Congress
Inside the ‘Cigar SCIF:’ How Tom Cole pulled off a House appropriations miracle
The crucial votes to fund the government last week were brokered in Speaker Mike Johnson‘s ceremonial office just off the House floor. But the groundwork to get the $1.6 trillion spending package through the chamber was laid in a literal smoke-filled room just steps away.
That would be the domain of Rep. Tom Cole, the 76-year-old cigar-and-whiskey-loving chair of the House Appropriations Committee. Inside that haunt, the Oklahoman took an unabashedly old-school approach over the course of months to getting the congressional funding process unstuck after a record-long, 43-day shutdown last year.
“That’s not actually an office — it’s a smoke room,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a regular in what some members cheekily call the “Cigar SCIF,” a play on the “sensitive compartmented information facilities” where government officials review state secrets.
Inside, Cole “doesn’t dazzle you with numbers, he works on people-to-people skills,” Issa said, “and it’s the reason we’ve gotten something done.”
That’s something of a miracle considering who Cole is and what his colleagues have demanded.
When Cole took the Appropriations gavel in the spring of 2024, conservative demands for spending reductions were mounting. Hard-liners citing unfulfilled promises of funding cuts had ousted Kevin McCarthy, a close Cole ally, from the speakership just six months earlier. Months later, Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president and immediately began freezing billions of dollars top appropriators had already fastidiously allocated.
“We often joke: Boy, did we get here at a bad time,” Cole said in an interview, describing the situation he and Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) confronted.
While the politics of government spending grew stormy as 2025 wore on, Cole and his allies were biding their time and working — puff by puff and sip by sip — to build support for the government funding bills he was quietly negotiating with his counterparts across the aisle and across the Capitol.
Matters came to a head in the weeks after the longest shutdown in U.S. history concluded in November. Fiscal conservatives in the House were threatening to block passage of the bills Cole had helped craft — demanding changes to legislation that had already been settled with Democrats.
In early January, with tensions high and the chances for another lengthy shutdown rising, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) entered Cole’s office off the House floor. He emerged more than an hour later and gave Cole his public blessing to proceed with what appropriators had negotiated, a key vote of confidence from the GOP leadership.
“The bills are being built by the Appropriations Committee in the House and the Senate,” Emmer said. “Tom Cole and his colleagues on the Appropriations Committee are doing excellent work.”
House hard-liners, who were eyeing massive cuts to member-requested earmarks, didn’t secure any further changes to the funding bills. Now eleven of the 12 annual measures have been signed into law, guaranteeing cash through September for every federal agency except the embattled Department of Homeland Security.
Along the way Cole has won grudging respect from those same hard-liners, who give him credit for negotiating relatively flat overall funding levels and for trying to return the House to its traditional process of debating the 12 bills individually instead of as a catchall omnibus package.
“Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” Republican Rep. Scott Perry said of Cole in an interview. “Of course he listens. He listens because he has to listen — we have votes.”
Cole is “a big reason,” the Pennsylvania conservative continued, that the House is “crawling out of this hole of just ‘go along to get along’ in Washington, D.C.”
‘Space is a great gift’
While Freedom Caucus types like Perry tend not to be denizens of Cole’s tobacco-scented inner sanctum, a wide variety of members are often seen slipping in and out.
Alongside top Republican appropriators like California Rep. Ken Calvert are some GOP lawmakers who don’t sit on the spending panel, among them Reps. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, Andrew Garbarino of New York and Don Bacon of Nebraska. Some Democrats, including California Rep. Jimmy Panetta, are known to drop in.
“I’ve learned more in that room than anywhere else in Congress about how things operate,” said Rep. Mark Alford, a second-term GOP congressman from Missouri who coined the “Cigar SCIF” moniker. “But it’s just good to have a place to have honest conversations and develop friendships.”
A grand photo of Cole’s great aunt, a famous Chickasaw storyteller known as Te Ata, is mounted beside a window overlooking the west front of the Capitol and the National Mall. Most days in winter, a fire burns in a black marble fireplace.
