Interview: Rep. Mike Simpson on reconciliation, a government shutdown, and Doug Burgum
The Lowdown:
Rep. Mike Simpson is agnostic on a “big, beautiful” budget bill “as long as it gets the job done.”
Simpson will meet with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to discuss their priorities — while they’ve never met, he’s a big fan.
Despite much of the incoming partisan politics around American energy, Simpson is optimistic that at least one of his priorities — the problem with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women — can be “bipartisan and bicameral and an administrative and legislative priority.”
Rep. Mike Simpson (R., Idaho) has seen budget fights come and go; in this year’s debate over one “big, beautiful bill” versus two, he is agnostic — “as long as it gets the job done.”
Amidst reports that the Senate may send its package to the House this week, Simpson told the Washington Reporter in an interview that the House will “put [it] on the back burner as we continue to work on a reconciliation bill, and hopefully they'll be ready to go with that as soon as we get back next week.”
However, Simpson, one of the most senior Republicans on the House’s Appropriations Committee, cautioned that “nobody's really focused on trying to finish the 2025 appropriation bills. We're still waiting for numbers.” That said, Simpson doesn’t believe there will be a government shutdown at the end of next month, despite the saber-rattling of some Senate Democrats, because “I refuse to believe we're stupid enough to do that again.” One solution that he doesn’t want is a one-year continuing resolution, which he said “would be terrible.”
Another priority of Simpson’s is his work as chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Interior and Environment; he is eager to craft his bill, once they “come up with a joint number between the House and Senate, because right now, the Senate’s interior bill is around $3.3 billion higher than ours. Well, it’s kind of hard to conference when they're spending $3.5 billion more than we are.”
To that end, Simpson will meet with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to discuss their priorities. While the two have never met — and Simpson conceded that a few years ago, he would have had no idea who the Governor of North Dakota is — Simpson became a Burgum fan from the moment he saw the North Dakotan’s presidential announcement speech.
“He knows the energy issues, plus he knows the public land issues, and from what I understand, he was endorsed by the tribes in North Dakota, which is impressive to me,” Simpson said. “This tells me he knows about Indian issues, because the areas of our bill that are probably the biggest challenge are Indian Health Services, Indian law enforcement, Indian education on the one hand, and the EPA on the other hand, the wildfire fighting and what we have to put into that. He knows all about them.”
A critical component of Simpson’s energy priorities is securing critical earth minerals for the United States, and reducing America’s reliance on China. Simpson is one of Congress’s top advocates for nuclear power, explaining that “if you are going to supply the energy this country needs, and especially the energy that all these new data centers around need, you're going to have to have small modular reactors, or the demonstration reactors that are being developed right now.” Nuclear power, he added, needs antimony — which Idaho could help produce.
“The Defense Department is big on this, because if you have anything nuclear, you need antimony,” he said. “We get 90 percent of our antimony from China, and China told us earlier this year, that they were going to cut us off. You can't be dependent on a foreign country for critical minerals. So in that arena, that's just one mineral, but with all the others like phosphates and other things that we get from countries that don't like us, we've got to become more self-sufficient on those things. And I think Burgum understands that, and those are some of the issues that I hope they work on right away.”
