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Sen. Josh Hawley marched through the U.S. Capitol, trailed by advocates from the St. Louis area. He stopped just outside of the entrance of the Senate chamber and turned to the press.
These Missourians, poisoned by the government’s nuclear radiation program, deserve more from Congress, Hawley intoned. They were here to speak with House Speaker Mike Johnson to push for the passage of a bill that would expand federal health benefits to nuclear radiation victims from across the country. The House had to act.
“So far what we’ve heard from them is zero,” Hawley said. “It’s just no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
The advocates went home that day empty handed. The House has yet to vote on the bill. But Hawley’s effort is indicative of his approach to lawmaking in divided government: Taking a vocal stand, drawing attention to an issue and then pressuring leadership to fall in line.
A Star analysis of Hawley’s legislative record over the course of his first term shows that the method has had mixed results when it comes to what he’s been able to accomplish for Missouri, particularly during President Joe Biden’s administration.
Hawley has seen success in moving forward parts of his ideological agenda. He has helped secure individual payments during the COVID-19 pandemic, pressed for a bill that would ban Tik-Tok , secured an audit of Kansas City’s troubled U.S. Postal Service and helped block Biden’s judicial nominees , to name a few.
But his outsider approach, whether it’s antagonizing leadership or refusing to participate in opportunities to secure direct federal funding for local projects, has often allowed some of his top legislative projects to flounder without becoming law – including an effort to directly help Missourians exposed to nuclear radiation.
“Josh works with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to get results for Missouri,” said Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for Hawley.
“Whether that’s working with Bernie Sanders to deliver direct COVID relief payments, working with Ben Ray Lujan to get the Senate to pass compensation for nuclear radiation victims, directly negotiating with the army to secure funding at Fort Leonard Wood, or partnering with a bipartisan coalition to advance the first congressional stock trading ban in the Senate, Josh gets it done.”
Hawley has claimed credit for passing six bills into law since Biden took office in 2021. Of those six, Hawley ended up voting against two of them – a ban on TikTok for government devices and a provision to increase safety regulations surrounding Duck Boats – because they were included in a larger spending package he opposed.
He has also opposed several bipartisan pieces of legislation that the Biden administration says has brought more than $3.2 billion to Missouri, including $211 million to Kansas City, and doesn’t sponsor individual projects in the state through earmarks – a process that allowed former Sen. Roy Blunt to secure more than $350 million in funding for Missouri in his final year in the Senate.
Hawley’s record has become a point of contention in his effort to win reelection in Missouri, as Democrat Lucas Kunce has argued that Hawley has been more focused on drawing attention to issues rather than bringing tangible support for the state.
“Has there ever been a Senator from Missouri who’s had this much trouble coming up with something he’s actually done for us?” Kunce said in a written statement. “Josh Hawley has secured $0 in congressionally directed spending for Missouri. That’s a fact, and facts don’t care about his feelings.”
Money for Missouri
One of the most direct ways for lawmakers to get money through their state is through what are often called earmarks.
Lawmakers will ask for federal funds for specific projects, and then try to get those projects into the annual spending bills. Blunt, Missouri’s former Senator, used this method to help secure at least $350 million for projects in the state.
But Hawley doesn’t ask for earmarks. He believes it enables corruption because people are directly asking a Senator to help get a project funded.
“Earmarking is the way the lobbyists and others get their talons into you,” Hawley said in March. “And a lot of times, what they want is they want their little pet projects funded. I think we ought to be about doing what’s good for the whole state, doing what’s good for the whole country.”
Where other Senators, like Blunt, built relationships with Kansas City area lawmakers to help fund projects in the area – Blunt and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat, became such good friends that they sometimes traveled together – Hawley tends to operate as a lone wolf.
His approach focuses on pressuring leaders of government agencies to support his favored projects. Specifically, he pushed the Secretary of the Army to increase funding for Fort Leonard Wood, a military base in central Missouri.
He wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Army asking for $91.4 million in funding for military housing at the fort. The Army appropriated around $41.4 million after pressure from Hawley.
But another $50 million was appropriated in the annual bill to authorize defense spending. While he pushed for the money to be included in that bill, Hawley voted against it and attempted to slow down its passage because it did not include an expansion of federal benefits to people exposed to nuclear radiation.
