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The Department of Homeland Security shut down at midnight on February 13, 2026 (Friday night/Saturday morning). By Sunday afternoon, fire departments across the country were doing the math on how long they could keep paying federally funded firefighters. Police departments were calculating whether to suspend grant-funded positions or gamble on local budgets. Emergency management offices were sending urgent emails to county officials: the federal money might not be coming.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues deportations—protected by $75 billion in money approved for multiple years in advance from last year’s immigration enforcement legislation—but grant programs get new approval every year, so they can be cut off anytime. They run on annual appropriations that expired Saturday night. Enforcement operations continue uninterrupted while the money supporting your local fire station’s staffing grant froze.
State agencies have started notifying local recipients that reimbursement requests can’t be processed. The federal employees who review those requests aren’t working.
Which Programs Freeze First
The Homeland Security Grant Program stops processing payments immediately. That includes the State Homeland Security Grant Program, which funds terrorism prevention and response capabilities. The Urban Area Security Initiative provides money to high-risk metropolitan areas to support urban preparedness and response capabilities. Operation Stonegarden reimburses law enforcement agencies in border regions for overtime and equipment used in border security operations.
Fire service grants hit harder because they fund ongoing payroll. When that reimbursement stops, fire stations face a choice: keep paying those firefighters from local funds you probably don’t have, or suspend positions you definitely need.
Volunteer fire stations get squeezed worst. They use SAFER grants to support paid-on-call positions—the handful of firefighters who make rural response possible. No federal reimbursement means no payroll means no staffing. For stations already operating on fundraiser budgets and donated equipment, there’s no cushion.
The Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which sent $3.3 million to Virginia nonprofits alone last year for improvements at religious institutions and schools, also freezes. Organizations that already purchased and installed equipment can’t get reimbursed. The federal grants officer who processes those claims is furloughed.
All frozen. The money was appropriated. Congress authorized it. But without new appropriations, the administrative machinery that moves that money from federal accounts to local bank accounts has stopped.
How the Antideficiency Act Halts Spending
Agencies can’t spend money unless Congress says they can. When Congress doesn’t approve new spending, agencies can’t legally commit federal funds to anything new.
Grants awarded before the shutdown, with funds already promised through signed agreements, can theoretically continue. The money’s already committed. But someone has to check the paperwork, make sure rules were followed, and approve the payment. Those employees are furloughed. The grants management system might stay online, but an automated system that accepts applications provides zero value when nobody’s working to process them.
A fire station with $500,000 in federal funds and a valid grant agreement can’t access that money because the person who clicks “approve” on the reimbursement request isn’t being paid. The money exists on paper, but nobody’s there to send it.
New grants can’t be awarded. Applications that came in before the shutdown sit there, unread. Competitions scheduled to announce winners this month are suspended. Technical assistance vanishes. You’re on your own with thick compliance manuals and no one to call.
The Two-Week Cliff
Most grant recipients can absorb a few days of payment delay. Money saved up, leftover funds from last year, maybe some wiggle room in the budget. But the math gets urgent fast.
The Emergency Management Performance Grant Program pays for state and local emergency management staff and day-to-day costs. Many states use these grants to support positions within state agencies. Two weeks into a shutdown, those carried-over balances start running dry. You’re looking at coordinators getting furloughed because federal reimbursement stopped.
Police stations with police officers hired with federal community policing grants—intelligence analysts, community policing coordinators—face similar timelines. A mid-sized station with five federally funded officers costing about $100,000 a month has maybe a month before they’re making painful decisions about layoffs or raiding other budget lines.
Fire stations run out of money faster because SAFER grants only pay salaries, nothing else. A volunteer station in rural Colorado with one part-time paid chief funded through SAFER can’t maintain that position without reimbursement. That’s whether your town has a fire station.
What Happened in Previous Shutdowns
The 2018-2019 shutdown lasted 35 days. Fire stations delayed buying equipment and training, then rushed to catch up after. It took months to catch up. Recipients rushed to spend leftover money before the September 30 deadline, which led to mistakes and audits.
