As chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing energy and water programs, Sen. John Kennedy is among the rarefied group of “cardinals” — the 12 gavel-holders who tend to take a clubby, I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine approach to the trillion-dollar government funding process they manage each year.

Lately, though, Kennedy has hardly been acting like one of the gang.

The Louisiana Republican has accused the Senate of “playacting” through this year’s bipartisan spending talks — a process, he says, that is actually as “dead as Jimmy Hoffa.” This past week, he contributed to a days-long holdup on an initial package of fiscal 2026 spending bills — insisting he get a chance to vote against funding for Congress itself.

And he’s flirting with a second act this fall, delaying his own bill to fund energy and water programs as he pushes for a spending cut. He’s also drawing red lines that could leave a separate bill funding the Interior Department hanging in limbo.

Kennedy’s assessment that the government funding process is “broken” isn’t playing well with colleagues. That includes Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Appropriations Democrat and a veteran of hard-nosed partisan fiscal negotiations.

“He’s breaking it,” Murray said in a brief interview.

As Kennedy tells it, his colleagues need to accept reality: Washington will be running on short-term spending patches, known as continuing resolutions, for the foreseeable future given the political hurdles to any workable agreement between President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats.

“There hasn’t been a point for a while,” Kennedy said in an interview about the government funding process. Hence, he says, the “playacting.”

It’s bleak talk for someone best known around Capitol Hill for his entertaining if sometimes contradictory approach to lawmaking.

A Rhodes Scholar skilled in dealing out down-home aphorisms to congressional reporters, he’s gaining a new reputation as a persistent headache for GOP leaders when it comes to government spending — and as an odd fit on a panel that is typically home to pragmatic senators who band together to cut deals even if they don’t love every piece.

By no means is he the only member on the committee who has thrown up roadblocks. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, for instance, forced leadership to drop its plan to include a bill funding the departments of Commerce and Justice over Trump’s move to cancel plans for relocating FBI headquarters to his home state of Maryland.

But Van Hollen and others with parochial concerns haven’t questioned the bipartisan appropriations process itself, and even Senate Majority Leader John Thune exhibited surprise at Kennedy’s broadsides.

“We’re just going to do what we can to get the appropriations process moving again, and that’s something we haven’t had here in quite a while,” Thune said. “So there’s a lot of muscle memory we’re trying to engage.””

The Senate is “trying to find a sweet spot,” Thune added.

Kennedy ultimately reached a deal with leadership this week to get a separate vote on funding for Congress. He said he wanted to be able to vote against the Legislative Branch bill without having to oppose a two-bill package focused on the departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture. He’s angling to make a similar protest vote against the bill funding the Department of Interior and environmental projects, which would complicate Thune putting it in a second spending package that he wants to bring to the floor next month.

But Kennedy’s position frustrated colleagues who say he didn’t articulate any policy concern with the congressional funding bill beyond believing it spent too much money. And his willingness to take a verbal sledgehammer to the Senate’s talks is grating on some fellow Republicans who are straining to keep them on track.

“What we’re seeing is different, and I don’t know why,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said about recent tactics from Kennedy and other senators. “When I came on the Appropriations Committee, it was kind of like an unspoken rule, if you will — that we would be there to not only support the Republican bills, but as appropriators, we kind of held together … and we made the process work.”

“We don’t have that right now, which is unfortunate,” she added.

Besides publicly badmouthing the bipartisan process, Kennedy made other moves to rankle his Appropriations colleagues — starting with his vocal support for Trump’s pursuit of “rescissions.”

Those spending clawbacks essentially serve to undo the spending panel’s work. Not only did Kennedy vote for a first $9 billion package last month, he has also been backchanneling with White House budget director Russ Vought about additional requests.

Democrats, and some Republicans, are warning that would blow up the appropriations process, but Kennedy called it “naive” to think if the White House held off that Democrats would want to “share a cup of hot cocoa and a hug with us.”

Meanwhile, his frequent claim that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is responsible for breaking the government funding process has particularly rankled Democrats. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is on the Appropriations Committee and likely to be Schumer’s next No. 2, said the idea that “you’re going to blame the Democratic leader, and you control both chambers and the presidency, is plainly goofy.”

“If he wants to vote no on his own bill, I suppose he’s entitled to do that. It’s a little weird, but he’s entitled to do it,” Schatz said. “But there’s no reason he should block the Senate from considering the legislation that he’s presumably helped to craft.”

That’s a reference to the ongoing standoff Kennedy’s in with Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine over the energy and water bill, which last year directed nearly $60 billion in annual taxpayer spending — much of it on the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

Collins and Murray agreed on a topline spending number for the bill Kennedy oversees. But the Louisianan wants to go lower — something Democrats consider to be a breach of the overall bipartisan agreement on the committee.