Despite much of the incoming partisan politics around American energy, Simpson is optimistic that at least one of his priorities can be “bipartisan and bicameral and an administrative and legislative priority”: tackling the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), which he held a hearing on last Congress, will hold a field hearing on later in February, and has written about in the pages of the Reporter.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Mike Simpson, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
What is going on now with reconciliation? What do you want to happen?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
What's going on is that the House is trying to come up with the bill, and with just a two vote majority, it's kind of hard on the Speaker, because you can't satisfy everybody, and you’ve got to assume that it's going to have to pass with all Republican votes. So he's been meeting with all sorts of people within our conference about about moving it, and some people, particularly our more exotic members, want bigger cuts without knowing exactly what those cuts are, or what the implication of those cuts are in some areas, but we all agree that we've got to reduce spending, so I've got no problem with the fact that it's taken some time. The Senate is frustrated. They want to go ahead and they want to do one bill without the tax cuts in it. The House and President Trump are saying the tax cuts have got to be part of it. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Senate mark up a bill this week, but if the Senate bill comes over the House, I suspect it will be put on the back burner, as we continue to work on a reconciliation bill, and hopefully they'll be ready to go with that as soon as we get back next week. I don't care if it's one bill or two bills, as long as it gets the job done, and whatever is easiest to get everything we want in it done. The challenge we're having right now from an appropriations perspective, is that everybody's focused on that. Nobody's really focused on trying to finish the 2025 appropriation bills. We're still waiting for numbers. I know that Chairman Tom Cole and the other three corners of the Approps Committee have been working on trying to come up with a number. Once they come up with a number, we could write the interior bill or any of the bills, it's just a matter of knowing what that number is, and they have to be common numbers. That's why we have to come up with a joint number between the House and Senate, because right now, the Senate’s interior bill is around $3.3 billion higher than ours. Well, it’s kind of hard to conference when they're spending $3.5 billion more than we are. So we've got to have a common number in there, whether it's a number between the two or what, I don't know yet, but we've got to get it done. And then the other question is, how is what's happening with DOGE and some of the other stuff going to affect not just our bills moving forward, but the 2025 appropriation bill, which we should have had done before Trump came into office, frankly, to get them off the table and make it easier for him. I asked Mario Díaz-Balart the other day, ‘what are you going to do on your 2025 bill, because there's money in both the House and Senate bills for USAID, and apparently Trump will veto probably any bill that has funding for that?’ I'm one of those guys who thinks there are parts of USAID that I think do a good job and that are kind of important. But when you see all the crazy stuff they were doing, everybody's kind of going, ‘wow, this is not what they should be doing.’ Did you have to eliminate the department to get rid of that? I don't know. I don't know what's the best way to do it. Musk might have gotten in there and just said, ‘this is so screwed up, we need to can it and start over again.’ But hopefully those good parts of what they do are going to be retained at some point in time, somehow. But how it's going to affect our appropriation, we don't know yet. I’m glad it’s not in my appropriations bill. It's going to be interesting, and that is not in my appropriation bill. At USAID, they did some things that were contrary to everything where we were headed. When you look at list of that stuff, I was telling my staff that one time, I was over in Iraq, and I met with the USAID people there, and they said their most successful program was their microloans, where somebody wants to reopen a shop in this war-torn country, the government will give them up to $5,000 that is 98 percent repaid. We’d give them $5,000 to start it. If they don't get it from us, where are they going? There's not a banking system, there’s not a phone system. There's not a system for when you need that kind of stuff, and when you think about it, those are the kind of things that we ought to be doing, but all the other stuff's screwed it up.
Washington Reporter:
You’ve been through government funding battles in the past; was there anything that could have been done to get the House and Senate on the same page at this juncture? Or were you always going to be headed towards this collision course over one or two bills?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
We were always going to be headed toward that collision once the new administration came in, and that's why all of us on the Appropriations Committee said, ‘let's wrap this up by the December 20 deadline, and get it done and get it off the table so Trump doesn't have to deal with that.’ We weren't trying to undermine him or anything. We were actually trying to help him. But now it's going to be kind of difficult to do when they're working on reconciliation on this hand, and on this hand, we're trying to get 25 appropriation bills done. And then there's a number of our members, particularly the more exotic ones, who think that doing a year long CR would be the right way to go. A year long CR would be terrible. But that’s the way it goes.
Washington Reporter:
You were just talking about the 2025 funding. Do you think that there is a concern that there will be a government shutdown at the end of next month?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
Concern, yes, but I don't believe there will be a shutdown, because I refuse to believe we're stupid enough to do that again, for the tenth time in the last 20 years or so. Some people think that is a legitimate policy. I've heard a couple of Democratic senators this weekend say, not that we will vote to shut the government down, but clearly indicating that's where they were headed, because of what's happening with the Elon Musk stuff, more than anything else, the USAID saga, and the withholding of funds and the buyouts and all that kind of stuff. That's going to be their strategy. I don't know if it's the whole Democratic Party or not.
