Meet the purple-haired ‘swamp creature’ with massive sway over the federal purse strings

Democratic Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a purple-haired member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is one of the most powerful lawmakers in Washington and now a foe of Elon Musk.

DeLauro is the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, considered one of the most important committees on Capitol Hill, and she also serves on the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, among other responsibilities. As the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, she is likely to use her influence over the federal budget to resist or otherwise obstruct President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to downsize the federal government with the help of Musk, fellow billionaire businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and the rest of the incoming administration.

 

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DeLauro, who has been in Congress since 1991 and is now 81 years old, went viral Thursday for her remarks from the House floor, during which she said that Republicans killed a deal to avoid a government shutdown simply because “President Musk” told them to do so.

Musk fired back on X, formerly Twitter before he purchased it, repeatedly calling DeLauro a “swamp creature” in several posts. The Tesla CEO seemed to be poking fun at DeLauro’s purple hair and her long career in Washington, referencing both a literal swamp creature and the term used by some on the right to describe members of the near-permanent political class in D.C.

DeLauro is a noted fan of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s plans to increase the use of female crash dummies to correct for “gender inequity” in car crashes. She also publicized her intention to “resist” the Trump agenda during the president-elect’s first term in office, which she seems poised to do again with Trump’s return to the Oval Office imminent.

DeLauro made headlines in 2011 when she attracted scrutiny for being on vacation along Italy’s beautiful Amalfi Coast as Hurricane Irene pounded her home district, subsequently telling reporters that she had “no apology for taking a vacation,” according to the New Haven Register. A columnist for the Hartford Courant gave DeLauro a “F” grade for her “embarrassing” Irene response writing that “vacationing in Italy while your district is in shambles is never a good idea” and “while other members of the delegation were on the ground in Connecticut, DeLauro was AWOL.”

She and her husband, prominent pollster Stan Greenberg, also made headlines during the Obama era when it came to light that former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel previously lived rent-free in the basement of the couple’s Washington home for about five years when Emmanuel was serving in Congress, according to The Los Angeles Times. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which Emanuel helmed from 2005 to 2007, awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of polling contracts to Greenberg Carville Shrum, a political consulting firm with which Greenberg was involved.