House Republicans have vowed to cut spending aggressively now that President Trump is back in the Oval Office, but some have already drawn red lines on cuts they say they can’t stomach.
Republican lawmakers have ruled out trimming spending that hits their districts and worry that budget belt-tightening could hurt their reelection chances in 2026.
Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, co-chair of the House DOGE Caucus that wants to work closely with Mr. Trump’s waste-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, said Congress has to break its spending addiction.
“This is what [Americans] voted for,” he told The Washington Times. “They voted for cuts and reductions. They have said, ’Enough with the spending,’ and that’s what I’m trying to deliver. … It’s not easy, and we know the swamp will not go quietly.”
Lawmakers are looking for spending cuts to pay for extending the Trump tax cuts of 2017, which are set to expire this year. Extending the tax cuts is one of Mr. Trump’s priorities and congressional Republicans almost universally agree with that, but without offsets, it would add trillions of dollars to the deficit over the next decade.
The House Budget Committee last week floated a 50-page list of spending cuts where, cumulatively, trillions in savings could be had over 10 years. The menu includes significant overhauls to welfare, health care and education that are bound to draw objections from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Here’s a sample of the proposed cuts and the 10-year estimated budget savings:
• Eliminate the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction: $1 trillion.
• Establish Medicaid Work Requirements: $100 billion.
• SNAP Work Requirements: $5 billion.
• Cap SNAP Maximum Benefit: $2 billion.
• Eliminate Credit for Child and Dependent Care: $55 billion.
• Eliminate duplicative Social Services Block Grants: $15 billion.
• Repeal green energy tax credits: $796 billion.
• Repeal state and local tax deduction (SALT): $1 trillion
• Sell federal land: savings to be determined.
“Not every cut is created equally, and so we’re really going to be going at this with a scalpel rather than a chainsaw to make sure everything that we do is going to benefit our working class people,” Rep. John James of Michigan said. “That’s the priority.”
Montana Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, whose state has large chunks of federally-owned lands, drew a red line on selling public lands.
“It’s a no now. It will be a no later. It will be a no forever,” Mr. Zinke told The Times.
Eliminating the SALT deduction on federal income taxes would similarly elicit a wave of defections from Republicans in blue states, particularly New York’s GOP delegation, who have pushed for an increase to the cap to ease the property tax burden on their constituents.
House Speaker Mike Johnson cannot afford to lose any support to pass anything through the House in party-line votes.
The current $10,000 SALT cap was set in 2017 to pay for Mr. Trump’s tax package. An increase now would add billions to the deficit. For example, doubling the cap would increase lost revenue by $170 billion, according to a report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York said there were ways lawmakers could pay for increasing the cap, like removing glitches in the tax code or ensuring tax credits aren’t refundable.
“Why are there major profitable companies, Amazon and Nike for example, that pay single-digit taxes? That could be a pay-for,” Ms. Malliotakis said. “We could look at different things. I’ve given the [Ways and Means] committee some ideas, but that’s one big one.”
One unifying area where cuts could be found is through deregulation. Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas, who chairs the Republican Study Committee’s Budget Task Force, said that Congress needs to start looking at “regulations to clean up,” in particular redundancies throughout various government agencies that haven’t been looked at or dealt with for several years.
“We never go back and clean up those regulations, we just allow them to proliferate, which means that you’re hiring more people, you’re growing the size of government, and it’s making it much more difficult to work with,” she said.
House Republicans are working on the tax and spending cuts this week at their policy retreat at the Trump golf resort in Miami.
Rep. Eric Burlison, one of the debt hawks of the House Freedom Caucus, said the tax package would likely cost in the range of $5 trillion over a decade, and he described his colleagues’ expectation of 3% growth in revenue during that time as “optimistic.”
If that growth track proved correct, he said, it still would not be enough to make up for the cost of the tax cuts.
“That’s just a math problem, and I think that you’ve got some people that don’t want to cut any spending,” the Missouri Republican said. “Well, guess what? The reality is when our spending is inflationary spending, [and] when the American people buy a $12 value meal and they’re angry, they should be angry at all these people who refuse to cut spending.”
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.