Two decades of homeland-security budget authority.
The Department of Homeland Security's budget authority, FY2003– FY2031, from OMB's Historical Tables. DHS began operations in 2003; there is no series before it. Budget authority includes supplemental and disaster funding, so the spikes are real — Hurricane Katrina, the pandemic response, and the recent reconciliation-funded surge — rising above a steadier appropriated base.
FY2027 budget authority
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nominal · OMB estimate
All-time peak
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Series span
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0 fiscal years
Years parsed
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contiguous, numeric — self-checked
DHS budget authority — the arc since 2003
nominal (current $) · OMB Historical Table 5.2Reading the arc
DHS budget authority is not a smooth line. The base discretionary budget grows roughly with the rest of government, but agency-wide budget authority spikes whenever the Nation faces a large emergency: Hurricane Katrina supplementals in FY2005, the COVID-19 response in FY2020–21, and the recent reconciliation-funded surge in FY2025. Those are real appropriations, not base growth — which is exactly why a department-level monitor keeps the recurring net discretionary base separate from one-time and disaster funding. This series is shown in nominal dollars: OMB's Historical Table 5.2 does not publish a constant-dollar basis for DHS, and we do not synthesize one.