By Liz Goodwin · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Republican senators find themselves in an unusual position these days: begging Trump officials to release funds they themselves appropriated.
Senators have in recent days made the case to Cabinet secretaries and other Trump officials to let money flow back into their states. They are trying to finagle exceptions to President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders or cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service that freeze hundreds of billions of dollars, including money for farmers and infrastructure projects. That push comes as the administration has also sought to fire a wide swath of federal employees – some of whom live in red states.
Even as many Republicans praise the ultimate goal of streamlining the federal government, some GOP senators spanning the ideological spectrum from Katie Boyd Britt (Alabama) to Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) have lobbied the Trump administration to reconsider its cuts or pauses to federal grants that support biomedical research and labs, or for programs supporting Native American tribes.
It’s a humbling turn of events for a body that has traditionally prized its power of the purse.The aggressive move to cut spending unilaterally “negates Congress’s hard-won power over appropriations,” said Jessica Riedl, a budget expert with the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, who predicted lawmakers were “afraid” to more forcefully grab back their appropriations power given Trump’s popularity with the GOP base.
“Eventually Congress is going to have to take back its power of the purse rather than nicely asking the administration for favors,” she said.
But Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama), a close Trump ally who supports the cuts, said last week that begging for funds may be the new normal, suggesting that lawmakers could lobby Musk to save spending they’ve allocated for their states as he slashes and cancels contracts at agencies.
“If we have to lobby for, ‘Hey wait a minute, what about the bridge in Birmingham?’ or, ‘There’s a bridge in Mobile’ or whatever, I think that could be very possible,” Tuberville told reporters.
Trump campaigned on overturning traditional limits on his ability to cancel funding appropriated by Congress, saying he should be able to use a technique called “impoundment” to reduce or eliminate spending. He and his allies have been laying the groundwork for challenging restrictions on that power in court and have aggressively flouted Congress’s power with potentially illegal freezes on spending.
The use of impoundment could create a situation where lawmakers who are in good standing with the Trump administration have a better shot at restoring their funds, posing a potential conflict of interest, experts said.
“I think it’s very indicative of why the impoundment power is so dangerous,” said Matt Glassman, a former Capitol Hill staffer who worked for the Congressional Research Service for years. “It creates a sort of favor-factory atmosphere where you’ve got to beg the president for your funding.”
Many Republicans have a direct line to Trump, who is known for texting and calling a wide swath of GOP lawmakers. But Republican lawmakers eager to unfreeze funds have aimed much of their lobbying at Cabinet secretaries in recent weeks, instead of directly petitioning Trump.
Murkowski said she’s been lobbying “pretty much all the departments” to restore frozen funding that’s affecting her state – including the Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department and Agriculture Department. She has also asked the Trump administration to exempt Native American tribes from freezes affected by an executive action targeting programs that promote diversity. Over the weekend, she slammed the administration’s responses to her on terminations of federal workers as “evasive and inadequate.”
Britt said she talked to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the administration’s drastic cuts to funding provided by the National Institutes of Health to universities for indirect costs related to scientific research.
“He said he absolutely understood that we need to keep research and innovation alive and well,” Britt said of Kennedy.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said that after talking to Kennedy about the cuts, he told her that “he will lead a reexamination of this initiative.” (The cuts are the subject of litigation and have been temporarily paused by a federal judge.)
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) said she’s been “aggressively” working the EPA and its secretary, Lee Zeldin, to unfreeze grants for green school buses that are manufactured in her state. Capito said she has been bombarded by questions about the freezes, but has faith overall that “good programs” will eventually be unfrozen.
“Trimming fat out of government, we all know it needs to be done,” Capito said. But she added that the confusion generated by the freezes has hit some in her community hard. “The uncertainty, I think, is difficult, especially small businesses and school systems, arts councils – all those things,” she said.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) used the social media platform X to ask Secretary of State Marco Rubio to help unfreeze food aid that was stalled in U.S. ports after the administration dismantled the agency in charge of foreign aid.
“I urge @SecRubio to distribute the $340 million in American-grown food currently stalled in U.S. ports to reach those in need. Time is running out before this lifesaving aid perishes,” he wrote earlier this month. GOP lawmakers have since proposed legislation to move the “Food for Peace” program, which buys crops from U.S. farmers to give to the needy abroad, to the USDA, after Musk put the U.S. Agency for International Development through “the wood chipper.”
“We wanted to get his attention,” Moran said last week. “And after we did that, we learned from the World Food Program that over the weekend, food was starting to move.”
The White House has defended the spending freezes as a popular and necessary check on out-of-control federal spending. “The spending freeze is already uncovering waste, fraud and abuse across federal agencies and ensuring better stewardship of taxpayer dollars, including for American farmers and families,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “Ultimately, President Trump will cut programs that do not serve the interests of the American people and keep programs that put America First, just as 77 million voters elected him to do.”
While some Republicans ask politely for their money back, Democrats have decried the pauses as illegal. “Once again: if Donald Trump or Elon Musk want to gut funding that’s creating good-paying jobs all across America, they can take their case to Congress and win the votes they need to do it. Defying the constitution to unilaterally rip away your tax dollars is not how this works,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
Murray’s staff has tracked nearly $400 billion in frozen funds so far, including billions for forest fire risk reduction, cleaning up Superfund pollution sites and grants for scientific research.
At least one Republican said last week that he believes Congress will eventually need to vote on cuts to federal agencies that the lawmakers themselves agreed to fund in yearly appropriations negotiations.
“DOGE is really doing good stuff, but ultimately, that money’s going to be sent back to us as a rescission package,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “If the money’s sitting there, there is a question, is it impounded, or is it going to be sent back as a rescission package? A rescission package … that’s ideally the way it would be done.”