During his career as an academic and as a high-level strategist for the GOP, Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.) never wanted to pursue federal office.

But after watching the horrors of 9/11 unfold outside of his office window at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “God opened a different door” for him. Cole is now the recently-inaugurated chairman of the House’s Appropriations Committee. He sat down with the Washington Reporter for an extensive interview, in which he laid out his thoughts on this year’s appropriations priorities, the advice he has for whoever wins November’s elections on budgetary matters, and what reforms he wants to make to how America funds its disaster response.

Cole assumed the helm of the Appropriations Committee after Rep. Kay Granger (R., Texas) left her role as chair mid-session. Cole told the Reporter that “the bottom line to me is we’re not going to finish [appropriation negotiations] by September 30,” and predicted that Republicans are “going to keep trying to move stuff, both between now and the August break, once we come back from the RNC and then continue into September.” 

“My guess is we get those to the last week or two of September, we pass the continuing resolution, and we kick these bills past the election, probably into the lame duck, November, December,” Cole said. In the meantime, “we should just get the best deal we can.”

In the event that Republicans hold unified control, which Cole predicts, he still wants to have gotten a lot of the legwork done ahead of time. 

“My recommendation to [Trump], if he asked me or wanted me involved in it, would be, ‘Mr. President, get this stuff done. Make us do our work, not put it on you, and, frankly, not do it to the new members of Congress.’” 

Cole spoke with the Reporter shortly after he visited a series of Baltic countries, which he said offer the United States a roadmap for how to balance spending priorities. The Baltic countries, for whom Russia is a “paramount threat,” have upped their defense spending, and “actually are spending more on defense and Ukrainian aid than the United States is as a percentage of their GDP and their total budgets,” which the countries accomplished byy cutting non-defense spending. “That’s clear-eyed thinking and budgeting,” Cole said. Instead, the Biden administration has prioritized “overspending” policcies like the American Rescue Plan, which Cole said “we did not need” and the Inflation Reduction Act, “which is really a Green New Deal boondoggle.” 

Cole, the unlikely appropriator, said that his life in politics prepared him to address a myriad of issues, most importantly, funding the government, Cole said. He encouraged people to “never [pick] any path because of money, and [do] the things that [you] really enjoy doing…I think the most important thing is to enjoy doing work and to do it well.”

Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.), lightly edited for clarity.

Washington Reporter:
You’ve started a new role as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. What do you think comes next on appropriations with the House’s legislative appropriations bill, and for the rest of the Congress?

Tom Cole:
Well, first of all, we’ll continue. Obviously we had a setback, but we’ll continue to try and move bills across the floor. They’re all out of committee now, and that becomes a discussion with our leader, Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer, and they’ve been able to get four across the floor, which with almost 70 percent of all spending, which I think is a remarkable achievement. I always tell people, it’s actually easier for me, I have a larger majority of my committee than they do on the floor. So I’m very proud of what we got done, but I recognize the challenges they have. I’m not 100 percent sure why we lost a few votes on our side for the bill to fund the legislative branch last week. My guess is one of the reasons, I know for at least a couple of those people, was the lack of a COLA, an issue that is both politically sensitive and in the courts right now, and so that cost us some votes. And I think actually some other people voted, though, on that one that had the COLA. They didn’t say, “I voted against it because it didn’t have a COLA,” but they wouldn’t have voted against it if it had had a COLA, because that would have been really angering a lot of members. If you actually look at the group that voted no, the majority of them are pretty much the same eight people, not everyone, I don’t want to throw Nancy Mace in there, because she was not amongst them, but most of them are the groups that cooperated with the Democrats to get rid of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. I don’t think there was much of a good reason to vote no on this bill. But sometimes people just want attention. That’s what they do. Look at the numbers. It was pretty much that group. Whatever they were mad about in Congress expressed itself against McCarthy and then I think on this bill. I’m not sure that will happen on every other bill. These were really conservative bills, like Andy Harris’s agriculture bill. He’s a Freedom Caucus member, but he wrote a really good bill. It certainly has a reduction of spending, although not a huge one. Some of these others, like Robert Aderholt’s bill on labor, if you’re a Freedom Caucus guy, you’ve really got no complaints. He’s made major funding cuts. It’s a very pro-life, very traditional Republican bill. You might actually run into problems on that one for people on the left or the more moderate wing of Republicans, but we’ll see. They’ve got to go as far as they can go moving these bills. I am a Deputy Whip, but I was at the Deputy Whip’s meeting specifically at Tom Emmer’s request to talk about the bills we had passed out of committee last week. What was in them, and to answer questions. My guess is they’re going to keep trying to move stuff, both between now and the August break, once we come back from the RNC and then continue into September. At some point, my instinct tells me that we’ll run out of runway. The Senate’s now moving. They got three bills out of committee. I just talked with Senator Patty Murray and again, they’re coming in with numbers well above ours, and whether they can get them across the floor, I’m not sure. 

