Story highlights Department of Homeland Security will run out of money without funding deal

Juliette Kayyem: Actions of Congress have consequences for the rest of us

Juliette Kayyem, a CNN national security analyst, is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a former assistant secretary in the U.S. Homeland Security department and founder of Kayyem Solutions, a security consulting firm. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) Imagine that you lived in a country that every day had to stay vigilante because of the risk of terrorist attacks -- physical or of the cyber variety. Or that has faced blizzards of historic proportions, with another winter storm on the way. And imagine if the people you were depending on to help you were expected to turn up for work, but that they may or may not be getting paid.

Well, thanks to a completely avoidable standoff in Congress , you might not have to imagine at all.

Juliette Kayyem

February 28 marks the date when money for the Department of Homeland Security runs out as House Republicans hold the DHS's funding hostage to make an ideological point. They say they are unhappy with President Barack Obama's executive orders rescinding deportation for a class of undocumented immigrants known as the Dreamers, among others. As a result, unless a deal is reached, more than 200,000 employees will be required to show up to work next Monday without pay.

If we lived in a world that existed solely on the ideological plane, then House Speaker John Boehner's approach might be brilliant -- the work of the agency created to enforce our borders and immigration rules would grind to a halt, the President would capitulate, and Boehner would have achieved some sort of short-lived "victory" on the backs of immigrants, many of whom arrived here as babies.

But most of us live in the real world, where actions have consequences for the rest of us. And that means not just those disappointed immigrants who believed they were beginning the process of securing citizenship. It also includes those who work at DHS and the people that depend on them.

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