If any House Republican was going to resist President Donald Trump’s effort to unilaterally bulldoze the federal government, Representative Tom Cole would be at the top of the list.

As the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Cole is the keeper of Congress’s purse, which the Trump administration has repeatedly seized for itself. But even Cole, now 75 and in his 12th term representing Oklahoma, is just fine with Trump and Elon Musk slashing the government without approval from Congress. When, during negotiations over federal spending this month, Democrats insisted on restraining Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Cole rejected their demand out of hand. I thought I detected a hint of satisfaction when he recalled his refusal: “I’m sorry, that’s not happening.”

Rather than trying to curb DOGE’s authority, Cole has worked behind the scenes to adjust its targets—in at least one case pushing back on cuts that would have hurt his constituents. Earlier this month, Cole told me, he and Musk sat down over bourbon and cigars to discuss DOGE’s mission. Cole said he gently encouraged Musk to consult members of Congress before making cuts. “I guarantee I know my district better than anybody in DOGE, or anybody in Treasury, or anybody in these departments,” Cole told me, summarizing his message. “So it’s usually wise to talk to me … If I think it’s a wrong move, I’m going to say no, and I’m not going to be part of it.”

Cole said the billionaire acknowledged that DOGE had made mistakes. “When we make them, we’ll fix them,” he recalled Musk saying. “So far,” Cole told me, “I’ve found them to be good to their word.”

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When I asked Cole to explain his support for an agency that clearly encroached on Congress’s prerogatives, he offered a cold political calculus. “A Republican Senate, a Republican House is not going to chain down a Republican president,” he told me last week. Democrats “wouldn’t have done that to Barack Obama or Joe Biden. We’re certainly not going to do that to President Trump.”

Cole is nothing like a typical Trump supporter in Congress. He’s an institutionalist who has been willing to oppose conservative hard-liners, and he owes his position not to Trump or the MAGA base but to years of developing close ties with powerful Republicans inside the Capitol. But Cole’s defense of DOGE is not exactly a shock to those who know him. He’s a staunch ally to party leaders who, earlier in his career, ran the House GOP’s campaign efforts. And Trump and Cole have been on good terms for years. During his first term, the president would sometimes call Cole to praise his TV appearances.

Cole knows where his voters are and where the party is. Sometimes he lets their opinions dictate his own. On January 6, 2021, hours after hundreds of Trump supporters ransacked the Capitol, Cole voted against certifying Biden’s presidential victory in two states—a decision he attributed entirely to respecting the views of his Oklahoma constituents, whose support for Trump reached a nearly two-to-one ratio.

Still, Democrats have long viewed Cole as a Republican they can make deals with—a rarity in today’s GOP. When Republicans were struggling to find a speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy in 2023, some Democrats mentioned Cole as a possible compromise choice. (He did not want the job, he told me at the time.)

So Cole’s support for Musk and DOGE has disappointed Democrats. In a hearing last week, Representative Joe Neguse, a Colorado Democrat, sharply criticized Cole for backing DOGE while also asking the Trump administration to reverse its plan to close federal offices located in and around his district.

In our interview, Cole offered no apologies. “If I think they’re wrong, I’ll bring it to their attention,” he said of DOGE. “I’ll argue my case, and hopefully I’ll be able to persuade them.” But Cole hasn’t objected to Trump and Musk effectively closing USAID on their own, even though he supports foreign aid. “It might need to be shut down,” Cole said, referring to the agency. Isn’t that Congress’s job? “Well, yeah,” he replied, “but Congress doesn’t always do its job. When Congress doesn’t do its job, I’m not going to be mad at an executive [branch] that’s trying to save money.”

We were speaking inside the Capitol, a short walk from the House chamber where Cole was leading the debate over a bill that Republicans soon muscled through to fund the government for the next six months. Democrats argued that the measure would further empower Trump to wage his war on the government, which many of them believe has precipitated a constitutional crisis. Cole, who was a historian before he became a politician, thinks that view is a bit much.

The power struggle between Congress and the president, he said, “is as old as the Constitution. We go back and forth all the time.” He and other Republicans argue that Trump’s efforts to expand presidential power to cut spending is no different from Biden’s repeated attempts to forgive student-loan debt over the objections of both Congress and—in their telling—a Supreme Court ruling. The question of whether Trump has overstepped legal bounds, Cole said, “will be settled in the court.”

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I asked Cole if he was worried that Trump would defy judicial orders. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied. And even if Trump did ignore the courts, Cole suggested, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. He noted that past presidents have disregarded rulings without terminating the republic. “I don’t defend that, but it’s not like this is some unprecedented assault on democracy,” Cole said. “I’m not going to worry too much,” he told me, referring to potential constitutional crises. “We’ll deal with them as they come up.”

Cole has a tendency to sound like a mere observer, which he is not: Lawmakers in his position have wielded immense power over funding, which they’ve used to curtail House speakers and even the occasional president. But serving as the appropriations chair matters somewhat less in a party that wants to cut spending, especially when that party is content to let the White House get its way. Cole seems okay with that. “If we ultimately disagree, well, we’ll just fight it out. That’s not unusual,” he told me. “Do I have better success with this administration than the last one? Sure. Welcome to politics.”