My guess is we get those to the last week or two of September, we pass the continuing resolution, and we kick these bills past the election, probably into the lame duck, November, December. At that point, what I think will happen is the winner of the November election will make the decision. “Do we want to finish these bills now before the end of the calendar year, or do I somehow think I’ll have a political advantage kicking them forward into next year?” And this is not an unusual thing. That’s one of the reasons why, frankly, Kay Granger decided not to finish out her term because she told me “Tom, I think whoever starts a negotiation should finish it. I’m not running again, and this could go into next year. But I want you to have been involved in negotiation all the way through.” This is a typically generous Kay Granger sentiment. I would argue, and regardless of who wins the election, and people disagree with me on this, that what we should do is finish the work. It’s not fair to the new president. If it’s Trump, he won’t have his people in place. He’s gonna have to deal immediately with a government shutdown issue. We should just get the best deal we can. And even if we take the Senate, which I think we will, and hold the House, which I think we will, the filibuster means that Democrats will still have plenty of leverage in a negotiation over approps, so you don’t gain anything, even if you’ve got a president there. We tried that in 2016 kicking it into 2017. We controlled the House, we controlled the Senate. Paul Ryan and I actually had a very serious discussion about this. I disagreed with the strategy, and I told him. For Donald Trump, we’ll be better this time, but last time around, he didn’t have any experience in government. He’s not gonna have an OMB Director approved. He’s not going to have anything. He’s going to have to plunge into the budget. We did the same thing to him, by the way, in my view, on Obamacare, not having a bill ready because they didn’t get wind, they didn’t want to go to work or to run the political risk of passing anything. So we really put President Trump, in my view, in 2017, in a very bad spot. And I think if we don’t finish our bills, we will do the same. Now, it’ll be different this time, in that I think he will be much better prepared. He understands the process. We’ll have good people around him, and we’ll move on, but I still think it’s better for him if we just get the messy part of this stuff done and but I’ve also said publicly that if the president, if he is the president-elect, which I think he will be, and he wants to kick this into next year, then I’m going to support the president. That’s his call to make. But my recommendation to him, if he asked me or wanted me involved in it, would be, “Mr. President, get this stuff done. Make us do our work, not put it on you, and, frankly, not do it to the new members of Congress.” You get 50, 60, new members, minimum. That’s normal. Could be more, and they will, all of a sudden, arrive in Congress having to vote on bills they had nothing to do with, and for the most part, will not understand. And it’s unfair to them. They deserve for us to have done our work, and then they can start anew, learn the process a little bit, look at the President’s proposals, but this idea of having a new president immediately having a sort of fiscal gun put to their head, saying, “if you don’t solve this, the government’s going to shut down a matter of weeks after your arrival” is extraordinarily unfair to the new president and extraordinarily unfair to the new Congress, and we just ought to be responsible enough, in my view, to come to a bipartisan deal. And it’ll have to be bipartisan and get our work done and let the new Congress, the new president, I hope, it could be the same president, get off to a start, but they’re not worried about last year’s problems. That’s not their responsibility. It’s our responsibility. We should do it.

Washington Reporter:
How are those negotiations going with Patty Murray and how do you compare and contrast your leadership styles on appropriations issues? 

Tom Cole:
Well, first of all, we were actually being fair to her, that’s where I first learned that they had actually gotten the first three out, we were actually talking about disaster relief issues ranging everything from tornadoes to hurricanes. Obviously, where we’ve had situations in Texas, we’ve had an incredible outbreak in tornado damage. So that was our focus. 

As soon as the bills have come out of committee, whether they’ve gone across the floor, now you’re in a much stronger position. If they’ve gone across the floor, and that should be our goal, but technically, under the rules of both the House and Senate, when something’s come out of full committee and gone to conference, we’re ready to go. They’re not, and that’s not a surprise. And we’re far apart in terms of not just specifics, but we don’t have an agreed upon top line number, and I’m really dragging it down the weeds here. 

