The House Freedom Caucus is known for using disruptive legislative tactics to shift policy rightward, but the group’s reputation has come under attack this year.
Members of the hardline conservative group told The Washington Times they’re still “winning” and achieving their policy aims, despite suggestions they’ve folded on key demands.
“We push it as far as we can, and then we get the Trump agenda through,” said Rep. Keith Self, Texas Republican. “Because we’re going to vote for the Trump agenda, but we want the Trump agenda to be as good as it can be.”
Twice this summer, members of the hardline conservative group had publicly threatened to block legislation that was a House vote away from President Trump’s desk and becoming law as they sought further changes.
In the end, the Freedom Caucus allowed a watered-down Senate version of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” carrying the bulk of the Trump agenda and a Senate-passed cryptocurrency bill to clear the House without their demands being addressed in the legislation.
Those decisions prompted ridicule that the Freedom Caucus folded.
“They put up a big fight and send out a bunch of fundraising emails on it and then end up folding and getting nothing. So I don’t think that accomplishes anything,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican and a former Freedom Caucus member.
Freedom Caucus members tell a different story of how they negotiated deals with the Trump administration and GOP congressional leaders to achieve their goals through other means.
“If winning is folding, we’ll fold every time,” Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, Maryland Republican, said in an interview.
Mr. Harris was among a few vocal Freedom Caucus members who had broadcast threats to vote “no” on the Senate-altered version of the bill. They were angry that the Senate scaled back provisions to phase out clean-energy tax credits and made other changes that added to the bill’s deficit impact.
A few of the holdouts held up a procedural vote on the package as they negotiated with Trump administration officials to secure a series of executive actions that would help achieve their aims without requiring further negotiation with the Senate.
“The feeling was that if it went back to the Senate, it would come back even worse,” Mr. Harris said. “That’s probably not a risk worth taking.”
Three days after Mr. Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, he issued an executive order authorizing the Treasury secretary to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits” for wind and solar facilities.
Senate changes extended the timeline for phasing out the credits, allowing wind and solar projects to qualify if they begin construction within a year of the law’s enactment.
Mr. Trump’s executive order called for Treasury and the IRS to ensure that the mandate is not circumvented by “restricting the use of broad safe harbors unless a substantial portion of a subject facility has been built.”
The IRS issued guidance on Aug. 15 that ends a previous “safe harbor” allowing investors to claim they’ve begun construction if they’ve incurred at least 5% of the total cost of the project, and enforces a requirement for physical work to have started.
“This action — along with subsequent measures by the Departments of Treasury and Interior — executes a key part of the negotiations between Members of the House Freedom Caucus to build on the successful repeal of the Green New Scam in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, fulfilling a core promise of the 2024 campaign,” the Freedom Caucus wrote in a celebratory social media post.
Mr. Self said there were “seven total” executive orders the Freedom Caucus negotiated, most of which have yet to be made public. He and Mr. Harris declined to preview those, saying they agreed to let the administration roll them out on its own schedule.
“I believe that most of them will come to pass, and there will be a lot of additional spending reductions on executive action,” Mr. Harris said, estimating they could save hundreds of billions beyond the $1.6 trillion in spending cuts enacted in the “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
That brings the spending-cut total near the $2 trillion mark that the Freedom Caucus initially sought, and gives the group members confidence that when economic growth is factored in, the law won’t add to the deficit.
“I remember going on the [Republican] retreat at the beginning of the term, and we were looking at around $300 billion in proposals of actual cuts and spending. And that just was not acceptable,” said Rep. Mark Harris, North Carolina Republican.
In the months that followed that January retreat, he said, the Freedom Caucus not only helped push that number upward but secured long-sought conservative policies like work requirements for Medicaid, a provision barring Medicaid dollars from going to Planned Parenthood and repeal of taxes on firearm suppressors and short-barreled rifles.
“When you look at the Big, Beautiful Bill, you see the House Freedom Caucus fingerprints all over it,” the North Carolinian said.
Mr. Harris of Maryland said another, lesser-known victory the Freedom Caucus secured in its last-minute negotiations over the package was a commitment from Speaker Mike Johnson to hold a House floor vote later this year on a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget.
Amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate, so Freedom Caucus members are under no illusion that the measure would actually pass. But they feel it’s an important symbolic vote, given Mr. Trump’s calls to balance the budget.
“This is part of the Trump agenda,” Mr. Self said. “We just need to take the temperature of the Republican Conference to see just how committed we are.”
One of the most outspoken members of the caucus on holding down spending, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, announced in mid-August that he is running for Texas attorney general instead of seeking reelection to the House in 2026. Several other caucus members have decided to run for governor in their states or for the Senate.
After Congress enacted the “Big, Beautiful Bill” in early July, the House turned its attention to three cryptocurrency bills, including a Senate-passed bill called the GENIUS Act that establishes the first regulatory framework for stablecoins, a cryptocurrency designed to maintain value with the U.S. dollar.
The Freedom Caucus did not want the House to clear the GENIUS Act to become law because members feared the regulatory framework creates “a back door to a central bank digital currency,” Mr. Self said.
“That means that the federal government would have transparency into your finances,” he said. “China uses it. They’ve got a social credit score. They actually look at what you post online, what you say.”
One of the other cryptocurrency bills the House was taking up that week was a measure to prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or any similar digital asset.
The Freedom Caucus sought to amend that bill into the GENIUS Act, or tie all three cryptocurrency bills together to make the Senate vote on them as a package to ensure the anti-CBDC language would become law.
To force a negotiation, nine members of the Freedom Caucus voted to block a rule needed to bring the cryptocurrency bills to the floor. Their action led to an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump.
Ultimately, they agreed to a compromise: The anti-CBDC measure would be added to the annual defense authorization bill, because it’s must-pass legislation that has been signed into law for 60 straight years.
The House and Senate are scheduled to vote on their initial versions of the defense bill in September.
The Freedom Caucus’ negotiations over the “Big, Beautiful Bill” and the cryptocurrency measures showed the group as more flexible than it has been in the past, which prompted much of the criticism that they folded under pressure from Mr. Trump.
Mr. Harris of Maryland said those critics are comparing different dynamics. The Freedom Caucus had much more room to play hardball when Republicans were in the minority or had a larger majority during Mr. Trump’s first term.
And Mr. Harris of North Carolina, who is new to Congress and the Freedom Caucus, said he never viewed the group as obstructionists. He joined because he felt they would work to get the most conservative results possible.
“These were people that were very serious about fulfilling the promises that they ran on, the commitments they made to the people back home,” the freshman lawmaker said.
Since the Freedom Caucus’ founding in 2015, the group has remained united in its goal to push legislation further to the right. But only a minority of its members have engaged in the hardball tactics like blocking bills from coming to the floor, which the chairman said is partly for strategic reasons.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, Virginia Republican, said he has “a different style of trying to get things done,” but he is “very proud” of his Freedom Caucus colleagues who’ve used their leverage to secure conservative victories for the American people.
“They go in and negotiate hard,” he said. “They win some, they lose some, but they’ve got a pretty good record.”
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.