“I think space is a great gift, and I think it’s misused quite often,” Cole said. “These are grand settings. They’re lovely rooms. They’re obviously immediately adjacent to the floor. You can’t have much better real estate than that.”
Engraved on one chair is the name of Rep. Hal Rogers, the longest-serving House member and a former Appropriations chair. The 88-year-old Kentucky Republican is often by Cole’s side during House votes and spends hours each week in the room off the floor, which Rogers said wasn’t used as “an open forum” until Cole got the gavel.
When Nebraska GOP Rep. Mike Flood — more than 25 years Cole’s junior — came to Capitol Hill in 2022, he sought Cole’s guidance on how to get on the Financial Services Committee. He got an invitation to another one of Cole’s smoke-filled offices — this one upstairs, next to the Rules Committee hearing room where Cole was then serving as chair — and received an education on Congress from Cole and “four other guys north of 75.”
“The people who don’t avail themselves of that have a much different experience in Congress,” Flood said in an interview, “because they’re not learning the Congress as an institution, as a functioning way to make laws and govern Americans.”
Cole likes to be regarded as an institutionalist and a “practical politician.” He holds a masters degree from Yale and a doctorate from the University of Oklahoma — both in British history — and is an avid reader of nonfiction accounts of war and politics. He was a member of the Oklahoma Senate in the 1980s, ran the National Republican Congressional Committee in the 1990s, served as Oklahoma secretary of state and then came to Congress in 2003.
“Experience, knowledge, temperament and persistence — he has it all in spades,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a senior appropriator and one of Cole’s closest friends. “The cigar does not hurt.”
Beyond the House
Last March, Cole joined with House GOP leaders to halt bipartisan negotiations with Democrats and instead advanced a six-month funding patch — an audacious move that spurred Democratic fury and fueled the government shutdown this past fall.
“The Democrats just didn’t think we could do it,” Cole said. “I think that’s what made the 12 bills possible this year. They know we can do it. They know we will.”
Even as Trump directly undermines Congress’ power to steer funding, Cole frequently praises the president in the first lines of any speech or statement celebrating a spending deal. He also was among the Republicans who voted Jan. 6, 2021, against certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, saying in a statement at the time that he did so “on behalf of my constituents.”
“I look on the administration as allies, not as enemies. But I also recognize that they can’t just do what they want to do,” Cole said this year. “Anybody that thinks that Congress has somehow lost its power of the purse — it has not.”
As Congress stares down another partial government shutdown over DHS funding, Cole is deferring to the White House in negotiations with Democrats who are demanding changes to the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.
“Clearly the decision is going to be made by the president on this,” he said.
Cole also doesn’t meddle in the negotiations of his “cardinals,” the dozen lawmakers who chair his panel’s subcommittees, empowering each of them to resolve differences with Democrats on their own.
“His word is gold,” said Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), one of those chairs. “He’s infinitely fair, infinitely reasonable. He is so well attuned to working with people.”
Cole instead focuses on negotiating overall totals and tricky policy disputes with Congress’ other three top appropriators: Collins, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
None of those women smoke cigars, and they prefer to meet in Collins’ less-odorous office on the Senate side. But they all have a close relationship with Cole.
Murray and Cole go back years: They faced off in negotiations over health, education and labor funding as subcommittee chairs during Paul Ryan’s speakership. Cole described the Washington Democrat as “a candid politician” who is “steely in her resolve” but “wants to get to a deal.”
Cole said Collins reminds him of his mother, who was the first Native American woman to serve in the Oklahoma Senate. “Her political skills are formidable,” he said, and “she’s a hard person not to like.”
As for his Democratic counterpart in the House, Cole calls DeLauro one of his “favorite people in Congress” and describes her as “an Italian grandmother.”
The respect is mutual. “You make a lot of acquaintances in this business, but you have few friends,” DeLauro said in an interview. “Tom Cole is my friend.”
