$170 Million for the Backlog. Zero for FY2026.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services runs almost entirely on the fees applicants pay it — 96% of its budget, by the agency's own accounting, comes from filing fees rather than congressional appropriations.▸ But one small slice never came from fees: a discretionary line Congress adds on top, earmarked for exactly the kind of extra capacity that clears a backlog. In the FY2026 Congressional Budget Justification, that line goes to zero — in the same document that shows the backlog it was funded to reduce just had its worst quarter on record.

USCIS's discretionary appropriation — separate from its fee revenue — carried three line items for FY2025: Employment Status Verification (E-Verify, the system employers use to check work eligibility), Application Processing (the money meant to fund extra adjudication capacity against the backlog), and, in a separate Federal Assistance account, Citizenship and Integration Grants (which fund local nonprofits helping green-card holders prepare for the naturalization test).▸ The FY2026 President's Budget keeps the first, at essentially the same $111 million, and zeroes out the other two entirely.

Application Processing carried $160,055,000 in FY2025 — the same figure enacted the year before, under the full-year continuing resolution.▸ The FY2026 request deletes it from the appropriations language entirely: the literal statutory text, struck and replaced on page CIS-10 of the budget justification, drops "the Refugee and International Operations Programs, and backlog reduction, $271,140,000" down to just "$111,142,000." Add the $10 million Citizenship and Integration Grants line, also zeroed, and USCIS's total discretionary funding falls from $281.1 million to $111.1 million — a 60.5% cut — in the same budget cycle its own numbers show the backlog growing fastest.

None of that discretionary money touches the roughly $6.6 billion a year USCIS spends adjudicating cases out of its fee accounts — that keeps flowing regardless.▸ What the cut removes is the one pot of money that was supposed to buy extra capacity against a backlog that, per USCIS's own Net Backlog by Form Type report, hit 5,408,000 cases as of June 30, 2025 — up from 4,964,000 three months earlier, a jump of 444,000 in a single quarter. "Net backlog" is USCIS's own term for cases that have already blown past the agency's published processing-time goal; it isn't a critic's estimate.

Asylum applications alone account for 1,264,400 backlogged cases — nearly a quarter of the total — followed by 750,200 Temporary Protected Status applications and 625,500 other work-permit renewals.▸ Buried in there too: 67,400 backlogged naturalization applications, people who cleared every requirement to become citizens and are still waiting on the agency to say so. The frontlog — mail USCIS hasn't even opened yet — was 60,171 pieces at the same point in time, more than double what it was a year earlier.

The agency processing all of this is shrinking, not growing.▸ Total USCIS staffing — every account combined — falls from 23,599 full-time-equivalent employees under the FY2025 continuing resolution to 22,711 in the FY2026 request, a cut of 888 people.

"Net backlog" is USCIS's own metric — cases pending beyond the agency's published processing-time goal — and differs from broader "total pending caseload" figures reported elsewhere, which include cases still within their normal processing window. Budget figures are the FY2026 President's Budget request as submitted; Congress may appropriate a different final number.