We marked up our bills to what was in the law, the Fiscal Responsibility Act. There are a lot of side deals that add billions of dollars that were never passed in law, and frankly, most members did not know about when they voted on the Fiscal Responsibility Act, including myself, by the way. So whether I agreed with them or not, they’re not the law. Strangely enough, Rosa DeLauro voted against the Fiscal Responsibility Act because they were not in there, and she made that point, to her credit. But when we get a new speaker who did not make any of these deals and did not know about them, and our members, for the most part, did not know about them. No appropriators were involved in the final negotiation on appropriations, a big mistake, in my view. Again, we had this discussion earlier with the speaker, and I said “look, we’re going to mark up to the law. That’s what everybody can see. That’s there. As a defense hawk, I’d like to do more in defense, but we’re going to live within the law.” 

And we did, and I’m really pleased with that. It was the right thing to do. The Senate, which also voted for the Fiscal Responsibility Act, has chosen not to do that. It’s not only accepted all the side deals, but it’s added some emergency funding because the world is a more dangerous place. And I agree with that, but the way the Democrats do it is if you do more on defense, then you have to match it dollar for dollar on non-defense. It’s not “let’s cut non-defense, because our major concern is it’s a dangerous world, and let’s forego luxuries at home in order to position ourselves better.” So we’re gonna have to sort through all that in a negotiation. And frankly, that’ll be above my head. The final number will be something that’s negotiated between the speaker, the majority leader, the two minority leaders and the administration. Our challenge in that negotiation will be poor Mike Johnson will probably have not only the Democrats against him and the president, but Republicans in the Senate may well come at a higher number than us. They always do. So he’s going to have to salvage the best deal out of that he can. And then when he gets us the top line, we’ve got to go back and renegotiate the bills at different levels. So all that can happen. 

I’ve been involved in this stuff a lot before. We can get it done after the election, but the election will be enormously important in terms of determining who the next president is going to be. If it is Donald Trump, I think Democrats will have a big incentive to try and get it done before the end of the year. They also will know that, while they still are going to have a lot of leverage with the filibuster, they probably aren’t going to be in the majority in the Senate. And if Donald Trump wins, we’re not going to lose the House, in my view. We’re likely to stretch our majority out, not a lot, but some. And so, it actually put us in a pretty favorable negotiating position between now and the end of the year. But again, I’ve got some of my colleagues who, and this is just an honest disagreement about politics, it’s not a philosophical issue, but a lot think “well, let’s kick it into next year. We’ll be stronger.” And it didn’t work that way in 2017. Donald Trump damn near vetoed a Republican omnibus that got him more money for the wall, got him more money for border security, got him more money for defense because he didn’t really understand the process, the contents, and you had Fox News going crazy. And I love Fox News, but other people, were saying “he’s got this and this, and Donald Trump could fix it,” and he really couldn’t fix it, and if he vetoed it, he would have shut down a government and shut down a bill written, I actually talked to him about at the time, in a bipartisan manner, but where we held the upper hand in both the House and the Senate. This is all complex stuff, but the bottom line to me is we’re not going to finish by September 30. There’s some merit in waiting to see what the elections say. We’re that close to an election. The American people ought to get a vote. Then the real question is if Biden wins, he’ll decide, if Trump wins, he’ll decide: do I want to kick this into next year, or do I want to get it done now? My argument would always be, get it done now, let next year begin a new process, and we can go from there. But again, I certainly defer to President Trump, if he has a different view on the other side of the election. I just hope it’s thought through and discussed. I have a good relationship with President Trump, and I’d love to be part of that, but I respect who the decision maker is on something like that, and it’ll be him. 

Washington Reporter:
If Trump wins, what do you want to continue on your work as Chair of Appropriations into next Congress on?

