These news briefs are part of The Connecticut Mirror’s 2026 political coverage. For more news about the 2026 legislative session, campaigns, elections and more, sign up here for The Issue, the CT Mirror’s weekly politics newsletter.

DHS shutdown winding down?

Congress looked like it was on track to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, but an exact end to the shutdown remains elusive.

House Republicans relented to a Senate deal to fund all of DHS except for ICE and Border Patrol. Even with Congress out, the House could have taken it up during its Thursday pro forma session. But it didn’t.

Congress will likely wait until lawmakers return in mid-April. But they’ll need to contend with a frustrated contingent of rank-and-file Republicans.

Republicans will also pursue multi-year funding for immigrant enforcement on their own. And that raises the question: does Congress still have an appetite to negotiate ICE reforms demanded by Democrats?

— Lisa Hagen, Federal Policy Reporter

Funding for family planning clinics

Federal funding for family planning clinics, including Planned Parenthood, will continue without interruption after the Trump administration signaled this week it would offer another year of support.

The announcement came just before the Title X funding was set to lapse on April 1, Bloomberg reported.

Gov. Ned Lamont and the governors of 18 other states sent a letter to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., last week urging the immediate renewal of the Title X grants. The governors said a lapse in funding would “cut off access to critical reproductive health care for millions of Americans.”

— Jenna Carlesso, Investigative Reporter

Ambitious reading proposal gets stripped

An effort to expand reading interventions for grades four to nine has emerged from the Appropriations Committee significantly altered.

Senate Bill 220 originally proposed individual reading plans for every student who tested low on a state exam. Based on public feedback, this changed to a state grant program for schools to implement multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) in the hope this would be less burdensome.

Appropriations has stripped the bill down further. Now, the State Department of Education will offer guidance to schools to implement MTSS for all grades, but there will be no funding or mandate attached.

— Theo Peck-Suzuki, Education Reporter

H.B. 8002 implementation

The Council on Housing Development, a new advisory body set up under House Bill 8002, which passed during special session last year, met for the second time Wednesday.

H.B. 8002 changed some zoning laws statewide and requires towns to plan and zone for a set number of units under certain guidelines. Among other tasks, the council will advise on those guidelines. They decided on Wednesday to split into smaller working groups to divide tasks.

The Office of Policy and Management issued preliminary guidelines last month and is seeking public comment on that document, officials said Wednesday.

— Ginny Monk, Housing & Children’s Issues Reporter

State of the bears

In 2025, Connecticut recorded at least 40 instances of bears breaking into people’s homes.

That’s according to the latest “State of the Bears” report published by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, which tracks the state’s growing bear population.

While last year saw a decline from the record 67 bear break-ins reported in 2024, DEEP said that the overall number of conflicts between bears and humans continued their decade-long increase.

The growing number of conflicts have led to some calls for a bear hunt in Connecticut, though lawmakers have yet to raise the issue during this year’s short session.

— John Moritz, Energy and Environment Reporter

A penalty for replacing workers with AI?

As lawmakers weigh how to handle a mass of artificial intelligence-related proposals, the Finance Committee is placing a new bill on the pile.

On Monday, the committee voted 34-20 to advance Senate Bill 515, which tasks the Office of Policy Management with planning a “workforce and productivity gap surcharge.” The charge would apply to companies that replace workers with AI while seeing revenues remain stable or increase. Companies with revenue increases that use AI but do not replace workers would be eligible for a tax exemption.

The bill, which emerged in the committee in late March, seeks to address growing concerns of AI-fueled job loss.

— P.R. Lockhart, Economic Development Reporter