In a speech at a private lunch Wednesday billed as a celebration of Easter, President Donald Trump told the White House budget chief he wants the federal government to spend money on the military, not social services like child care and health care, which he said states should pay for by raising taxes.
“We’re fighting wars; we can’t take care of day care,” the president said. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare—all these individual things.”
After posting a video of the closed-door event, in which Trump’s spiritual adviser compared him to Jesus Christ, the White House deleted it. But if the administration was sheepish about those funding priorities, it made them explicit Friday by publishing the president’s budget request to Congress for the fiscal year that begins in October.
The request calls for $1.5 trillion for the military, the highest level in U.S. history, while cutting other federal spending by 10%. It asks Republicans to enact $350 million of that defense spending through a procedural maneuver that lets them sideline Democrats, while increasing the regular military budget by $251 billion and only partially offsetting that amount with $73 billion in proposed cuts. That would add more than $500 billion to a national debt that already exceeds $39 trillion.
But despite Republicans having near-total control of the federal government, one Democrat in Congress still has the power to thwart most of the president’s budgetary demands.
Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has to sign off on the spending bills that require bipartisan support to become law each year. That makes the relatively low-profile Washington lawmaker arguably the most powerful Democrat in the federal government at a time when her party has precious little leverage in the nation’s capital. In a statement Friday, she called the future envisioned by Trump’s budget request “bleak and unacceptable.”
“Last year, I said I’d rip up President Trump’s budget and make sure Congress wrote a new one instead—that’s exactly what we did and will do again,” Murray said. “The American people want their tax dollars going toward investments that help everyone and make life more affordable—the basics like utilities and child care. Those are the investments I am going to fight for. Trump wants to build a ballroom—I want to build more affordable housing, and only one of us sits on the Appropriations Committee.”
The Senate filibuster rule, which requires a 60-vote supermajority to end debate and pass most legislation, means the minority party gets a say in the upper chamber. As a result, the appropriations process has remained a bastion of bipartisanship even while the political climate at the Capitol has become more vitriolic in recent years.
After Trump requested a 13% increase in defense spending and a 22% cut to all other programs in 2025, Murray and the Republican chair of the Appropriations Committee, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine—along with their counterparts in the House—a crafted spending bills that largely kept federal spending at previous levels. Following a fight over the massive tax-and-spending package Republicans dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Congress eventually passed 11 of the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund the government.
An ongoing fight over the one remaining bill, which would fund the Department of Homeland Security, has put Murray at the forefront of her party’s messaging efforts as Democrats aim to retake control of the House—and maybe even the Senate—in November’s midterm elections. Since federal immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January, most Democrats have refused to help fund DHS unless Republicans agree to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol.
Federal lawmakers’ influence depends largely on the committees they choose to join. Sitting in her office at the Capitol on March 26, Murray told The Spokesman-Review she identified the Appropriations Committee as her top priority as soon as she got to Congress in 1993, part of a then-unprecedented wave of four women elected to the Senate.
“Who I am is a mom and community worker, and I know that as a mom, the best influence you have is when you write things in the checkbook – what you decide you’re going to pay for,” she said. “And here in Congress, it’s the same thing: The biggest influence is how you’re going to write that budget and who it gets written for, and what you invest in.”
As Murray tells it, her priorities haven’t changed in her 33 years in Congress. Nor has the fundamental nature of the Senate, which she described as “just 100 people” in a place where personal connections still matter for getting things done. What has changed, she said, came with the arrival of “a president who runs things as if we don’t exist.”
“You have to work with different people on different issues and respect them,” Murray said. “There are senators who are good at that; there are senators who are not good at that. That has not changed. I think what has changed for this year in particular is how the president treats Congress and Republicans rather than how we operate here, but that influences how Republicans are.”
As an example of how bipartisan horse-trading still gets things done, Murray recalled how she worked with Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana to direct $190 million to a flood control and fish passage project at Howard Hanson Dam on the Green River east of Tacoma, after the Trump administration blocked $500 million in funding Congress had previously approved for the project.
The president’s budget request on Friday proposed to halt that project, and Murray pledged again to continue funding it.
“Was he like, ‘This is the best thing since sliced bread?’ ” Murray said of Kennedy, who leads the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. “No, but he knew that that was something that he needed to work with me on if he wanted to get his stuff.”
In a similar move that could have a major impact on the Inland Northwest economy, Murray used her role on the panel to direct up to $70 million to the Spokane Aerospace Tech Hub through a funding package Congress passed in January, after the Trump administration withdrew $48 million from the project in 2025. The senator declined to pull back the curtain on how she countered that particular move by the president, saying only, “I always see issues and go, ‘Now, OK, how can I solve that?’ ”
That project aims to turn the Inland Northwest into a global leader in manufacturing advanced composite materials for aircraft and spacecraft, established through bipartisan legislation championed by Sen. Maria Cantwell, another Washington Democrat. Most of the funding Murray made available for the tech hub comes through the Defense Department, which the Trump administration calls the Department of War and has used to strip funding from certain Democratic priorities.
Asked what she would do if Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth tries to block the tech hub funding again, Murray said, “Well, if he does that, I’m back at it.”
