that was given away. But leaders are the ones who can de-escalate. He seems to be de-escalating.’

Others who spoke on the record said they trusted Trump but were pessimistic about getting to Feb. 13 with a plan that Republicans could all support.

‘Homeland Security is doing a tremendous job. It’s unfortunate that two people got shot, but it’s unfortunate that 20 million illegals came to America, too,’ Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said Monday.

‘Trump, I trust his judgment. I’m just saying my gut instinct is…they’ll use the two weeks to demagogue [DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem, they’ll use the two weeks to say how bad everything is with ICE. I think they’ll take the two weeks to make unreasonable demands on dismantling ICE. That’s not going to happen.’

Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., told Fox News Digital, ‘I am concerned, but I’m hopeful that the president in the negotiations will hold firm, and hold strong.’

But two more House Republicans who spoke with Fox News Digital privately signaled they did not see a path to GOP success on DHS after Trump’s talks with Senate Democrats.

‘Whatever will come of that will be something that I probably won’t be able to support,’ one of them said.

‘How are we in a better negotiating position in two weeks? The only difference will be time,’ the second GOP lawmaker said. ‘At the end of the day, I’m worried that we’re going to make a lot of concessions that we wouldn’t normally make.’

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital that Trump would hold firm on implementing his immigration law.

‘President Trump and his entire Administration have been clear: we will not waver when implementing the President’s electoral mandate to enforce federal immigration law. Democrats should not hold funding hostage for disaster relief as many Americans continue to recover from winter storms,’ Jackson said.

President Donald Trump said he spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping Wednesday to discuss a range of issues, including the war between Ukraine and Russia, while stressing that their relationship ‘is an extremely good one’ that will bring ‘many positive results’ in the coming years.

The president and Xi also discussed Trump’s upcoming trip to Beijing in April, which he said he ‘very much’ looks forward to.

‘I have just completed an excellent telephone conversation with President Xi, of China. It was a long and thorough call, where many important subjects were discussed, including Trade, Military, the April trip that I will be making to China (which I very much look forward to!), Taiwan, the War between Russia/Ukraine, the current situation with Iran, the purchase of Oil and Gas by China from the United States, the consideration by China of the purchase of additional Agricultural products including lifting the Soybean count to 20 Million Tons for the current season (They have committed to 25 Million Tons for next season!), Airplane engine deliveries, and numerous other subjects, all very positive!’ Trump posted to his Truth Social.

‘The relationship with China, and my personal relationship with President Xi, is an extremely good one, and we both realize how important it is to keep it that way,’ he continued. ‘I believe that there will be many positive results achieved over the next three years of my Presidency having to do with President Xi, and the People’s Republic of China.’

The president’s call with Xi comes on the same day the Chinese president announced that he had a separate conversation Wednesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.