Sen. Lisa Murkowski intends to serve as the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee when the next Congress convenes, a spokesperson for the Alaska Republican said Monday.
Murkowski will aim to succeed Sen. Susan Collins of Maine as the panel's senior Republican after Collins lost her reelection bid, Joseph Plesha, a Murkowski spokesperson, told Politico.
The move could push Murkowski's signature legislative interests, spanning energy, the environment and defense, toward the center of the committee's agenda, even though she would not hold the gavel. It would also hand a prominent Trump administration critic a new platform to examine White House spending decisions and potentially constrain its agenda.
Senate Republicans are expected to settle committee leadership questions early next year. Murkowski is expected to claim the ranking member position as the most senior Republican on the panel next year, though she is reportedly facing a possible challenge from Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas.
Murkowski has spent more than 15 years as the top Republican on the Senate Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, where she frequently highlights her bipartisan work with Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who is in line to chair that subcommittee. Whether she will keep leading that panel remains unclear, though she would be entitled to do so.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington is set to chair the full Appropriations Committee in the next Congress. Murray and Murkowski have a good relationship and are expected to cooperate, including on efforts to block the administration from unilaterally withholding funding that Congress has approved.
The federal government is currently funded through Dec. 11. Appropriators are expected to push that deadline into next year, but Democratic attempts to leverage the spending fight to cut off funding for the war against Iran could complicate those plans.
Speaking last week with Alaskan radio station KNOM, Murkowski said Collins' departure "is going to be putting me in a position of higher leadership on the Appropriations Committee." She said she wants to help repair what she called "a broken process in the Congress" while working to "do the job that people have sent us here to do."
Asked about the concerns she hears from constituents, Murkowski pointed to high prices and the effects of a changing climate. "People are seeing and coming to fear, coming to fear, the fall and what it may bring, and it's not just here," she said, noting that Alaskans in some parts of the state feel "not only a vulnerability but an insecurity in being in their own homes."
Murkowski said she wants to tackle Alaska's unique energy challenges, citing the potential of battery storage, small modular nuclear reactors, wind power and "other renewable sources that are more close to where we are."