That relationship was built not only through years of hard-nosed negotiations but also gentler moments like a 2004 Middle East trip the pair took as part of a bipartisan delegation of appropriators.
“I’m going to drink all the bourbon with you that I can,” she recalled telling him. “On the other hand, I’m not smoking any cigars.”
CAMBRIDGE, Maryland — On Capitol Hill, Rep. Andy Harris is one of the most uncompromising advocates of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. On the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the Maryland Republican is seen as a hero for securing foreign labor to power his state’s commercial seafood industry.
The 69-year-old lawmaker, who chairs the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and the subcommittee that funds the Department of Agriculture, has leveraged his influence as one of Washington’s most prominent hard-liners to lobby the White House in favor of a robust influx of temporary foreign workers.
That meant convincing the Trump administration earlier this year to max out the number of guest workers allowed for the season, helping businesses throughout the country — including seafood producers in his district, who bring in workers from Mexico to hand-pick meat from the region’s blue crabs.
“I’ve been in long enough to know how to get things done, and we got it done,” Harris told Jack Brooks, owner of the J.M. Clayton crab company, on a recent afternoon outside his facility along the Choptank River.
It’s not just a parochial priority for Harris, who has grander ambitions to increase the number of seasonal workers who flow in and out of the country. He’s driving a debate within the Republican party about whether the president’s “America First” agenda means aggressively stemming the number of foreigners who enter the United States — both legally and illegally — or helping the U.S. economy with regulated foreign labor.
Harris told Brooks he plans to build on his success by working to guarantee longtime H-2B employers get the positions they seek regardless of their luck in a yearly lottery.
“We appreciate you out there battling on our behalf, for sure,” Brooks said to Harris. “I know you’re just one guy.”
The H-2B visa program Harris wants to expand is distinct from a separate temporary visa program for migrant farmworkers. It’s instead aimed at nonagricultural jobs such as landscaping, construction and, in this case, “crab picking.”
There is no conflict, Harris argues, between his endorsement of the president’s aggressive approach to illegal immigration and his support for more temporary foreign workers who return to their home countries each year.
At the same time, Harris — the son of immigrants from Central Europe — also consistently rails against amnesty policies that would create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“This is not an immigration issue — this is a temporary foreign worker issue,” Harris said in an interview. “Once we control the uncontrolled border crossing, let’s talk about how we can bring a foreign workforce in to boost the economy where it needs to be boosted.”
Under the “Buy American, Hire American” agenda Trump has pursued throughout his first and second terms, his administration has often resisted calls to issue the maximum number of H-2B visas Congress allows. This year, however, Harris traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue at a crucial moment to persuade the White House otherwise — quietly locking in roughly 65,000 positions for workers with H-2B visas for the current season, about 30,000 more than what the Trump administration had announced it would allow.
The White House’s decision to boost the number of visas followed the termination of work documents for 1.3 million undocumented immigrants, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. The Trump administration’s No. 1 priority, she said, “is protecting American jobs and wages” while meeting the demands of the president’s “rapidly growing economy.”
Harris pitched Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in recent weeks on his ideas for embracing an influx of temporary foreign workers as Trump promises “a Golden Age of American agriculture” and a renaissance for U.S. manufacturing amid record tariffs and new Republican-led tax perks.
“I think they realized that — as we bring work back — we are going to have to provide the labor here,” Harris said.
The congressman also wants to impose a “buy American” mandate for SNAP food assistance to ensure the roughly $100 billion in federal aid each year is used to purchase food grown and produced in the United States. “But that means that you’re going to have to have workers here,” Harris explained.
Asked about the Trump administration’s reception of Harris’ ideas, a spokesperson for USDA said in a statement that the president “is putting America First” by “streamlining” visa policy and “prioritizing fixing programs farmers and ranchers rely on to produce the safest and most productive food supply in the world.”