Tom Cole:
I have both priorities in terms of the approps process and then priorities beyond that. In reality, we’re 28 percent of the budget. I think when Hal Rogers, our oldest serving member and former chairman, got here, we were 45 to 50 percent of the budget. We’ve actually not been the problem in terms of unbalancing the budget. In fact, you could eliminate the entire appropriations process, and you’d still be running a deficit today. We held spending flat. I made this point in a press conference last week. Think about Speaker John Boehner passing the Budget Control Act. If you compare the numbers from fiscal year 2010 to fiscal year 2019, we’re spending less on defense in 2019 than we were in the 2010 fiscal year, and less on non-defense in a 10 year period. We should live by the Budget Control Act on the Appropriations Committee. In that same period of time, non-discretionary spending — basically Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — went from about $1.9 trillion to about $3.2 or $3.3 trillion, and it wiped out everything we did. No administration since George W. Bush’s has tried to do anything on this. But if you really want to deal with the budget, then you have to have a serious discussion about entitlement spending. And these programs are all going bankrupt, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, they’re all drawing down their trust funds. We’ve not gotten the committees of jurisdiction, which are Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce to do much about this. Energy and Commerce tried with Obamacare that would have saved a lot of money. Our House proposal, which did pass the House, was torpedoed in the Senate because John McCain was mad at Donald Trump. That’s all it was. It’s not like John McCain, — who I have enormous respect for, he was a friend — knew much about health care. He knew a lot about defense and foreign policy, which were his bailiwick, but he became mad, and he was the decisive in bringing down what would have been the repeal of Obamacare and a much cheaper system put in place. 

But the bottom line is, nobody has made this the main focus of what they’re doing. I don’t have any problem with our tax policy, but you have to change these programs and that doesn’t mean penalizing people that are on them. You’re not going to bankrupt them. People that have played under a set of rules, those rules need to be honored. 

I actually have a bill on this, John Delaney and I introduced one together years ago, on Social Security. When we founded that program, the average woman lived to about 63 or 64 and the average man lived to 58 or 59 back in the 1930s. Now, if you get to 65 you have a 50 percent chance of getting to 85 and a 25 percent chance of getting into your early 90s. Now that I’m 75 I think this is a really good thing. You’ve either got to put the money in or gradually, you have to do it gradually, and as to be bipartisan. And we’ve not had anybody seriously either at the committee level, that is the chairman — this includes people I really admire, like Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady, they’re good friends of mine, guys who are great legislators — but they were always focused on the tax side. Nobody ever got serious about how you really solve these entitlement things. And so nobody’s done the legislative work. And frankly, the last president who tried was George W. Bush, and frankly, Nancy Pelosi used it as a political weapon against him and against Republicans in 2005 and 2006, and we lost the majority. We didn’t lose it over Social Security. We lost because we were in two unpopular wars, and it was the midterm of a second term president.

The point is, Congress has done nothing and no president’s talked about this in 15 to 20 years. And that has to change. Our number one problem on the Appropriations Committee is that people think we can control it with the money we have. We cannot. I could eliminate half of what we spend. Over half is on defense. I could eliminate every dime, and there would still be a budget deficit, and it will still be getting worse every year. Until people get serious about talking about entitlements in a bipartisan way and doing what Ronald Reagan, Tip O’Neill, and Howard Baker did in 1983, we’re in trouble. I’m old enough to have seen it done in my lifetime. You’re gonna run the risk of perpetual deficits and eventually bankrupting programs that are enormously popular, particularly Social Security and Medicare with the American public.

Washington Reporter:
Is this still your blueprint for Social Security? 

Tom Cole:
I reintroduce the bill every year. And we don’t try and do Medicare and Medicaid, this is just a Social Security bill. But let’s start and get something done, and that’s one. We have a model of what works. Other people would argue, “no, it needs to be a more full-throated normal thing, not a commission bringing it up.” To me, Social Security is pretty easy. It’s a math problem. We know how many people turn 66 every year, we know roughly, collectively, how long you’re going to live. We know how much money is coming in. We know more is going out than is coming in. Let’s fix this one and do it in ways that would be an enormous contribution to restoring confidence in the political process.