Washington Reporter:
How do you feel about the DOGE effort to help cut government spending?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
I have said all along, people were very worried about that, and I said, ‘listen, I’ve got no problem with outside eyes looking at what we do and criticizing it, making recommendations, and asking, ‘why are you doing it this way? Do you know you're duplicating this over here?’’ I think outside eyes are very valuable. When they get into the recommendations they make that affect policy, then Congress needs to be involved. And so I would hope that they would recommend some things to Congress. Some of them, I may agree with. Some of them I may not. It's just that I need to see what they are. But Congress needs to take a bigger role in this, frankly.
Washington Reporter:
You are on the Energy subcommittee on Approps; how do you look at getting energy costs down, energy independence, energy exportation?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
There are a lot of things that need to be done that were being done actually four years ago. That is, we need to access the resources we have in this country. It's not just oil and gas that we need. We're doing much more wind power now, solar power, those kind of things. Hydropower, nuclear power, are going to be huge. If you're really going to address climate change, you’ve got to have nuclear power. In fact, a lot of the environmental groups are starting to recognize that; in Idaho, the Idaho National Lab is the lead nuclear lab in the country; they're doing small modular reactors. There's these demonstration reactors. That's going to the future of power in this country, and I'm not against wind or anything like that. When I wake up, I look out my front window and on a good day, I can see the peaks of the Tetons above the foothills. Now there are windmills where those foothills are. Doesn't bother me, they’re far enough away, but we had a problem in southern Idaho with the Lava Ridge project, which was huge and Trump canceled that on the first day, at least temporarily. We’ve got some language in our bill to prevent it from coming back.
Washington Reporter:
Stopping the Lava Ridge wind project was one of Trump's first moves out the gate. Can you talk about your opposition to that and how wind energy does or doesn't factor into Idaho's priorities?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
We have a lot of wind power in Idaho. I don't know how it is compared to other states, but when you fly from Boise to Idaho Falls, you go across wind farms all across the state. But just because I support wind power doesn't mean a turbine anywhere, anytime, anyplace. And this one was in the wrong place: when you've got a whole Magic Valley, Twin Falls area where every county commissioner, every city councilman, every organization that I'm aware of is opposed to this. The Minidoka Japanese internment camp has an association that's opposed to it, because it will be within their view, and these would be the largest wind towers on land in the world, they're huge. They're the size of the Space Needle. And there would be around 240 of them. So then the state legislature passed a resolution against it. All seven of our statewide elected officials are against it. All four in the congressional delegation are opposed to it. Because guess what? All our constituents are against it. I have not had one person from the Magic Valley come up to me and say ‘this would be a good thing for us.’ Everybody's opposed to it. You’ve got to listen to the constituents. That's why we put language in our appropriation bill dealing with it, trying to get the the BLM to go out and do more hearings, but then Trump came down and included it, surprisingly to me, in his energy thing. But there's so much we can do to get ourselves back to energy independence using the resources we have in this country, whether it's fracking and oil production, or whether it's even geothermal, we're seeing expansion of geothermal across the country and stuff like that. So there's a lot of things that you can do, but ultimately, if you are going to supply the energy this country needs, and especially the energy that all these new data centers around need, you're going to have to have small modular reactors, or the demonstration reactors that are being developed right now.
Washington Reporter:
Another priority of yours, that you wrote an op-ed with us about, is the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). You did a hearing on this last Congress. Where do you see working with the Trump administration on being able to tackle this?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
I think that would be both a bipartisan and bicameral and an administrative and legislative priority. I've been on the Interior Appropriations Committee, as the chairman a ranking member, for 22 years now. This is my 23rd year on it. So I've been involved in the issues surrounding Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, for a long time. I was sitting at home about a year ago about this time, and I'm watching a program on Idaho Public Television, and they had a lady from the Nez Perce tribe who was involved in this issue. And she and the moderator are talking about how there's 6,000 missing and murdered indigenous women and children every year. I’ve been on this committee for 22 years. I never heard this. It was kind of a shock to me. So I got back and we started doing some investigation. We said we’ve got to have a hearing on this and find out what the issues are surrounding it. And frankly, we had one of the best hearings that I think we've had on on MMIW as a matter of fact. Regularly, we do around two days of tribal hearings, and we invite tribes come in and testify. And usually we have between 60 and 70 in that neighborhood of tribes, and it takes two days to go through, because they all have five minutes. And as you know, nobody sticks to five, but it's important to the tribes. After that hearing, the tribes were so impressed that we were digging into this, and we have 110 registered to testify this year. So we’re going to spend about three days at the end of February on our tribal hearing days.
