Sidelined By Trump And Musk, Hill Spending Leaders Fight For Relevance

Congressional appropriators, the lawmakers with jurisdiction over government funding, were once among the most powerful figures on Capitol Hill — tough and often-revered negotiators who struck bipartisan deals even in the most polarized times. Those days might be over.

Last week's rapid-fire push by GOP leaders to enact a stopgap funding bill through September put into sharp relief the waning influence of the House and Senate Appropriations committees that once ran the show. With President Donald Trump giving Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk and White House budget director Russ Vought unprecedented latitude over the federal purse strings, the leaders of the spending panels were ultimately sidelined by the executive branch and their own party leaders.

Appropriators insist they are merely experiencing a setback, not headed for extinction, and that they fully intend to regain their relevance. Republicans are pledging a return to “regular order” by completing all 12 annual spending bills on time — a feat that has not been accomplished since the 1990s.

“Heads will explode” among appropriators if GOP leaders don’t facilitate that return, said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, an appropriator and a member of Senate Republican leadership.

“We better go through the traditional process,” Capito said.

But with a looming mandate to codify DOGE cuts as a part of those 12 bills, morale among many members of the Appropriations Committees is at an all-time low, while distrust between the two parties has reached a fever pitch.

“You're talking to a pretty discouraged appropriator right now,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a longtime member of the committee, said in an interview.

Since Trump was sworn back into office, his administration has unilaterally frozen government grants and foreign aid while gutting entire offices and agencies — directly undercutting provisions in the prior slate of funding bills appropriators wrote and Congress cleared last year. Yet lawmakers just acquiesced to a new, seven-month funding patch that scrapped a year of work on bipartisan spending measures while maintaining Trump, Musk and Vought’s ability to move around federal cash.

“Almost a total bended knee,” was how one former Republican appropriator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, described the outcome. "The approps members always got on together and protected the power of the purse from all interference. The trifecta changed all that."

Republican appropriators have now been directed to bake Musk’s DOGE cuts into a new batch of funding bills before the next government shutdown deadline in September — another sign that the appropriations process has been hijacked by the executive branch.

“We are in a bad place, and it’s a place that I regret," Murkowski said on the Senate floor before voting to pass the latest patch.

“This is our job under the Constitution,” she said. “It’s not the executive’s. It’s not the president’s. It’s our job.”

Still, every Republican appropriator in Congress joined Murkowski in voting for the funding bill. Democrats in the Senate also helped pave the way for passage, pushing the legislation over a necessary procedural hurdle even after Republicans snubbed Democratic demands to include guardrails in the bill to prevent Trump from ignoring congressionally approved spending.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appeared to contradict his own Democratic appropriators in voting to advance the stopgap funding bill, defending his position on the Senate floor by arguing the guardrail language was ultimately unnecessary.

“Nothing in the [bill] changes the Impoundment Control Act, the foundation of Congress' appropriations authority,” Schumer said. “These actions are illegal and no new law is needed to declare that.”

Republican appropriators were pushed into the periphery, too. Last month, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was “absolutely” opposed to a funding patch through September; House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said he and Collins were “very close” to a bipartisan deal with their Democratic counterparts.

Two days later, Collins divulged that Republican leaders had instructed her to start writing a partisan fallback plan anyway, while the final bill that would, indeed, fund government operations through the end of the fiscal year was drafted by House GOP leadership and rammed through with limited input from either chamber’s spending leaders. Party leaders also did away with earmarks for member projects in their districts, for many years a point of leverage for appropriators in getting their colleagues to support appropriations bills.

Cole, in an interview, conceded that the stopgap bill would likely “make it easier for DOGE and Elon Musk and Trump” to make their own spending decisions.

Last week’s capitulation was the culmination of years of declining clout for appropriators. When John Boehner became speaker beginning in 2011, he pushed the Appropriations Committee out of coveted offices in the Capitol. A few years later, Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, repeatedly violated the “regular order” process by killing appropriations amendments adopted in committee and didn’t involve his Appropriations chair in crucial end-game negotiations ahead of the longest government shutdown in history.

Just before bringing House Republican funding bills to the floor in 2017, the beginning of Trump’s first presidency, Ryan unilaterally nixed language adopted in committee that would have allowed the children of undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers, to work for the federal government, along with a provision to sunset the 2001 war authorization.

But back then, longstanding bipartisan relationships on the House and Senate spending panels might have helped keep some of these rifts at bay. Now, there are signs Republicans and Democrats could be done working together to negotiate government funding deals for the foreseeable future.

In another significant power shift last week, House Republicans united behind the stopgap measure without relying on Democrats for help, with conservative hard-liners cheering a process they have long derided.

“Freezing spending, no earmarks, no omnibus bill, a serious proposal that I think gives the room for the administration to execute those and execute whatever they want to do with impoundment and other tools — I think the bill is the right approach,” said Rep. Chip Roy of Texas in an interview. “We’re in as good a spot as we’ve been in a long time.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), a senior appropriator, accused Republican leaders of putting “junky stuff” in the bill to attract votes from Roy and others. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), who chairs an appropriations subcommittee and the House Freedom Caucus, said Democrats are the ones who need to compromise: “You ask the Democrats if they want to be involved.”

With conservatives in the White House and on Capitol Hill in a new position of strength in congressional spending battles, even Collins, an avowed moderate, is bolstering her relationships with Republicans on the furthest end of her party’s spectrum. In recent weeks, she has lunched with the conservative House Republican Study Committee and started texting with Musk.

The outreach has won accolades from unlikely allies, including Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, who chairs the House DOGE Caucus, which formed to support Musk’s efforts to cut federal waste, fraud and abuse.

“Sometimes, on the far right side, she gets an unfair reputation and is treated unfairly,” Bean said in an interview after Collins' visit with the Republican Study Committee. He added, “If you listen to her talk in there, she's a fiscal conservative, for sure.”

Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.