As chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing energy and water programs, Sen. John Kennedy is among the rarefied group of “cardinals” — the 12 gavel-holders who tend to take a clubby, I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine approach to the trillion-dollar government funding process they manage each year.
Lately, though, Kennedy has hardly been acting like one of the gang.
The Louisiana Republican has accused the Senate of “playacting” through this year’s bipartisan spending talks — a process, he says, that is actually as “dead as Jimmy Hoffa.” This past week, he contributed to a days-long holdup on an initial package of fiscal 2026 spending bills — insisting he get a chance to vote against funding for Congress itself.
And he’s flirting with a second act this fall, delaying his own bill to fund energy and water programs as he pushes for a spending cut. He’s also drawing red lines that could leave a separate bill funding the Interior Department hanging in limbo.
Kennedy’s assessment that the government funding process is “broken” isn’t playing well with colleagues. That includes Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Appropriations Democrat and a veteran of hard-nosed partisan fiscal negotiations.
“He’s breaking it,” Murray said in a brief interview.
As Kennedy tells it, his colleagues need to accept reality: Washington will be running on short-term spending patches, known as continuing resolutions, for the foreseeable future given the political hurdles to any workable agreement between President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats.
“There hasn’t been a point for a while,” Kennedy said in an interview about the government funding process. Hence, he says, the “playacting.”
It’s bleak talk for someone best known around Capitol Hill for his entertaining if sometimes contradictory approach to lawmaking.
A Rhodes Scholar skilled in dealing out down-home aphorisms to congressional reporters, he’s gaining a new reputation as a persistent headache for GOP leaders when it comes to government spending — and as an odd fit on a panel that is typically home to pragmatic senators who band together to cut deals even if they don’t love every piece.
By no means is he the only member on the committee who has thrown up roadblocks. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, for instance, forced leadership to drop its plan to include a bill funding the departments of Commerce and Justice over Trump’s move to cancel plans for relocating FBI headquarters to his home state of Maryland.
But Van Hollen and others with parochial concerns haven’t questioned the bipartisan appropriations process itself, and even Senate Majority Leader John Thune exhibited surprise at Kennedy’s broadsides.
“We’re just going to do what we can to get the appropriations process moving again, and that’s something we haven’t had here in quite a while,” Thune said. “So there’s a lot of muscle memory we’re trying to engage.””
The Senate is “trying to find a sweet spot,” Thune added.
Kennedy ultimately reached a deal with leadership this week to get a separate vote on funding for Congress. He said he wanted to be able to vote against the Legislative Branch bill without having to oppose a two-bill package focused on the departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture. He’s angling to make a similar protest vote against the bill funding the Department of Interior and environmental projects, which would complicate Thune putting it in a second spending package that he wants to bring to the floor next month.
But Kennedy’s position frustrated colleagues who say he didn’t articulate any policy concern with the congressional funding bill beyond believing it spent too much money. And his willingness to take a verbal sledgehammer to the Senate’s talks is grating on some fellow Republicans who are straining to keep them on track.
“What we’re seeing is different, and I don’t know why,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said about recent tactics from Kennedy and other senators. “When I came on the Appropriations Committee, it was kind of like an unspoken rule, if you will — that we would be there to not only support the Republican bills, but as appropriators, we kind of held together … and we made the process work.”
“We don’t have that right now, which is unfortunate,” she added.
Besides publicly badmouthing the bipartisan process, Kennedy made other moves to rankle his Appropriations colleagues — starting with his vocal support for Trump’s pursuit of “rescissions.”
Those spending clawbacks essentially serve to undo the spending panel’s work. Not only did Kennedy vote for a first $9 billion package last month, he has also been backchanneling with White House budget director Russ Vought about additional requests.
Democrats, and some Republicans, are warning that would blow up the appropriations process, but Kennedy called it “naive” to think if the White House held off that Democrats would want to “share a cup of hot cocoa and a hug with us.”
Meanwhile, his frequent claim that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is responsible for breaking the government funding process has particularly rankled Democrats. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is on the Appropriations Committee and likely to be Schumer’s next No. 2, said the idea that “you’re going to blame the Democratic leader, and you control both chambers and the presidency, is plainly goofy.”
“If he wants to vote no on his own bill, I suppose he’s entitled to do that. It’s a little weird, but he’s entitled to do it,” Schatz said. “But there’s no reason he should block the Senate from considering the legislation that he’s presumably helped to craft.”
That’s a reference to the ongoing standoff Kennedy’s in with Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine over the energy and water bill, which last year directed nearly $60 billion in annual taxpayer spending — much of it on the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
Collins and Murray agreed on a topline spending number for the bill Kennedy oversees. But the Louisianan wants to go lower — something Democrats consider to be a breach of the overall bipartisan agreement on the committee.
“Just because Patty gives me a number doesn’t mean I have to accept her number. She’s got one vote, and I’ve got one vote,” he said.
Murray, who is also the top Democrat on Kennedy’s subcommittee, said she is working with Collins on a plan to advance that bill out of committee over Kennedy’s insistence that it include less funding than the panel’s leaders have prescribed.
Kennedy credited Collins with “doing the best she can.” But he said he wants to cut spending and rated the chances of that happening through the bipartisan spending process as about as high as the likelihood that “donkeys may fly someday, too.”
Last Congress, he recalled, panel leaders made the case that Senate appropriators needed to “come together” and “sing ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘We Are the World.” The pitch hasn’t changed this year, he said — he’s just unmoved.
“I love ‘We Are the World,’ it’s a beautiful song,” Kennedy added. “But it’s not reality.’”