President Donald Trump is encouraging Congress to cut short its two-week recess and return to Washington to fund the Department of Homeland Security amid its ongoing partial shutdown, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday.
Lawmakers left the Capitol last week with no deal to fund the department, extending what is already the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history.
“Has he told leadership that they should cancel recess and come back?” ABC News White House Correspondent Karen Travers asked Leavitt during Monday’s press briefing.
“He’s said it repeatedly,” Leavitt said, adding that the president has said “he’ll host a big Easter dinner here at the White House if Congress will come back and fight the Democrats on this issue, which we should do, because, again, [the] Democrat Party is in the wrong here.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a news briefing at the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on March 30, 2026 in Washington.
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Although Trump last week publicly called for Congress to cancel recess, he has not publicly called for lawmakers to return to Washington since they left town Friday. ABC News has reached out to the White House for comment on Leavitt’s remarks.
More than 40 days into the funding impasse, there was a glimmer of progress last week when the Senate, in the early hours of Friday morning, passed a bill to fund most of DHS except for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
But House Republicans rejected the Senate bill, instead passing its own legislation that would fund the entire agency for 60 days.
The House and Senate ultimately left town with no compromise, and are currently scheduled to be out for recess until mid-April.
Amid the gridlock on Capitol Hill, and as lines and turmoil grew at some of the nation’s busiest airports, Trump on Friday signed a memorandum directing DHS to work with the White House budget office to pay employees at the Transportation Security Administration.
Some TSA officers received their first paychecks in more than a month on Monday, workers told ABC News.
Travelers walk on the main concourse of Terminal 2 at Ronald Reagan International Airport, March 30, 2026 in Washington.
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Leavitt made clear that the executive action from Trump is a short-term Band-Aid and said that Congress still needs to act to fund these agencies.
“The president just can’t keep signing presidential memorandums and proclamations every time Congress fails to do its job,” Leavitt said. “And every time Democrats are holding our entire country hostage, picking and choosing which programs and agencies they want to fund just because they don’t like this administration’s policies. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
Leavitt added that Trump is “also encouraging Congress to come back to Washington to permanently fix this problem and to fund and reopen the Department of Homeland Security entirely.”
Several other DHS agencies remain without funding, with employees not getting paid at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and civilian employees in the Coast Guard.
“Because of the Democrats’ reckless shutdown, tens of thousands of DHS employees are still not being paid,” DHS Acting Assistant Security Lauren Bis said in a statement.
Democratic Sen. Chris Coons on Monday told reporters it “wouldn’t solve anything” for the president to try to call the Congress back from recess, insisting that the House needs to pass the Senate’s funding deal.
“Ultimately late last week when Republicans were unwilling to put those reforms into the bill and thus into the law, Leader [John] Thune said we are just going to fund all of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol. One hundred of us agreed on that. We left. There is no point in calling us all back because that was the result of a conscious choice by the Republican majority,” Coons said.
Democrats have demanded reforms to ICE and CBP following the fatal shooting of two American citizens by federal agents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis earlier this year.
House Republicans, meanwhile, are objecting to any DHS funding bill that doesn’t include funding for the border and for immigration enforcement.
“The reason that we can’t accept this ridiculousness, OK, is because we’re not going to risk not funding the agencies that keep the American people safe,” Speaker Mike Johnson said last week.
ABC News’ Allison Pecorin and Luke Barr contributed to this report.
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