Capitol Hill Appropriators Fight to Regain Relevance

Last week's sprint to approve a stopgap spending bill has revealed the waning influence Capitol Hill appropriators have on the government funding process in the age of a Trump executive branch with seemingly no qualms about upstaging the congressional appropriations committees.

Lawmakers on the House and Senate spending panels who were sidelined when President Donald Trump gave Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chair Elon Musk and White House budget director Russ Vought unprecedented authority over the federal purse told Politico they are not destined to become a relic of the past and fully intend to fight for their relevance.

Toward that end, Republicans are reportedly vowing to return to "regular order" by accomplishing something that hasn't been done since the late 1990s — completing all 12 annual spending bills on time.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., an appropriator and member of Senate Republican leadership, said that appropriators' "heads will explode" if GOP leaders don't make that happen.

"We better go through the traditional process," Capito told Politico.

With the executive branch directing appropriators to codify the DOGE spending cuts in those 12 forthcoming bills, members of the Appropriations Committees say morale has plunged while the relationship between Republicans and Democrats has soured significantly.

"You're talking to a pretty discouraged appropriator right now," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, a member of the committee, told Politico.

The Trump administration has taken a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy since the president was sworn back into office, freezing foreign aid and gutting government agencies, which has undermined provisions in the previous raft of funding bills appropriators wrote that were approved by Congress last year.

Even so, congressional lawmakers recently agreed to a seven-month stopgap funding bill that reportedly scuttled a year of work on bipartisan spending bills and gives Trump, Musk, and Vought flexibility in reallocating federal money.

The outcome was described by one former Republican appropriator as "almost a total bended knee."

"The approps members always got on together and protected the power of the purse from all interference," the former appropriator, who was granted anonymity by Politico, said. "The trifecta changed all that."

The new batch of federal funding bills is due before the next government shutdown deadline in September, and Republican appropriators have been instructed to include Musk's DOGE cuts in them.

"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 stopgap measure. "This is our job under the Constitution. It's not the executive's. It's not the president's. It's our job."