To close followers of visa policy debate in Washington, it’s clear that Harris is “the ringleader” of the push to expand the pool of temporary foreign workers, said Daniel Costa, a director at the Economic Policy Institute, a group that is critical of the way workers are treated under the H-2B program.
While Harris’ stance is not “a paradox,” Costa said in an interview, it’s certainly in conflict with the MAGA vision of top Trump advisers, including Stephen Miller. Harris’ lobbying effort is reminiscent of the “fracture in the Republican coalition” last year when Elon Musk pressed the president to boost a separate visa program for high-skilled workers against the guidance of other close Trump allies, he added.
Back in Harris’ district, seafood processors on the Eastern Shore have for decades struggled to fill key gaps in their workforce. “Crab pickers” began moving into manufacturing and other jobs in the mid-1990s, forcing business owners in the region to start seeking seasonal foreign workers.
At that time, there were more than 50 crab producers in the area. Those businesses that didn’t bring in foreign employees quickly closed, followed in later years by those that had bad luck in the visa lottery. Local crab producers still standing estimate there are fewer than a dozen remaining.
Lindy’s Seafood, another producer on the Eastern Shore, was not awarded any foreign workers in this year’s initial federal lottery. But the company lucked out when the Trump administration opened up the supplemental visas Harris helped secure.
“It’s a scary thing to go through, when every year is kind of tossing the dice,” said Aubrey Vincent, the company’s owner.
Other Maryland lawmakers have tried to help. Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks have joined with lawmakers from states with big seafood industries to push a bipartisan bill that would exempt seafood processors from the cap on H-2B visas.
“It’d be nice to have the Trump administration support this effort,” Van Hollen said in an interview. “But regardless, we’re going to push very hard to get it done.”
Maryland’s Democrats don’t have the same sway right now as Harris, the sole Republican in his state’s 10-member congressional delegation and the only Marylander on Capitol Hill who has the ear of Trump administration officials mostly disinterested in working across the aisle.
Before Harris was elected to Congress in 2011, Maryland’s crab producers had another powerful advocate: then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who later chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee. After the limit on H-2B visas was first imposed in 2005, Mikulski succeeded in excluding returning workers from the visa cap.
But when Mikulski retired in 2017, Senate support for that policy died. “As soon as you lost the bicameral advocacy for it, it just became difficult,” said Harris, who pushed the policy in the House while Mikulski championed it in the Senate.
In 2016, appropriators started adding language to the annual funding bills allowing DHS to issue about 65,000 extra H-2B visas per year — the quota Harris got the Trump administration to fulfill this year.
Now Harris is working alongside the Senate funding panel’s current chair, Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, to advocate for the visas, which she argues are essential to “temporarily fill the seasonal roles that many inns, restaurants, and hotels rely on” during the summer tourism boom in her home state, whose license plates read “Vacationland.”
For the upcoming fiscal year, Harris wants to add what he calls “certified employer” language to a full-year funding bill for DHS. That means businesses that have used the H-2B visa program to hire temporary foreign workers for several years could go through a process to guarantee they get the same number of seasonal employees each year.
Some of Harris’ colleagues suggest waiting for a comprehensive immigration overhaul package to make changes to the H-2B visa program, rather than tackle it piecemeal. But Congress hasn’t been able to achieve such a feat in 40 years, and Harris isn’t interested in waiting.
“It’s not going to be anytime soon,” Harris said. “So let’s just deal with the issue now.”
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi headlined a growing list of Democratic lawmakers who called Friday on Rep. Eric Swalwell to withdraw his campaign for California governor amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
“This extremely sensitive matter must be appropriately investigated with full transparency and accountability,” Pelosi said in a statement. “As I discussed with Congressman Swalwell, it is clear that is best done outside of a gubernatorial campaign.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday that a former congressional aide accused the congressman of two sexual encounters without her consent, beginning in 2019. BLN later reported that four women allege that Swalwell has committed sexual misconduct, including one former staffer who accuses Swalwell of rape.
Swalwell denied the allegations in a statement.