“Just because Patty gives me a number doesn’t mean I have to accept her number. She’s got one vote, and I’ve got one vote,” he said.

Murray, who is also the top Democrat on Kennedy’s subcommittee, said she is working with Collins on a plan to advance that bill out of committee over Kennedy’s insistence that it include less funding than the panel’s leaders have prescribed.

Kennedy credited Collins with “doing the best she can.” But he said he wants to cut spending and rated the chances of that happening through the bipartisan spending process as about as high as the likelihood that “donkeys may fly someday, too.”

Last Congress, he recalled, panel leaders made the case that Senate appropriators needed to “come together” and “sing ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘We Are the World.” The pitch hasn’t changed this year, he said — he’s just unmoved.

“I love ‘We Are the World,’ it’s a beautiful song,” Kennedy added. “But it’s not reality.’”

The Senate passed its first spending bills Friday, taking swift action after leaders struck a bipartisan agreement to package the bills together earlier in the day.

The chamber voted 87-9 to pass a two-bill package to fund the departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture, along with military construction and the Food and Drug Administration. The chamber is set to take a separate vote shortly on a third bill funding Congress itself.

With federal cash set to dry up at the end of September, the Senate’s minibus would do nothing to stave off a government shutdown that could potentially hobble federal agencies in October. But Senate leaders still want to move that package through with the goal of gaining leverage in the broader spending talks with the House and President Donald Trump.

“It’s taken a great deal of work, good faith and negotiation to get to this point,” Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine). “Congress has a responsibility, a constitutional responsibility under Article I, for the power of the purse. We are executing that responsibility.”

The package would provide almost $154 billion for military construction and veterans programs. It would send more than $27 billion to the Agriculture department and FDA. Both represent a roughly 2 percent boost over current levels.

The Senate rejected an amendment from Sen. Jeff Merkley, an appropriator and the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, that would bar the rescission, or clawback, of funds in the bill by the White House. Democrats are worried that the administration will send another rescissions package ahead of the fall funding deadline, which would likely implode any hopes of getting a larger funding deal.

Still, Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, defended the smaller deal reached among senators, saying that the package “rejects damaging cuts from Trump and House Republicans.”

The Senate adopted by voice vote an amendment from Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Alex Padilla of California that would bar the use of any funds in the bill to reduce services provided by the Veterans Crisis Line.

Senators rejected other amendments from Democrats including one that would have halted funding of the Agriculture Department reorganization and another to require a report on staffing reductions at the VA.

They also rejected amendments from Sens. John Kennedy (R-La.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) that would have made deeper cuts to the Agriculture-FDA bill.

The chamber also voted 75-21 to reject a proposal from Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin that would bar lawmakers from taking credit for earmarks. It would require the funding to be revoked if a lawmaker were to ever tout their earmarks in interviews, mailings, speeches or even on the campaign trail.

The Senate’s progress is a U-turn from just Thursday night when tensions were running high after Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) blocked the ability to bring up a four-bill package that would have incorporated funding for the Justice and Commerce departments as well as other agencies.

Van Hollen blocked funding of the DOJ bill because of a stalemate that developed after the Trump administration backtracked earlier this year from a years-long process that would have moved FBI headquarters to Maryland. The Senate punted the Justice-Commerce funding bill until after the August recess.

Congress will ultimately have to consider a continuing resolution that wards off a shutdown on Oct. 1 and buys more time for bicameral, bipartisan talks on a government funding deal for the coming fiscal year.

Some House lawmakers are angling for another lengthy stopgap, while Senate leadership is hoping to get some full-year bills to President Donald Trump’s desk for signature before the shutdown deadline. That would let them have parts of the government funded for fiscal 2026, while running the rest of the government on a short-term spending patch.

Cassandra Dumay and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

The scheduled congressional deposition of Ghislaine Maxwell, a co-conspirator of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is indefinitely postponed, House Oversight Chair James Comer said Friday.

In a letter to Maxwell, Comer said he would agree to delay the meeting after her lawyers earlier this week requested a postponement in the planned Aug. 11 testimony citing a pending Supreme Court petition regarding her case.

Maxwell’s attorneys also made a number of requests in order to facilitate her cooperation with the Oversight panel’s questioning — some of which Comer rejected outright Friday.

Comer said his committee was “willing to continue to engage in good faith negotiations” but would not grant her congressional immunity, which her lawyers had requested. The committee, he added, also would not send her team the questions in advance, another demand of Maxwell’s lawyers.

“Your testimony is vital to the Committee’s efforts regarding Mr. Jeffrey Epstein, including the 2007 non-prosecution agreement and the circumstances surrounding Mr. Epstein’s death,” Comer wrote.

But he agreed to delay the interview until after the Supreme Court rules on her appeal, which claims that her 2021 sex trafficking conviction was barred by Epstein’s earlier plea deal. That’s not likely to happen before the court begins its annual term in October.