Washington Reporter:
Within Idaho, there's a huge move, whether it's on a permanent basis or at least to vacation there, from a lot of these tech executives. How do you view this movement?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
It’s been going on for years. In fact, we had road signs up at one point that read ‘remember, you're in conservative Idaho now,’ and all this kind of stuff. We were always worried that people would move from California, Oregon, or Washington to Idaho, and that they would change our politics. But what we're finding out is the people that are moving to Idaho from those states are not the people who change our politics to the left, they change them to the right, because it's the more conservative people who are just sick and tired of California and Washington and Oregon. If you look at the numbers, it's kind of interesting. Idaho was the fastest growing percentage-wise state in the country. In reality, that means that if 1,000 people move to Idaho that to match that, a million people have to move into California. It’s percentage-wise, but still, it's pretty impressive. But if you go to North Idaho, the people coming in are coming from Washington and Oregon, in Boise, in the Treasure Valley, they're coming from California. And if you get over on my side of the state, in Idaho Falls, they're coming from Utah, which kind of surprised me. If you're in Utah, why would you move up to Idaho? We pretty much have the same politics and jobs; maybe that damn Utah is getting way too liberal. It's changing Idaho, but in the opposite direction that we were worried that it might.
Washington Reporter:
You're meeting with Secretary Doug Burgum later this week. Can you talk about your getting to know him, and what the significance of his appointment is for Idaho and for the American West?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
I was really glad to see him take Interior because he knows his stuff, and I this is a story I'll tell him when I see him. If two years ago, someone would have said to me, ‘who's the governor of North Dakota?’ I’d have had no idea. And then I watched him, when he announced for president and he gave a speech for about 45 minutes; when he got done, I said he’s smart, and he's very, very good, so I'm really pleased that he's at Interior. I don't know him. I've never met him. This will be the first time we get a chance to sit down and talk and go over what the priorities are in the interior bill, that kind of stuff. But he’s coming from North Dakota, he obviously knows the issues. He knows the energy issues, plus he knows the public land issues, and from what I understand, he was endorsed by the tribes in North Dakota, which is impressive to me. This tells me he knows about Indian issues, because the areas of our bill that are probably the biggest challenge are Indian Health Services, Indian law enforcement, Indian education on the one hand, and the EPA on the other hand, the wildfire fighting and what we have to put into that. He knows all about them. I'm really looking forward to meeting and working with him and with Chris Wright at Energy. I don't know him either. The one that I do know is Lee Zeldin at EPA, and I think he's going to be a great EPA Director. He would have been a great governor. If that's his goal, eventually, I think he will be that.
Washington Reporter:
What are you hoping to see immediately from the Trump Interior Department, in contrast with the Biden Interior Department?
Rep. Mike Simpson:
I hope that they also start doing some of the leases in the ocean and on land for some of these things. The other area that bothers me is critical minerals and our supply of critical minerals in this country; we are dependent on countries that don't like us for a lot of things that are necessary. One of them is antimony. There's an issue about a mine in Idaho that they've been trying to open. It was an old World War Two mine, and it's actually polluting the river right now, the tailings and stuff like that, not to an extreme amount, but it needs to be cleaned up. So these guys come in said, ‘let us reopen the mine. We will clean up the tailings. We will put them through reprocessing. We get gold out of it. And antimony.’ The Defense Department is big on this, because if you have anything nuclear, you need antimony and a lot of other areas and stuff; we get 90 percent of our antimony from China, and China told us earlier this year, that they were going to cut us off. You can't be dependent on a foreign country for critical minerals. So in that arena, that's just one mineral, but with all the others like phosphates and other things that we get from countries that don't like us, we've got to become more self-sufficient on those things. And I think Burgum understands that, and those are some of the issues that I hope they work on right away.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Simpson, thanks so much for chatting.