The interview came during a brief pause between rounds of Murray’s negotiations with White House officials and GOP congressional leaders over the DHS funding bill, which eventually led to the Senate passing a bill to fund most of the department, with the exception of immigration enforcement operations that Republicans already funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. By letting that bill pass by unanimous consent after midnight on March 27, Senate Republicans essentially accepted the demands Murray and her fellow Democratic leaders had been making for weeks.
After reportedly telling his fellow Republicans he refused to “eat the crap sandwich the Senate sent us” and sending lawmakers home for a two-week recess, House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana reversed course at Trump’s demand on Wednesday and agreed to bring the bill up for a vote when the House returns.
Blocked by Murray from funding all their priorities through the appropriations process, Trump and his GOP allies in Congress are gearing up to use a procedure called budget reconciliation—the same tool that let them pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act without Democrats’ help—to fund immigration enforcement and the war with Iran. There’s no guarantee Republicans will agree on a way to finance all that spending, and trying to do so could benefit Democrats in an election year when polls show most Americans don’t want Congress to cut social services or rack up more debt to fund an unpopular war and a crackdown on immigrants that has gone far beyond Trump’s promises to target “the worst of the worst.”
While some Democrats in Congress have called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished in the wake of high-profile acts of violence, including the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, Murray said she doesn’t want to see the agency “thrown out.”
Instead, she has negotiated with Republicans and the White House to reform the agency and restore public trust, including by requiring agents to remove their masks and obtain a warrant from a judge before entering a home or business.
Republicans in Congress have publicly resisted those demands, but Murray blamed the impasse on Stephen Miller, the influential Trump adviser who is often described as the “prime minister” of the administration.
She described having productive talks with GOP leaders and administration officials, only for those envoys to return the next day and say her demands had been rejected by someone in the White House.
W. Ron Allen, who has served as chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Council since 1977 and has worked closely with Murray since her first run for Senate, said the appropriations process works because members of both parties know the majority won’t stay in either party’s hands forever.
“Because of that, they take care of each other, and it’s just an unwritten rule that you don’t just shut them off, because you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot when you lose power,” Allen said. “Even if you’re only the ranking member, you command a great deal of influence and are able to bring home resources that are important to our state, east side and west side.”
David Reeploeg, who worked for Murray from 2005 to 2008 and now serves as vice president for federal programs at the Tri-City Development Council, said the senator has directed federal dollars to all parts of the state, not just her political base around Puget Sound.
“The reality is that most of her votes come from the western side of the state and she doesn’t get a whole lot of votes in Eastern Washington, but she still spends a tremendous amount of time, energy and political capital on issues that are important for the Tri-Cities, like Hanford cleanup and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,” Reeploeg said. “And I think that just speaks to her desire and her demonstrated ability to do what she thinks is important for the state, and it’s not just for political reasons.”
Another way Murray directs federal dollars to Washington state is through earmarks, a practice she helped revive in 2021—with new transparency measures—after a 10-year moratorium prompted by concerns that letting individual lawmakers steer money to their constituents was a recipe for corruption.
While some members of Congress oppose the practice, most have embraced it as a way to direct relatively small sums to specific projects that may otherwise get overlooked.
“She’s a master of the earmark,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said of Murray. “And she hires a team of people who want to know what’s happening in Spokane and Eastern Washington, so that they can look for opportunities in the variety of appropriations bills that go through the Senate to insert our priorities.”
Brown, who met Murray in 1992 when both were running for office as Democrats, said earmarks are important because they let Congress and local leaders work together to tailor federal funding to the specific needs of a place like Spokane, rather than applying the same approach to the whole country. If it weren’t for that help from Spokane’s representatives in Congress, the mayor said, the city government would have to dedicate more time and money to seeking out that funding.
The power to direct federal tax dollars to a senator’s home state makes the top spot on the Appropriations Committee one of the most sought-after positions in Congress, and it creates strong incentives to remain in office. No matter how effective Murray’s eventual successor may be, that senator likely would need to spend decades in office before matching her level of influence.
Now 75, Murray says she intends to run in 2028 for another six-year term, at the end of which she would be 84. That’s hardly unusual in a body whose members routinely serve into their 80s, but at a time when Democrats are questioning their party’s tendency to back aging incumbents, it’s sure to raise questions.
Former Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who is now 89, was one of just two women in the Senate when Murray was elected and fondly remembers mentoring the Washington senator when she arrived in 1993. Recalling her decision to retire in 2017 at age 80, Mikulski said it was hard to leave behind her team and give up her position as the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.
“It’s not easy, because I thought being a United States senator and the senator from Maryland was the greatest job and the highest honor that I could ever, ever, ever, ever have,” she said. “But also, I knew that I was going to bump 80, and I didn’t know if 80 was going to bump back.”
When Mikulski thinks about the political environment her successor is operating in today, it makes her “absolutely volcanic,” but she said one of Murray’s strengths is that she “always keeps her cool.”
“She’s seen the Senate at its best, and she’s seen the Senate at its worst,” Mikulski said of Murray. “In order to find common ground, there has to be steady ground, and Sen. Murray is operating in an environment where there’s very limited opportunity for bipartisan work.”
Murray said bringing resources back to her home state brings “a sense of purpose and accomplishment” that keeps her going, though late-night negotiations with the White House and a taxing cross-country commute to her home on Whidbey Island. Plus, she said, she doesn’t like being bored.
“Don’t give me the plaques,” she said. “Don’t give me the awards. Just let me do my job.”
Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact the Spokesman-Review's managing editor.