The 2013 shutdown ran 16 days. During the first two weeks, most recipients got through on reserves. By the final days, certain programs approached fund exhaustion. The recovery period involved processing backlogs while grantees simultaneously tried to catch up on delayed projects and meet original deadlines that hadn’t been extended.
This shutdown is different: it only affects DHS, so other federal agencies keep working. That creates an uneven situation. Grant recipients dependent on DHS funds scramble while recipients of Department of Justice or Department of Commerce grants continue normally. State budget officers have to separate their federal money, tracking which is flowing and which is frozen.
Who Gets Hit Hardest
Border states are hit hard by Operation Stonegarden funding freezes. Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California got the largest allocations. The program also funds northern border and tribal law enforcement, but most money goes to the southern border. That funding reimburses sheriff’s offices and state police for overtime worked on border operations. The overtime’s already been worked. The reimbursement isn’t coming.
Cities considered high terrorism risks get large federal grants through the Urban Area Security Initiative. New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago—these cities receive UASI grants supporting urban response capabilities that smaller cities don’t need and can’t afford. When those concentrated funding streams freeze, the specialized capabilities they support freeze too.
Rural states have a different problem. They get less total money but rely on it more heavily. Wyoming’s state agency operating on limited general fund revenue can’t sustain preparedness activities without continued federal support. The federal dollars aren’t supplemental—they’re foundational.
Volunteer fire stations—about 67% of all fire stations—face a real crisis. Career stations in major cities have municipal tax bases to draw on. Volunteer stations in economically disadvantaged regions operate on fundraiser budgets. There’s no money saved up. There’s barely enough to run day-to-day.
The Cascade Beyond Direct Recipients
Many grant recipients don’t hire people or run programs themselves. They hire companies and nonprofits to do the work. A state agency hires a nonprofit to run training courses. The nonprofit can only keep training if the state pays them, and the state can only pay if the federal government reimburses them.
When reimbursement freezes, states can’t pay contractors, so the work stops. Training, equipment installation, and staffing all stop throughout the chain. A company hired to install security equipment at schools can’t keep working without knowing they’ll get paid. A training vendor contracted to provide courses can’t operate courses without receiving payment from state agencies.
The pile-up of delayed work lasts long after the shutdown ends. Once the government approves money again and starts paying, all the delayed work has to restart in order. State agencies receive reimbursement first, then pay accumulated contractor invoices, then contractors resume operations. Everything has to restart at once, forcing organizations to spend leftover money quickly before the September 30 deadline. That pressure leads to sloppy work.
What Continues During Shutdowns
DHS has a plan for which functions keep running when Congress doesn’t approve money. The choices about what keeps running reflect laws, legal requirements, and decisions about what government needs to do.
ICE can keep deporting people because Congress approved money for multiple years in advance through last year’s special budget bill. That $75 billion can be spent regardless of whether Congress passes new appropriations. Border Patrol continues operations. TSA officers work without pay but continue screening passengers. These are enforcement functions that Congress protected with special funding, or functions the government decided are essential.
FEMA can theoretically keep paying for disaster response because it’s emergency work.
But preparedness grants—money for training, equipment, and staffing—are considered less important. They’re preparatory rather than responsive. This means responding to disasters gets priority over preparing for them, and protecting federal buildings gets priority over helping states and cities prepare.
Enforcement gets money approved for years in advance. Preparedness has to fight for money every year and can be cut off whenever Congress fights. If you want to know what the federal government thinks is important, watch what keeps running during shutdowns.
When This Might End
Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on immigration enforcement rules. Democrats have called for limits on federal law enforcement authority following fatal shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis. Republicans don’t want Congress to limit what ICE can do. The White House and Democrats have traded ideas, but they still disagree on major points.
A two or three week shutdown drains grant recipients’ savings. Stations have to decide: keep running on local money or shut down and wait for federal payment. Neither option is good. Using local money could bankrupt the station if federal payment takes months. Shutting down means fewer firefighters available.