I’d be the first to tell you, and I’m not an expert, but Medicare or Medicaid, they’re not within the jurisdiction of any committee on which I’ve ever served, but those things, particularly Medicaid, which we’ve expanded enormously through Obamacare, have got to be looked at. But the committees of jurisdiction and the administration have to do their job, and everybody’s hot to trot on expanding benefits, or Democrats have a Social Security program that basically will extend the Social Security tax on every dime anybody makes. We do that, by the way, on Medicare, and it’s still going broke, so all options on the table, but we haven’t had a discussion yet, and that’s just because we haven’t had the political will at the leadership level in either party or by any president or any administration in 15 or 20 years. Until we get somebody willing to do it, and talk about it when they’re running, nothing will change. You can’t spring it on the American people, because we’re going to have a problem. But I told this to my friends, and they really are my friends, Jason Smith and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, when I became Approps chair: “you guys are going to hate me in about a year.” I’m tired of my committee getting the blame when we held spending flat for a decade. And you guys on your committees, not Smith and Rodgers personally, but those committees of jurisdiction and the administrations, both Democratic and Republican, did absolutely nothing to address what everybody who knows anything about the federal budget understands is driving the deficit. And again, we need to do our part on our committee. We’ve shown we can do it before. We just showed it in these 12 bills. Hell, we made some really tough decisions. Our members have their fingerprints all over. When your bill is coming through the Appropriations Committee, I don’t have a Rules Committee to protect us from tough votes. Any member of that committee can offer any amendment they want, so there’s going to be cuts that Democrats scream are unsustainable and, of course, we’re starving children and punishing widows or that our own guys could say what they want to say. But the point is we came to something that was lower than what had been agreed to between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy. There are no side deals. It’s what the law told us to do. A lot of my members wanted to do more on defense, myself included. We only had a 1 percent increase in a very dangerous world with an inflation rate higher than 1 percent. But they did it, and then they cut non-defense by about 6 percent overall. Some of these might have been mentioned, but labor age as much as 10 percent, Mario Diaz-Balart handled State Foreign Operations. He cut it by 11 percent. And their votes are all on that. And we passed the defense bill. We passed Homeland Security, we passed VA/MILCON. We’ve been able to do a lot. Last week, we had 210 Republicans pass the leg branch bill. And again, the little group that is just mad is just irresponsible. You get 210 Republicans up there. You got ten who can’t vote for something. That’s the smallest item in the budget. It’s a nothing deal. And the reality is again, had there been a COLA in it, ironically, it would have passed. In other words, they want to raise their own salaries.

Washington Reporter:
What are the appropriations priorities that you want to focus on?

Tom Cole:
One of the areas that we really need to think through is the whole issue of disaster funding. We actually do try to budget for it. It was a reform that was made a number of years ago during the Boehner years. We actually do start off with a budget in the disaster category for FEMA and different groups. But it’s not enough. Now we have a provision, some years we don’t spend it all, and it carries over, and that’s a good thing, because it helps you. But we’ve had a particularly difficult year with disasters. We’ve had a terrifically difficult wildfire season. We’ve got this Baltimore bridge situation. Nobody in Baltimore, Maryland is responsible for this in the least, but it’s a huge problem. We’ve had an unusual tornado season. My district’s one of the ones that’s been ravaged by it, but an unusual number of tornadoes in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, — kind of the Republican heartland — and Illinois. Hurricane season looks like it may be a lot worse than we thought. Hurricane Beryl’s not quite as bad. We’ll see if we can get through this.

