The House Freedom Caucus has dominated the headlines since President Donald Trump took office in January.
The group pressured House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., with tough love to phase out green energy incentives in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, enact deeper spending cuts, and remove punitive taxes on firearms.
Ultimately, they provided the necessary votes to pass the monumental legislation alongside all but two House Republicans, drawing accusations of folding under pressure from outlets such as CNN, Punchbowl News, and Politico.
Freedom Caucus members take a different view—that they worked within the narrow Republican majority to make the conference’s goals more ambitious and deliver a more conservative product.
“I think from the very first mention of how much we were going to be able to have in terms of savings it was not near what it ended up being, and I think there were a number of members of the Freedom Caucus that helped move it in that direction,” Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., told The Daily Signal after the bill’s passage.
“Many of the cuts that we saw rolling back the Inflation Reduction Act and those credits that oftentimes came with the energy, that was the result of many folks in the Freedom Caucus that were standing up and talking about that,” he added. “You see their fingerprints all over it.”
But what’s next for this fiscally conservative, tough-on-the border band of Republicans who emerged from the tea party movement a decade ago?
Since the One Big, Beautiful Bill, they’ve continued to create some of the biggest headlines in Congress, having successfully pressured the House leadership into including a provision barring the Federal Reserve from creating a digital currency in a draft of the annual defense spending bill.
More recently, a few Freedom Caucus members have joined the push to release more information on the now-deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, Freedom Caucus Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., says the overarching fight to lower spending continues.
“The Freedom Caucus is going to fight for more conservative bills,” Norman told reporters Wednesday. “The Freedom Caucus is what drove a lot of the reductions and a lot of the recission package to the $9.4 billion and to the cuts we had, and we’ll fight for that and I don’t apologize.”
Norman sees future rescissions packages—bills by which Congress can cut unspent discretionary spending before it’s gone out the door—as a major legislative priority.
The Daily Signal asked him if he thought there was much appetite in Congress for future rescissions packages.
“Absolutely, by conservatives,” he said, noting that “$9.4 billion was a teardrop in the ocean.” He was referencing the $9.4 billion in cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid that House Freedom Caucus members helped pass in the House.
These cuts were ultimately brought down to $9 billion in the Senate.
Also coming down the pipeline is a potential follow-up to the One Big, Beautiful Bill, which has been teased by Speaker Johnson. Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., told reporters he’d like to use another budget reconciliation bill as a chance to cut waste, fraud, and abuse from Medicare.
“I would like to see some additional spending reductions and I think we can find a lot of savings with the waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare. Because look, there’s a game that’s happening and anybody that’s in the Medicare Advantage system knows that there’s some shenanigans that happen whenever the insurance companies get paid more by basically categorizing you as sicker. And we need to put some guidelines around that.”
Asked if restructuring entitlement programs could pose political issues for Republicans, Burlison argued that Republicans are seeking to eliminate waste, not benefits for rightful Medicare and Medicaid enrollees.
“I think that what we’ve demonstrated with the way in which we addressed Medicaid is we’re trying to make the system work for the people who need it and eliminate the waste, fraud, and abuse. I think that everybody should be looking to make these systems better,” he said.
There’s also the annual appropriations process, where Freedom Caucus members are hoping to enshrine big spending cuts.
Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, recently laid out his goal to The Daily Signal—making the funding bills as fiscally conservative as possible in the House and then letting the Senate work out a reasonable compromise with the Democrats whose votes are needed to pass the bills.
“The appropriations process, as you mentioned, requires 60 votes [in the Senate], which means you bring Democrats in the process,” he said. “Too often we negotiate with ourselves. We pass what we think the end product should be and we show up to that with the negotiating table and then it moves even further away. So we’re talking about what should be and then we’ll get to the negotiating table with the strongest negotiating position possible.”
With the end of the fiscal year approaching on Sept. 30, the Freedom Caucus appears keen to continue pushing conservative policies into legislation, even if it bothers the Democrats whose votes Republicans need to fund the government.
When The Daily Signal asked Harris if Republicans should ease off of rescissions packages and conservative bills so as not to endanger these negotiations, he suggested this would be a waste of the opportunities a Trump presidency provides.
“I do believe in 2024, the American people in that election voted to do government differently, and I think with the election of President Trump, with a majority in the United States Senate and a majority in the United States House, that the American people wanted to see government done in a different way. And I really do believe that that’s exactly what we’ve tried to do,” he said.
He added, “Republicans are committed to using every tool in the toolbox and giving President Trump all the tools in the toolbox to be able to move his America First Agenda forward.”
Bradley Devlin contributed to this report.