“These allegations are false and come on the eve of an election against the frontrunner for governor,” he said. “I will defend myself with the facts and where necessary bring legal action.”
Key backers of Swalwell’s governor bid swiftly revoked their support after the Chronicle’s story was published, including Reps. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) and Adam Gray (D-Calif.), who served as campaign co-chairs.
“Today’s reports about Eric Swalwell’s conduct while in office are deeply disturbing,” Gray said in a statement. “Harassment, abuse, and violence of any sort are unacceptable. Given these serious allegations, I am withdrawing my support and Eric Swalwell should end his campaign immediately.”
But nothing underscored the peril for Swalwell’s nearly two-decade political career as vividly as Pelosi’s statement. The former speaker included Swalwell in her inner circle of favored Democratic members for years, tapping him for junior leadership roles and to serve as a manager in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021.
The situation also presents a predicament for the sitting House Democratic leaders, who have insisted on letting a full Ethics Committee investigation play out before supporting formal discipline against another House Democrat accused of misconduct, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.).
A spokesperson for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the allegations “serious” and said they require “a serious and thorough investigation.”
“These brave women must be heard and respected,” the spokesperson, Christie Stephenson, said in a statement. “It is imperative that the inquiry follow the facts, apply the law and take place immediately.”
House Republicans already began discussing Friday evening the likely scenario that one of their own members will bring a censure effort against Swalwell, according to three people granted anonymity to describe private conversations.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an interview that she was weighing a censure and other action against Swalwell based on the reports of sexual assault allegations against him.
Luna said she would act “if there is evidence brought forward.”
The internal consequences could start playing out as soon as the House returns to session Tuesday, but a wave of top California Democrats immediately dropped their endorsements of Swalwell, including Rep. Ted Lieu, the No. 4 Democrat in House leadership.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) likened the situation to his push for transparency around disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and called for “appropriate” House and law enforcement investigations.
“No one in a position of power should be allowed to act above the law or with impunity,” he said in a statement. “It doesn’t matter what office you hold, how wealthy you are, or which political party you align with. The same rules must apply to Eric Swalwell.”
Meredith Lee Hill and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump gave his blessing Friday afternoon for a party-line package focused narrowly on immigration enforcement — in a boost to Senate GOP leaders amid the Department of Homeland Security funding stalemate.
Trump’s comments came after he met Friday with Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming. The two lawmakers went to the White House to pitch Senate GOP leadership’s plan to restrict the party’s filibuster-skirting effort to only funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Protection.
“Reconciliation is ON TRACK, and we are moving FAST and FOCUSED in keeping our Border SECURE, and getting funding to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to continue our incredible SUCCESS at MAKING AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump had previously backed using reconciliation to pass funding for immigration enforcement after it became clear Democrats would not agree to reopen those shuttered operations within DHS without a deal for more guardrails on ICE and CBP. But the president’s post Friday, which hammered home the preference for focusing the bill on this issue, is a significant boost to GOP leaders as they face calls from some of their members to broaden the scope of any reconciliation measure.
Some Republicans have called for funding all of DHS through reconciliation. The Senate previously passed a bipartisan deal that would reopen the department except for ICE and Border Patrol, but it has stalled in the House as hard-liners demand the Senate first pass the immigration enforcement funding.
Graham, whom Trump also re-endorsed Friday, is responsible for crafting the budget resolution that will allow the party to begin the reconciliation process — its second time using this maneuver in addition to last year’s tax and spending megabill. He is expected to tap the Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel to draft the immigration enforcement measure.
Senate Republicansare expected to not include pay-fors for the funding, arguing that it would have gone through the appropriations process were it not for opposition from Democrats. They’ll need sign-off from their own conservatives and the right-flank in the House for such a plan.
Trump also reiterated Friday that he wants the bill on his desk by June 1, adding that Republicans won’t need Democrats’ votes “as long as Republicans UNIFY, and stick together.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Myah Ward contributed to this report.
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