Kamela White: Democratic clerk, Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security

Kamela White sees that numbers can tell a story — or be used to hide one.

As a clerk for Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, White plays a role in shaping federal policy through government funding.

She said her biggest goal under the Trump administration has been to work for accountability as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been given unprecedented levels of funding with few strings attached.

White, 51, noted that the DHS has gotten more than a trillion dollars in federal funding amid “the evisceration of any sort of oversight.”

Some of that shifted, however, with the adoption of the 2026 budget more than a year into President Trump’s term and as GOP senators found they were also getting silence on their requests to the administration.

“I think a lot of the lack of information sharing, the lack of answering questions, it wasn’t just our questions; they weren’t answering the majority’s questions either. So there’s a shared frustration with the inability to get information that I think really helped us to have a lot of common ground,” she said.

“Otherwise, we’re just like, ‘What’d you spend that $190 billion on?’ Because they didn’t have to report a penny of it.”

White spent years at the Office of Management and Budget and served at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. She made the switch during former President Obama’s era after helping build out predictive analytics data to assess what personnel levels would be needed to respond to expected flows along the border and at ports of entry, shifting how Congress decided to fund the agency.

“What changed was you weren’t arguing over the numbers anymore,” she said, prompting the agency to realize it hadn’t been “telling our story.”

“You have a better opportunity to build that common ground if you’re able to introduce trusted data.”

Under Trump, White has also been part of the team investigating how immigration funding has been spent, uncovering that the DHS bought 12 planes without authorization for the purchases from Congress and paid above market rate for warehouses officials planned to turn into detention centers.

“By default, you are setting policy with funding,” she said, noting that some funding has strict parameters around its use.

She also said the committee’s Democrats were able to “restore some of the changes the administration put in place, and make it harder for them to either stonewall or not respond” to oversight.

“No oversight on money is a dangerous thing,” she said.