# Patty Murray **Patty Murray** (b. Oct 11, 1950, Bothell, Washington) is the senior Democratic senator from Washington and **vice chair** (the ranking Democrat) of the [[Senate Appropriations Committee]]. In the vault she is the leading congressional antagonist of the second Trump administration's campaign to spend less than Congress appropriates. That makes her the senator most associated with the defense of the [[Power of the Purse]]. ## Career Murray won her seat in 1992 as the "mom in tennis shoes," a nickname a state legislator had meant as a put-down and she turned into a campaign slogan. She has since held most of the Senate's fiscal gavels: - **Budget Committee chair (2013–15).** With House Budget chair [[Paul Ryan]] she negotiated the **Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013**, the two-year deal that eased the sequester after the 2013 shutdown. - **HELP Committee chair (2021–23).** Covered health, education and labor. - **Appropriations Committee chair and president pro tempore (2023–25).** She was the first woman to serve as president pro tempore. - **Appropriations vice chair (2025–).** Since Republicans took the Senate, she has been ranking member opposite chair [[Susan Collins]]. Her term runs to January 2029. ## The purse fights, 2025–26 - **The March 2025 stopgap.** She led opposition to the House Republicans' full-year stopgap, which left spending details to the administration, and pushed for a short-term bill instead. The Senate passed the full-year version 54–46. - **Pocket rescission (Aug 29, 2025).** The administration moved to cancel **$4.9 billion** in foreign aid by sending the request too late in the fiscal year for Congress to act. GAO considers that tactic illegal. Murray called it an "absurd, illegal ploy to steal [Congress's] constitutional power." See [[Rescission and Impoundment]]. - **The shutdown (Oct–Nov 2025).** A record **43-day** shutdown ended Nov 12, 2025. - **The current stopgap (Sept 2026).** The Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027 (H.R. 6500) passed the Senate **90–6 on Aug 8, 2026**, with Murray voting yes, and the House **370–48 on Sept 1**. It was signed **Sept 2** and funds the government through **Dec 11, 2026**, so there was no Oct 1 shutdown this year. The next deadline falls five weeks after the midterms. - **The NIH transfer (Sept 2026).** On **Sept 3, 2026**, she attacked a Defense Department agreement to use up to about $2 billion of NIAID funds for biodefense work. She said "the Trump administration is now trying to rob NIH of billions of dollars that Congress provided for medical research so that it can pad the Pentagon's budget," called the agreement "outrageous," and demanded it be "terminated immediately." It is the same appropriations-integrity argument she makes about rescissions, applied to moving money between agencies rather than refusing to spend it. See [[NIH]]. ## Why she matters The second-term budget strategy under [[Russell Vought]] runs through the gaps in appropriations law: pocket rescissions, apportionment slow-walks and interagency transfers. Murray is the Democrat who documents each one, and her committee's minority statements are a running record of them. When Democrats regain a gavel, she is the senator most likely to write the statutory fixes. > [!warning] Surname collision > The vault contains several unrelated Murrays: Charles, Douglas, Pauli, and Murray Rothbard. Always link the full name; never reserve a bare "Murray" alias. ## See Also - [[Senate Appropriations Committee]] · [[Power of the Purse]] · [[Rescission and Impoundment]] · [[Impoundment Control Act]] - [[Continuing Resolution]] · [[Government Shutdown]] · [[Susan Collins]] · [[Paul Ryan]] - [[NIH]] · [[NIAID]] · [[Office of Management and Budget]] · [[Russell Vought]]