What we normally do is we put something back, but we probably don’t put enough, and then once these disasters mount up, we just put them on a credit card. We declare emergency spending. The whole concept of emergency spending is out of control. When there are real emergencies, and what I’m talking about here really are emergencies, and by the way, it’s amazing what a good job has been done in Baltimore in terms of clearing out the channel, getting out the stuff, and getting the port back open again, which affects the livelihood of thousands of people and trade in the United States. Baltimore was a more important port, honestly, than I realized before this happened, and began to dig into it. So we need to look at that. But look at the Senate, and the Democrats in the House too when they were in the majority, they were declaring things like housing to be an emergency. I mean normal housing, not housing destroyed by a tornado, but just oh my gosh, “it’s an emergency, because we want to do more at HUD, so we’re declaring an emergency.” That’s been $3 billion. If you look at the gimmicks that the Senate has right now, in the bills that are starting to pass, they’re declaring emergencies. Defending the United States is an emergency, so we’re declaring an emergency and spending more money on defense. I’m all for spending more money on defense. I think we are in a dangerous world, but shouldn’t we just then lower non-defense, not declare an emergency, put extra money in defense, and then, by the way, since we do that, we’re going to put extra money in non-defense, because the Democrats consider that an emergency? It’s ridiculous. So the whole issue of emergency spending and how politicians use it, in both parties, to avoid making tough choices. I was just in the Baltic states. I was in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and then we stopped in Poland. And this was all about, of course, Ukraine, Russia, the conflict over there. I was really struck by the Baltic nations. All these countries, by the way, are above their NATO required 2 percent, they’re all at 3 percent or over. And they all, all three of those tiny countries, have committed money to Ukraine on top of that, around 0.25 percent of their GDP. So they actually are spending more on defense and Ukrainian aid than the United States is as a percentage of their GDP and their total budgets. We’re talking to their foreign ministers, their defense ministers to their Prime Ministers. All of them, of course, are very pro-American. All of them are very worried about Russia. I wondered how they are financing this major increase in defense. And they said “well, we’re cutting non-defense.” They’re not adding it to the national debt, they’re actually restraining the other areas, which they think are important. They want good housing, they want good health care. The take from the Baltics is “for us, the paramount threat is Russia, and we’ve got to be ready. We really believe, if we lose in Ukraine, they’re coming here next. Our whole history tells us that. Putin is showing us that he’s going to do that kind of stuff. He nibbled away at Georgia in 2008, he stripped Crimea out of Ukraine in 2014, and parts of the Donbas, he’s now launched this major invasion. Do you think he’ll stop if he gets Ukraine? Do you think we’re next? We think we’re next. So we’re all in for Ukraine, and we’re doing everything we can do with the budgets we have to make sure that we’re sort of little porcupines here if they come our way. They know they’re going to pay a hell of a price.” Now, that’s clear eyed thinking and budgeting. We’re not doing any of that. We act like we will continue to put this on a credit card indefinitely, and we can’t. There’s been so much overspending from the Biden administration. We did not need the American Rescue Plan. We did not need the inflation Reduction Act, which is really a Green New Deal boondoggle. The economy is growing nicely. We actually are lowering emissions through the marketplace and with natural gas. Those are the things that, in my view, fueled inflation. I mean, my son’s 40. He’d never seen anything like this. If you’re my age, you lived through the 70s and early 80s, the last great inflation outbreak. So he’d gone his whole life and never seen what he saw. And just to personalize it, he bought a house across the street from where my wife and I live. He’s a public school teacher with a modest income, he wanted to be close to his neighborhood where he grew up. We’re very proud of him. He got his house at around a 3 percent rate, and now he’s looking at things. He’s thinking he made a really good investment. I said, “the one favor Joe Biden did for our family is partner, you ain’t moving anywhere. You are stuck here looking after your mother and me in our old age.” Look, he’s a great kid. I got no complaints with that one, but we have a whole generation now that we really have changed what’s possible for them, particularly at the modest income level, which, again, he’s a public school teacher, and he supports himself. But his options are now limited. If he had not gotten the house when he did, and Oklahoma has a hell of a lot cheaper housing market than Washington, DC or the coast, I wonder how people in his circumstance could buy a home or have an opportunity, and that’s all because we were expanding government without paying for it. Those things have to be looked at. So our contribution on the approps side to dealing with that should be rethinking emergency funding and how we do it, put more in it. I’m not referring to emergency funding. I mean, I’m a big believer that governments are here to do things like that in a crisis, and we had made some progress during the Boehner years but we need to do more. 

Washington Reporter:
Your radical proposal on emergency funding is just to make it for emergencies only?

Tom Cole:
That would be the first thing, and then I would like to set more aside. If you read any financial advice book, they’ll say the first thing to do is have an emergency fund. When a car breaks down or the roof leaks. I learned this stuff when I was in my 20s, and actually did it, and it really has made a difference in my life. “I think I better have six months’ income on hand.” Now, you can’t do that in the federal government overnight. We spend roughly $1.6 trillion through the appropriations process every year. I doubt we’re going to have an $800 billion emergency fund. But we need to start doing that, and we need to be very careful. The tools should only be used in emergencies — hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes — those things are emergencies, and I get that. 

