Johnson promises Hawks huge safety-net cuts next time

From the point of view of Republican “fiscal hawks,” the White House and the GOP congressional leadership have never been especially trustworthy when it comes to cutting the social spending they all allegedly deplore. After all, there was no big budget-cutting extravaganza during Trump’s first term after the GOP’s effort to kill Obamacare died. Fiscal hawks cheered the ham-handed and largely illegal DOGE effort to demolish the “deep state” and its beneficiaries at the very beginning of Trump’s second term but then that went away.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted in mid-2025 did include lots of thrilling cuts in funding for Medicaid and SNAP and did not include any of those wasteful Obamacare subsidy payments that Democrats and RINOS demanded — so that was good. But that budget-reconciliation bill was supposed to be just an appetizer. Pressure mounted in early 2026 for a second reconciliation bill that would shred the safety net some more with Trump wingman J.D. Vance riding herd on an alleged epidemic of “fraud.” But wouldn’t you know it: Reconciliation 2.0 had to be “skinny” to give the finger to ICE protesters by pre-funding immigration enforcement until the end of the Trump administration with none of those pesky woke “guardrails.”

So the assault on the safety net had to be postponed to Reconciliation 3.0. Fiscal hawks were promised that bill would come this summer, despite RINO misgivings about the negative impact on the midterm elections. Indeed, prospects for big social-spending cuts rose when Trump launched his war of choice against Iran, racking up costs that needed to be offset elsewhere in the budget.

Now the budget resolution necessary to set up the third reconciliation bill is ready for action on the House floor. And guess what? There are no cuts at all! It’s another “skinny” bill that makes a down payment on Iran war costs, dumps some money on restive farmers, and, most important of all, sets up a slush fund to encourage states to adopt proof-of-citizenship requirements and other obstacles to voting. The president would prefer to impose these measures on the country via his toxic SAVE America Act, but that’s stuck in the Senate.

Understandably, House fiscal hawks are threatening to vote against this budget resolution until Speaker Mike Johnson agrees to include some vicious social-services cuts like he promised. So Johnson and OMB director Russell Vought are now holding out the prospect of a fourth reconciliation bill after the midterms, which would include the bloodletting everyone so badly wants. Politico reports:

Speaker Mike Johnson and White House budget chief Russ Vought tried to rally House Republicans on Tuesday morning around passing a party-line package containing the administration’s $95 billion supplemental funding request for the Iran war and farm aid — by promising members they’d get another chance to pass a more sweeping partisan policy bill after the midterms …

Johnson and Vought told House Republicans at the closed-door conference meeting Tuesday morning that the vote on the budget resolution Wednesday was simply a first step, according to four people inside the room.

Vought also argued the political realities in the Senate shaped the package the White House and House GOP leaders are currently pushing.

Presumably delaying the day of reckoning for the despised New Deal and Great Society programs until after the midterms will quiet the swing-district RINOs whining that unpopular spending cuts would endanger their campaigns. But you have to figure that by now the target audience for this mañana pitch is feeling a bit suckered. At this point, however, killing the budget resolution and forcing a return to the less-skinny idea of a budget-cutting third reconciliation bill might not only endanger Pentagon spending but interfere with Johnson’s efforts to placate Trump’s increasingly frantic demands for something like the SAVE America Act. If Reconciliation 3.0 is forced into a ditch, the whole congressional session could crater just before voters head to the polls, which would not be a good look.

Is a lame-duck budget-cutting Reconciliation 4.0 a realistic prospect? Probably not. If Republicans beat the odds and maintain control of both the House and Senate in November, they’ll have another two whole years of a trifecta majority, which will make possible lots of additional reconciliation bills. So why hurry? If they lose the trifecta, however, sneaking through unpopular legislation during a lame-duck session won’t get the GOP off to a very good start toward what will be a truly apocalyptic 2028 election.

The reality is that most Republicans understand that their budget-cutting agenda is never going to be popular and can only be swallowed in combination with tasty tax-cut treats, like those in the OBBBA. So the OBBBA represented about all the budget-cutting the political market can bear before a high-stakes election. Any real assault on the “welfare state” is going to require a lot more political capital than the Republicans and their unpopular president possess. So it will continue to be part of an agenda that’s just on the horizon.