It was one of Hawley’s frequent “no” votes over the past four years of the Biden administration. He rarely supports nominees proposed by the Biden administration and has voted against long-standing bipartisan legislation, like military funding and legislation that includes provisions he has spent years pushing supporting.
Three of those bills – a law providing infrastructure funding, a law funding projects involving semiconductor chips and scientific research, and a law that invests federal funds in renewable energy projects – have brought more than $320 billion in private and public projects in Missouri, according to a database compiled by the Biden administration that appears to include funding from local and state sources.
Hawley voted against all three of those bills. He has criticized the legislation, saying it would provide funding for liberal projects he doesn’t think should be funded.
Still, Hawley has been able to attract Democratic support on some of his efforts – particularly on legislation aimed at better regulating the tech industry. He’s signed onto bills sponsored by Democrats that aim to force social media companies to limit harm to children, including online bullying.
He recently voted for those bills in the Senate. They still haven’t passed the House.
Introducing bills
Hawley has introduced 129 bills over the past six years – around 40 bills during every two-year legislative session. They range from efforts to prevent Chinese entities from owning farmland in America to requiring more oversight over weapons shipped to help Ukraine’s fight against Russia, to trying to eliminate legal protections for social media companies.
He has co-sponsored bills with hard-left politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, from Vermont, to push for individual checks during the COVID-19 pandemic and was part of a bipartisan compromise to prevent lawmakers from owning individual stocks.
“For Sen. Hawley, it seems like he’s more on the generalist track,” said Craig Volden, a political science professor at the University of Virginia who tracks the effectiveness of members of Congress.
“There are some effective generalists, but what we’ve found more than that is some degree of specialization and alignment between what’s central to your state, plus what do you have background expertise in, and what are your committee assignments, that when those are nicely aligned, senators become particularly effective.”
Under Volden’s metrics , Hawley meets the expectations for a Senator shepherding bills into law. In the most recent rankings, for the Congressional session between 2021 and 2022, Hawley was ranked as the 53rd most effective lawmaker – ahead of his Missouri colleague, former Sen. Roy Blunt.
Hawley has seen some of his legislation become law, like a bill to improve the safety of duck boats. That law came from an incident at Table Rock Lake, where a duck boat sank in 2018, killing 17 people.
But most of Hawley’s legislation has not only failed to pass the Senate, but it’s also often failed to get even a hearing.
Part of that is just how Congress works. Congress passes fewer bills than it used to, but those bills are larger and often contain provisions that aren’t directly related to the topic of the original legislation.
Hawley often votes against those large bills. For years, he had pushed for the federal government to ban TikTok. When Congress passed a version of the ban, a bill intended to force the owner of the app to sell it off, it came in a bill that sent military aid to Ukraine and Israel. Hawley voted against it.
Those large bills tend to be negotiated by the leaders of each political party – people Hawley has openly agitated against. Hawley takes bipartisan aim at leadership and has been one of the leading critics of his own party’s leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell.
“Some members are able to push the envelope,” said Casey Burgat, a political science professor at The George Washington University.
“That is their brand, that is their name, and they’re just known as agitators. And they find that when they actually want to get something across the finish line, then all of a sudden, the folks they agitated for the last year plus are no longer there, willing to support them.”
For the past two years, Hawley has led the charge in agitating for an expansion of the federal program to provide medical benefits for people exposed to the government’s nuclear projects during the Cold War – particularly people who live near the Coldwater Creek in the St. Louis area, which was contaminated by a facility that extracted uranium and radium.
He teamed up with a Democrat from New Mexico, Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, on a bill that would include people who were affected by radiation in places that weren’t covered by the original bill.
Hawley has gotten the bill through the Senate twice. He was nearly able to tuck it into a larger bill, which provided a blueprint for military funding before it was stripped out by House and Senate leaders in final negotiations.
Activists have celebrated Hawley’s emotional pleas for Congress to pass the bill. But Congress has allowed funding for the program to expire instead – in large part because Hawley has been met with resistance in the Republican controlled House.
“Lawmaking is just one feature of their job,” Burgat said. “And so being an effective oversight investigator, being an effective communicator for your party or your particular issue, being a really good and responsive constituent service representative, that’s part of their job, too.”
“So when we talk about effective, you can have a lot of different means to being effective, and almost all of them are impossible to quantify,” Burgat said.
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