One of the things I did when I was the chairman of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development subcommittee, the year before the Democrats, because they just wanted to do more housing as part of the last budget they pushed through, as they were losing the majority, added over $3 billion to the HUD budget and called it an emergency. Well, that’s horseshit. We just eliminated that money. We’re going to lower the budget accordingly, and we’re going to find a way to stretch it out, and we’re not going to kick people out of their houses. There were actually ways to do it. I had not been on that subcommittee in many, many years, I didn’t really know the budget, I was there for a few months early in my career, and then got moved to another committee. But one of the things I learned, and the first thing I did when I took that chairmanship was I wanted to go out and get to know this community. I didn’t know a lot about public housing. I still don’t know a lot, but I know a lot more. And so I contacted people in Oklahoma City who ran the public housing program. “Take me to some of your places,” I told them. “Explain to me your problems. Let me start learning.” Well, they took me to a particular public housing unit. Right now, increasingly most public housing is not owned by the public government. We basically do a voucher system, and people in private developments take in a certain number of public assisted housing actually and it helps them. It’s reliable in terms of the financing, and it keeps us from owning the housing. Government-owned housing is usually not as well-maintained as you would like. So they were showing one of their older housing deals in downtown Oklahoma City. And so I went in, and they had talked to several people about, “could the Congressman come in and kind of see what it’s like to live here? Come into your house?” And there was this little African-American lady. I remember she was tiny. She was petite, probably about 4’10”, 80 pounds. And she had agreed that I could come in and see her place. And she’s single. I don’t know if she’d ever been married, I don’t know her background, but I walked in and it’s just as neat as a pen. It’s very modest, but everything’s picked up. This is a person who has great pride in her house, and she is living on Social Security. She had to pay a certain percentage of her very modest Social Security check. She had nothing else. And I thought, here’s somebody who maybe had a rough life. I don’t know what happened, but this is it. This is where she will probably end her days. She’s doing everything she can to do it the right way. I don’t want to do something that kicks somebody like that out of their house. They don’t have a place to go. Appropriate the money, do what you need to do. But don’t be so thoughtless that you’re going to punish somebody like that who is there through no fault of their own. Or don’t throw it away by trying to expand the program with emergency funding. So emergency funding is a big problem. I think Democrats use it as a tool. You’re seeing the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, use it now. Make some tough decisions: if you really want to fund defense and you don’t have the money, raise the taxes or cut the spending someplace else, but don’t declare an emergency and just put it on the credit card. And I think that’s what’s happening on the Senate side. To be fair, I haven’t seen all their bills yet. They’re just coming out. But I’ve heard the rhetoric, and I hear it even from our own side. I would prefer to do what we’ve done in the House, which is to live within what the law told us to do and go from there and not declare an emergency just so we can again increase defense spending by putting it on a credit card without doing the tough stuff. If we need to have more money, then let’s do something to get the money, either by cutting spending or taxing ourselves. Let’s not just keep putting on the credit card. 

Washington Reporter:
You want a rainy day fund for the rainy day fund.

Tom Cole:
We have one, and we will appropriate stuff. We probably need to look at appropriating more, just at least right now. I don’t know if we’re just going through an unusual year with disasters. Of course, Democrats want to blame everything on climate change. Not sure that’s it. This stuff goes up and down. I remember earlier in my career, Oklahoma was around number three in the country on per capita disaster relief because. I live in the only town in the world to have two F5 tornadoes. We’ve been hit a lot. Moore, Oklahoma is one of the tornado central areas. We’ve been hit eight times in the 22 years that I’ve been in Congress. And that’s not unusual. They are just a lot of disasters. We’re having a lot of wildfires now. The Democrats like to say it’s climate change, a lot of it is just not managing the forest very well. We don’t clean them out. There’s a lot of prohibition against logging, and you put too much fuel out there. Talk to Mike Simpson. He knows more about this than I. He’s the chairman of Interior, which deals with the forest lands and with the firefighting stuff. But he would argue that climate change is not the big issue. Poor forest management is. Bruce Westerman, who’s our chairman of Natural Resources, and he is actually an expert in forest management. He got a Yale degree in it, and he would argue the same thing, and knows a hell lot more about it than I do. But environmentalism sometimes gets in the way of taking care of the environment. 

Washington Reporter:
With regards to appropriations, there is debate within the GOP about DOJ funding. One of the departments of the DOJ that’s particularly divisive is the antitrust division. Do you Republicans should be cutting funding to the division or fully funding it? 

Tom Cole:
Your control of bureaucracy is your control over the purse strings. It’s always worth looking at. You can’t get down to managing individual cases, but it’s worth talking about what’s the appropriate amount of money? There are some people that will just regulate anything, and we certainly have any problems at DOJ in terms of what I would think weaponization and political prosecution. I wouldn’t have believed that a decade ago, I’ve just seen too much. Not just with Trump, but I’ve seen it directed in other areas. So looking at all those things and thinking in terms of restraining activity by limiting funds is a very appropriate thing for Congress to do. It’ll swing back and forth. But most Republicans think less government is usually better than more government. Most Democrats seem to have the opposite point of view. I think history and common sense is very much on the Republican side. Leaner is better almost every time.

Washington Reporter:
What advice would you give to someone who wants to be the next Tom Cole? You were in academia, you ran the NRCC as its executive director, and now you’re running the Appropriations Committee. 