The 2018-2019 shutdown lasted 35 days and only ended when Trump and Congress agreed on border spending. This shutdown is about limiting ICE power, not border spending, which is harder to solve because Congress rarely agrees on what police can do.
When the shutdown ends and Congress approves money again, it’ll take a long time to catch up. FEMA staff face piles of unreviewed applications, changed requests, and questions about rules. States have to figure out what grants are still available, whether they get extra time to finish projects, and whether deadlines have been extended.
Grant recipients need to find out if promised money is still there, if they get more time to finish projects, and if payments are back to normal. It takes weeks to figure out what’s actually happening. During that time, grant recipients don’t know how much money they actually have.
What This Exposes
Congress chose to protect enforcement but not preparedness. Enforcement gets money through special laws. Preparedness has to fight for money every year. The immigration enforcement law gave ICE and Border Protection $75 billion and $65 billion respectively, approved for multiple years, so they can keep operating. Grant programs for fire service and preparedness need approval every year and can be cut off.
The shutdown makes states and cities think about how risky it is to depend on federal grants. Cities and states that built their fire and police budgets around federal grants are in real danger when Congress doesn’t approve money. Grant recipients are starting to think about getting money from states instead, raising local taxes, or relying less on federal grants.
Fire departments and local government groups want Congress to approve grant money for multiple years so shutdowns don’t hurt them. They know shutdowns hurt their ability to serve people, but they can’t influence Congress’s budget fights.
State and local officials, fire chiefs, and police are figuring out how much money they’ll lose and planning for a long shutdown. The visible impacts—TSA officers working without pay, border patrol operations continuing—get news coverage. The less visible grant freezes—affecting training, equipment, and staffing across the country—get almost no attention.
But those grant freezes decide whether communities can respond to disasters. The firefighter job that gets cut during the shutdown might not come back when wildfire season starts. The training that gets cancelled might have been the difference between handling the next hurricane well and total chaos. The security equipment that doesn’t get installed at the synagogue might have saved lives.
A fire station in rural Montana with two federally funded positions and $180,000 in annual federal grants can run on savings for maybe three weeks. After that, those firefighter jobs are gone. The station doesn’t close—volunteers still respond—but it takes longer and they can do less. When the next building fire happens, or the next medical emergency, the difference between having those firefighters and not might be minutes. In a fire, minutes matter.
State agencies managing dozens of federal grant programs have a different problem. They’re tracking which grants have money already promised, which are waiting for payment, which were supposed to get new awards this month. They’re fielding calls from local recipients asking whether to continue projects or halt work. They’re trying to provide guidance when federal agencies aren’t answering phones. The uncertainty compounds: not knowing when the shutdown ends makes it impossible to plan, and not being able to plan means every decision carries risk.
For nonprofits that got grants to install equipment at schools and churches, the shutdown creates a money problem. Many bought equipment with their own money, expecting the federal government to pay them back. That reimbursement isn’t coming. Small nonprofits with tight budgets can’t handle losing $50,000 or $100,000. Some will have to borrow money to get by. Others will postpone their other plans. A few might go broke.
The political fight causing this shutdown is about immigration enforcement—specifically, whether Congress should limit what ICE can do after controversial incidents. But the way Congress fights that debate—refusing to approve money for the entire Department of Homeland Security—hurts things that have nothing to do with immigration. The fire station losing funding has nothing to do with ICE enforcement practices. The nonprofit waiting for reimbursement has no stake in deportation policy. They’re caught in a fight that isn’t theirs, paying costs they didn’t incur.
Congress fights over Policy X, refuses to approve money for Agency Y, and Program Z—which has nothing to do with the fight—freezes. The grant recipients affected by Program Z have no leverage in the Policy X debate. They can’t vote in Congress. They can’t negotiate with the White House. They can only wait, and hope, and calculate how long their reserves last.
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