Appropriations Committee Ranking Member DeLauro and Chair Cole.
WASHINGTON — Even in an age of partisanship, the House Appropriations Committee was the one panel where Republicans and Democrats still worked together, coming to compromise and cooperation as they divvied up a large chunk of the federal budget.
It was largely immune from the rancor of other committees as policy questions and debates over social issues were left off the 12 federal spending bills.
“They don’t deal with value questions,” said Ross Baker, a congressional expert and political science professor at Rutgers University. “They deal with how money should be devoted to federal programs. You can always split the difference. Values questions are harder to negotiate.”
Today, members of the committee chaired by Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole with New Haven Democrat Rosa DeLauro serving as the ranking member are finding they’re not immunized from that rancor in the age of Donald Trump.
Democrats say Trump won’t allow Republicans to engage in the traditional give-and-take of lawmaking, with GOP members instead blindly following whatever the president wants. Republicans say that whatever Trump is for, Democrats are against, so there’s no room to compromise.
“That’s the new factor that’s been introduced,” Baker said. “What was a fairly smooth running circuit got interrupted. Trump was a circuit breaker. He generates an uncommon amount of animosity. What had been a fairly cooperative process has turned very sour and the source of that sourness is the president.”
As a result, rather than enacting legislation funding the federal government through Sept. 30, the House wound up passing what is known as a continuing resolution (CR), which kept the government open but gave the White House rather than Congress more say in how the money was to be spent.
Because the federal funds were approved in a CR rather than a bill signed into law by the president, Congress lost its ability to direct federal agencies to use billions of dollars to fund local projects known as earmarks added by individual lawmakers, to increase allocations for specific programs, or to insist the federal agencies take care of a list of congressional priorities.
That’s not how it used to be.
Former Rep. Charlie Dent, R‑Pa., used to serve on the House Appropriations labor-health and human services subcommittee with both Cole and DeLauro, who took turns chairing the panel depending on which party was in control of the chamber.
“They worked together quite well advancing important legislation,” Dent said, citing funding for medical research and early childhood education as two allocations that drew bipartisan support. “They had the capacity to seek pragmatic compromises while not surrendering their values. I found them both to be very constructive and really helped make that subcommittee function well.”
Even today, Cole calls DeLauro “terrific,” a “thorough professional,” and a “thoughtful legislator.”
“We’ve been good friends and unlikely negotiating partners for many years now,” he said. “When she gives you her word, she keeps it and when she makes a deal she keeps it.”
But Trump has gummed up the works, Dent said.
“The administration has been usurping congressional authority,” he said. “That has made the dynamics of the Appropriations Committee much more challenging than was the case when I served on it. I hope in this difficult time they can continue their good work.”
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D‑N.J., who serves on the same subcommittee now, said she sees the difference.
“The Appropriations Committee was one on which members expressed their priorities, what they thought was right and how they thought things should be approached,” Watson Coleman said. “But now it is what the administration is telling them to say and do. So there’s no opportunity to be bipartisan if you are not going to be true to anything or have the ability to have any opinion. It’s all Trump and Elon [Musk, who is leading the effort to cut spending].”
DeLauro said that the rancor started when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia in 1995 presided over the first Republican-controlled House in 40 years, but got a lot worse under Trump.
“Since the ascent of Newt Gingrich, we have seen a much more partisan divide, and we have seen much more confrontation,” DeLauro said. “That has been doubled and tripled most recently.”
As an example, she said both sides were close to an agreement on a bill that would have funded the federal government through the end of the fiscal year, but Republicans caved to Trump and cut off negotiations, insisting on a CR or nothing.
“We were very, very close to a deal,” DeLauro said. “The Republicans on the committee were told that negotiating was over, that they wanted a year-long continuing resolution, which is what they have.”
Cole put the blame on the Democrats, still shell-shocked from being shut out of power after the 2024 elections.
“I think the Democrats are struggling a lot, the way we did in 2009 and ‘10,” when the Republicans didn’t control the White House or Congress, Cole said. “When you lose everything at one time, those are difficult years. It’s like the ultimate Rorschach test of American politics and it drives Democrats crazy. That has complicated negotiations.”
That said, Cole said he hopes that both sides could negotiate and compromise on the bills needed to fund the federal government beginning Oct. 1 instead of having to rely on another round of continuing resolutions.
“I’m hopeful the temperature will come down and we can arrive where we can get our normal bills done, which means we’ll have a bipartisan negotiation and end up with a bipartisan bill,” he said. “That’s my preferred outcome.”
But Baker said that won’t happen as long as Trump occupies the Oval Office.
“The Democrats are motivated by animosity and the Republicans by fear. And the source of both of those emotions is Trump,” Baker said. “He has injected not just partisanship but personal animus into a process which has been refreshingly free of it. Service in an appropriations committee used to be a ticket to a tranquil and productive career for a member of Congress. To be thrust into the battles over appropriations today is a much less satisfying experience.”