Tom Cole:
First of all, rule number one is, to do stuff you like to do. I’ve never picked any path because of money, and I’ve done the things that I really enjoy doing. I think the most important thing is to enjoy doing work and to do it well. Compensation will take care of himself. The second thing is, it sounds corny, but when God opens the door, walk through it. I did not begin my life planning to be an elected politician or a political operative or anything of the sort. I was going to be a British historian. I was pretty good at that, but there weren’t very many opportunities there. By accident, I ended up helping my mother get to elected office, because that’s what she wanted to do. I didn’t care that much about it, but it was important to her. I hadn’t done much the first time she ran, she lost very narrowly, and I felt terrible about it. I should have done more. I got involved in it, and I really liked it. I gotta see it through her eyes as an elected official, and we were very close, personally, always. So I just started messing around with it for fun. All of a sudden, people said “hey, I’ll pay you if you do this.” Well, really? Okay. The biggest part of it is just that God opened a different door for me. And I could have stayed right where I was at, but I said “I’ll try this,” and it worked out well. And every time I thought about going back to academic life, something would turn up politically that was more interesting, and strangely enough, it was more parochial. It kept me at home, kept me in Oklahoma, whereas if I had been an academic, the job market is national. I would have probably ended my career as a junior college professor in Bismarck, North Dakot. 

I came from a traditionally very conservative set of parents. My dad was a career non-commissioned officer and then aircraft maintainer for years, and got to work with his hands. He was not particularly academic in the least, but he was a great father and great provider for our family. My mom just knew how to work, and she was a gifted and natural politician. 

Do things you like, be willing to walk through the door when something shows up you didn’t expect. Don’t be reckless, but think about it, try it. That’s kind of worked out. I was at the top of my game as a consultant when I ended up running for Congress. I took about an 80 percent pay cut. I remember trying to explain this to my wife, who asked “why are we doing that?” I said, “well, I just happened to be in Washington, DC as the top political guy for the US Chamber of Commerce when 9/11 happened. And I sat on the fourth floor of the US Chamber, which is across Lafayette Park. It sits near it and the White House, and I watched it all unfold.” I could see people running out of the White House who I knew from the political division, and I could watch the Secret Service deploy across the roof of the White House. I could see the smoke coming up from the Pentagon, and I was stuck there for hours. The Secret Service actually then deployed across the rooftops of all the buildings in the immediate vicinity. And around one o’clock you could hear F15s over Washington, DC, flying combat. And none of us knew at the time that there was a life and death struggle going on in the skies over Pennsylvania. I’m convinced that plane was headed not for the White House, but for the Capitol building. It’s a much easier target. That’s where you would go, but it’s never been released. But regardless, and all of a sudden, I’m thinking, making all this money, and one of my star clients was Rep. J.C. Watts, and he decided not to run, to go do other things. And it was a competitive district then. It’s not now. He was the first Republican to hold it, and we didn’t have another candidate that could win. I’d been a state senator there. I ran all of J.C.’s campaigns, one statewide, four for Congress. My mom was still in office there, and I thought I could win. I didn’t think anybody else could. And I won pretty close, 53-47 over a guy who I served with in the State Senate on the other side of the aisle, obviously. 

I thought long and hard, and this door is open for some reason right now. It was late in the cycle. J.C. made his decision in July of 2002 and filing was that month, and I didn’t know until late June. I knew he had been struggling for several years because he wanted to go back to the private sector. By the way, he did brilliantly there, but I felt that this seat is opening for a reason right now. I can win. And people calling me who were friends from the White House or from Congress, because I knew a lot of them. They said “you’ve got to run. You’ve got to do this.” I think that this campaign will be over in 17 weeks and if I’m supposed to win, I’ll win. If I’m not supposed to win, I’ll know this was not the right decision, I’ll go back to making money again. But I got lucky or unlucky, my wife debated which, and I won. Congress has been the same thing. I mean, mostly I just come in, do the work, figure out how the institution works, make friends, small group politics and try to be a good team player on my team. It’s opened up opportunities for me, but I’ve also been careful to not take opportunities that I didn’t think I was the right person for. I don’t have any problems supporting somebody else for a job if I think they’re better at it than I am. It’s kind of like when I was a kid. I played high school football, small college football. Who doesn’t want to be quarterback? But I could look in the mirror. Ain’t gonna be me. I was too slow, but I could hit people, and I don’t mind being hit. I could play on the offensive line, or I could play on the defensive line, and that’s where my skill set put me. But I never aspired to be something I knew I couldn’t or shouldn’t be, or there was somebody better that could do it.

Washington Reporter:
Thanks so much for this thorough conversation, Congressman Cole.