Democrats would be willing to bargain with Republicans on what amendments would be offered on on annual funding bills once a topline deal is reached, a key senator said yesterday.

• “This thing has to go in order,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a senior appropriator in leadership. “The question of amendments, I think, flows from whether or not you have a bipartisan agreement. If you have a bipartisan agreement, there’s usually bipartisan agreement to block amendments that would be harmful to the likelihood of passage.”

Negotiations on how to advance money for agencies past Sept. 30 stalled last week as Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) deadlocked on how to split defense and non-defense spending.

President Donald Trump and senior congressional Republicans are pushing for appropriators to sign off on over $1 trillion in discretionary spending during the next fiscal year for the Pentagon, a significant increase that Democrats say needs to align more closely with domestic spending.

• “At every turn, I’ve pushed to advance a bipartisan appropriations process with a bipartisan topline just as Chair Collins and I have done for the last 3 years,” Murray said in a statement late Tuesday. “But unfortunately, Chair Collins continues to propose topline funding levels that would supersize Trump’s war budget while leaving families behind.”

Republicans offered to increase domestic spending “a little,” but that their proposal remained lopsided, Schatz said.

• “It’s especially difficult this year because of how much they’re demanding in defense spending,” Schatz said. “If they had come to us and said, ‘let’s do something that rhymes with last year, we would have our deal.’”

Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), a senior appropriator, pointed out that when Democrats held the majority, Republicans stood down on offering amendment votes that would have gotten enough support from moderates to get adopted to advance bills to the floor.

• “Susan Collins led that effort because she wanted to protect the process and wanted to give us an opportunity to have that debate in a full Senate setting,” Britt said. “I’m hopeful that our Democratic colleagues will show that same respect in allowing the process to work.”

Senate subcommittees continue to negotiate individual bills to various degrees in the meantime. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) are directing staff to talk but are not personally hashing out details, according to a person familiar with negotiations.

Britt hoped to talk with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), her Democratic counterpart on the Homeland Security panel, about ways to support the Coast Guard, TSA, and CISA now that Republicans have ensured immigration enforcement for the rest of the Trump administration in the budget reconciliation law (Public Law 119-98) that Trump signed earlier this month.

• “It gives us a real opportunity to lean in to all the other great things that the department does that sometimes get overlooked because of the controversy there,” Britt said. “I’d love to see us make some significant strides and come to a bipartisan agreement on a package.”

Schatz and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are also discussing how to fund State-Foreign Operations programs they oversee from their subcommittee.

• “We have a good relationship,” Schatz said. “But I didn’t tell anybody until he won his primary.”

President Donald Trump’s nominee to take over as the second-highest-ranking official in OMB assured senators that he would not leverage a proposed rule overhauling federal grantmaking to personally kill funding for particular projects.

• “The ultimate deciders of these grants will be the political employees at the agencies,” Acting OMB Deputy Director Hal Duncan told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee yesterday. “I would not make decisions on a specific grant.”

Duncan’s testimony came on his second day of testimony after submitting to questions from the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday. The former House Republican aide is also serving as OMB’s legislative liaison.

The regulatory changes OMB is pursuing are “fundamentally about getting our arms around the grant enterprise” to halt money going toward “divisive DEI ideologies, woke gender ideologies, illegal immigration.”

Senators on HSGAC will vote on his nomination after the recess, Chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in a brief interview yesterday.

As lawmakers debate President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, some Democrats pressed Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for details on Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system, including the Pentagon’s own cost estimate for the program and its’ spend plan for a proposed $185 billion investment.

• “This is unacceptable. Before you spend one more taxpayer dollar on Golden Dome, DOD must share its plans and goals for the system,” the letter reads. “Congress and the American public have a right to know what they are paying for.”

The letter, led by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Reps. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) and Don Beyer (D-Va.), note that the CBO estimated the system could cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years, though the Pentagon has disputed that figure.

This comes as the White House is expected to finally make a supplemental request for emergency funding for the Pentagon to cover the costs of the war in Iran. It’s unclear how much the request would ask for.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters yesterday she expected to meet with Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg by the end of the week to discuss the supplemental request.