Kay Granger, First Republican Woman From Texas in the House, Dies at 83
Granger, who served nearly three decades and chaired the House Appropriations Committee, died Sunday, her son said.
Kay Granger, the first Republican woman from Texas elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, died Sunday at the age of 83, her son J.D. Granger said. She served in Congress for nearly three decades.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a post on X that Granger "broke barriers for women in public service" throughout her career, adding that she "was a dear friend who will be greatly missed."
Granger, who began her career as a high school teacher and businesswoman, accumulated a string of firsts. She was the first woman elected mayor of Fort Worth, Texas, and the first Republican woman to chair the House Appropriations Committee, one of the most powerful panels in Congress.
First elected to the House in 1996, she did not seek reelection in 2024 and experienced worsening "health challenges" in her final months in office, according to a statement her office released in December 2024. She cast no vote in Washington after July 2024. The statement did not specify the nature of those challenges but said frequent travel to Washington had become "both difficult and unpredictable" since early September of that year.
Granger graduated from Texas Wesleyan University in 1965 and considered a career in fashion design before following her mother into teaching. She spent nine years in the Birdville school district teaching English literature and journalism, according to a profile compiled for the publication "Women in Congress, 1917-2006."
A divorce prompted a career change. To earn more money, Granger sold insurance from home while her mother, Alliene Mullendore, who moved in after a stroke, helped watch the children. She built a successful insurance business she ran for more than two decades.
"I was a high school teacher with three children, a 2-year and 6-month-old twins, and my husband left," Granger told The Hill in a 2008 profile. "It's the reason I talk so much to working mothers ... you just fight your way through the day."
Her political career began on Fort Worth's zoning commission, followed by a seat on the city council and then election as the city's first female mayor, serving from 1991 to 1995. Her "Code: Blue" programs included citizen patrols that halved a rampant crime rate and private-sector partnerships that drew major businesses to the city, work that attracted national attention.
In 1996, both parties recruited her to run for the House. She won as a Republican.
In Congress, she was named to an advisory board that consulted then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and took seats on the Budget, House Oversight, and Transportation and Infrastructure committees, which she gave up to join Appropriations. There she focused on defense spending, including championing production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in Fort Worth.
When Republicans took charge of the House in 2023, Granger became the committee's chair, where she sought steeper non-defense spending cuts than the top-line numbers Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden agreed to in order to avoid a government default.
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