Q&A with Rep. Tom Cole, House Appropriations Chair

Article I, section 7 of the United States Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, stating that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." The president is required, under law, to submit a budget proposal each year, but congressional appropriators generally treat this as little more than a guiding document, especially in times of divided government. In a year such as this, when one party controls both the executive and legislative branches, the appropriations chairs will try to stay as close to the president's budget proposal as possible, although, in the end, there will have to be a bipartisan compromise to get the legislation past the Senate filibuster. This year, House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK4) has had to be patient, as passage of The One Big, Beautiful Bill, President Trump's massive tax and border security bill, has taken precedence over work on the FY 2026 budget. President Trump released a 'skinny' version of his budget a month ago, but Cole says the Office of Management and Budget has yet to provide him and his Senate counterpart with much of the detail needed for appropriations legislation. Here's a portion of my conversation with Rep. Cole on this topic last Friday:

CAMERON: So, you're still waiting to get all of the detail you need from the administration?

COLE: I'm not being critical, new administrations take a while to get people in the place to get this done. Nobody ever meets the deadlines, but if we're to fund the government by September 30th or somewhere in that range of time, we need that information. We got a little bit more of it last week, there's a lot of it's still out there, but we have to start marking up the bills. And we've had this discussion with the Office of Management and Budget, and said, 'Look, we gotta go. And so keep sending us stuff, but we're going to have to make some decisions-- the more information you can give us, the better informed we're going to be.' There's 12 different bills that fund the government, the big one is defense. We'll actually start marking that up next week, moving through the subcommittee. But, again, there's Homeland Security, there's Veterans, there's Education. there's the Justice Department, FBI, Department of Justice--we want to get all those bills through committee and hopefully some of them across the floor before the August break.

CAMERON: So, where do things stand right now? What's the most critical thing keeping you from moving forward?

COLE: I like where we're at, in terms of starting to move it. The biggest unresolved question for us right now is what is the final top line. This year (FY 2025), we actually spent $25 billion less than we were entitled to spend. There was $18 billion of extra spending in a signed agreement between President Biden, former President Biden, and former Speaker (Kevin) McCarthy. We let that go. We didn't spend any of that. Then we added on a net $7 billion further reduction. That's this year. So, we're spending less to run the government day to day than we could. We'd like to do at least another $45 billion. So, we want to continue to push it down. OMB would like--the Office of Management and Budget--would like to do more. Some of those areas we agree with, some we don't. I had the chairman of the Science Committee in here this morning, and he was showing me-- 'Look, Tom, if we go with what the OMB wants us to do for NASA, I can promise you the Chinese are going to get to the moon before we do.' These are some of the crippling effects of what they've asked for. Now, those are legitimate policy disagreements. We agree on lowering spending--we don't agree with every one of the proposals in front of us, but we're having a robust conversation, both with our leadership. And when I say 'we,' it's the 12 subcommittee chairmen and myself, trying to come to a number that they think can pass, without a number that's so draconian that it literally eviscerates the space program, or it literally undercuts vital research for things like curing cancer and Alzheimer's and Down's Syndrome. So, we're having those kind of debates, both internally with the administration and at the committee level, to get to the right top line.

CAMERON: How does your situation compare to what's happening with appropriations in the Senate?

COLE: We're actually moving bills. The Senate has not yet got to the point that they're moving bills--they're having robust hearings and doing the right stuff. And, to be fair, you know, there's only so much time and oxygen in the room, and everybody's been focused on The Big, Beautiful Bill. That's been the preeminent deal and it is the more important of the two because it's changing the entire tax code, which impacts every single American; it's changing Medicaid, which is an incredibly important program to strengthen and preserve; it's providing additional money for defense, additional money on the border. I recognize that, but it's time to get the day-to-day business done, and we've got to get a lot of people to agree on that--it's every bit as complex as the Big Beautiful Bill, but it's different components, each of which takes time -- subcommittee hearing, full committee markup, time on the floor, then a negotiation with the Senate, which presumably has been doing the same thing, and that's got to get done by September 30 or shortly thereafter. So, we waited as long as we could, got as much information as we could get--we're waiting literally on the Office of Management and Budget... don't have it yet, but as we've told them, keep feeding us information--we'll take it into account, but we can't wait much longer or we'll run right into a government shutdown.

CAMERON: Even if you had all the information you needed right now, you'd still likely be looking at having to pass a continuing resolution before the end of September to keep the government funded, right?

COLE: Probably so, and that's not unusual. But, again, the part I'm responsible for is getting these bills out of committee, and I intend to have all of these bills out of committee by the August break. We'll see if I make it. And I want some of them across the floor-- that can that can provide the basis of a negotiation with the United States Senate, and that negotiation has to be, in the end, bipartisan--it starts out in a partisan place, but we have to get 60 votes in the Senate. And if we get 60 votes in the Senate, I promise you, I lose some Republican votes on the right wing (in the House) and I've got to have Democratic votes here. (This isn't like the reconciliation package where we just need simple majorities in both the House and Senate...) You can do that once a fiscal year. But, I don't get to do that in approps ever. So I've always got to reach a bipartisan solution, in a time when politics is very partisan, very polarized...where a lot of Democrats, if Trump told you the sky was blue, they'd say, no, it's not, it's red, you know, or vice versa.

CAMERON: You've always been a big supporter of scientific research. I'm wondering if you have any concerns about the direction this administration is going with regard to funding for research?

COLE: I do. Look-- and again, this is legitimate debate--people are going to have this back and forth. But, you know, if you look at, for instance, cancer and compare where we are now to where we were 20 years ago. We do some great cancer research at Stephenson Center...this would devastate that. Or, we do a lot of important research at the National Weather Center at the University of Oklahoma. Any Oklahoman, every spring, thanks God for the work that they do there. They do long-term forecasting, and they give us more warning, they help us understand what's going on. So, you know, we're going to end up cutting some things I would prefer not to cut because we're running a $2 trillion deficit, so you have to make hard decisions. But I think research is the key to saving money over the long term. And I think it improves the quality of life. And I certainly don't want to lose one of the crown jewels of Oklahoma. And some of those things are like the National Weather Center, like the Kerr Water Labs. You know, over half the country gets its drinking water from groundwater. Where's the best research done on groundwater in the United States? At Kerr Labs in Ada, Oklahoma. They've been doing it for decades. So, you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, you protect these kinds of institutions that are producing knowledge and breakthroughs. 58 percent of all the new drugs in the world are patented in the United States, and that takes a very robust NIH-- they do the basic research--people always think, well, it's the pharmaceutical companies that do it--they do the last part of it, but honestly, you can spend $1 billion looking for an Alzheimer's drug and it not pan out, and you've lost $1 billion. So, there's limits to the risk a private company can take. It's no accident we got to the moon on government money, not private money...So, yeah, I do have some concerns. We've had very good discussions about that. My concerns aren't unique to me, other people have concerns in this area. And when people say NIH, they sometimes think, 'well, that's that big place in Washington.' 85 percent of the money that goes to the NIH goes back out to colleges and universities, like Oklahoma, like Oklahoma State, where they do high-quality research. Then that product is quite often picked up and used by a pharmaceutical company, and they do the last ten yards, but the groundwork has been laid by substantial public investment. And this ecosphere that's producing miracle cures and saving lives, you know, right now, 65 percent of people that contract cancer will eventually recover fully, 65 percent! That was not remotely true 20 or 30 years ago. So, this money has paid off in saving lives, expanding lifespan, improving the quality of life for us and for people all over the world. So, yeah, I want to be very careful before I disrupt that system.