Ron Johnson says Trump’s pressure on the budget bill will be “completely counterproductive”
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Exclusive – One of President Donald Trump’s main opponents of the Big and Beautiful Act declared that even the commander-in-chief had not been able to stop him from opposing what he believed was a bill that Republicans were targeting to cut government waste.
R-Wis. Senator Ron Johnson told Fox News Digital that Trump attempted to swing him in current legislation.
Johnson has become an important voice against the House Republican Party’s budget reconciliation process. Senate Republicans finally began the tedious process of analyzing the bill this week.
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Senator Ron Johnson said even President Trump could not sway him on the “big and beautiful Bill.” (Getty Image)
Members of the House of Lords (including Johnson) are determined to make changes to the bill, and most people want to reduce Medicaid and food stamps to be more delicious. Trump has made it clear that his bill must be passed, but acknowledged that some changes will be needed in the Senate.
Trump’s direction is to propose a bill that can make up a razor majority in both chambers.
However, Johnson wants to see spending return to pandemic levels, cutting trillions of dollars deeper than Republicans have endured. Unless he sees the changes he wants, he is ready to object to the bill.
He believes the president’s pressure on him and other like-minded Fiscal Eagles will fail.
A better approach, he said, is to work with lawmakers like him and the Finance Hawks to better understand the reality of the country’s fiscal situation, which is a “grizzy” reality.
Ron Johnson proposes “line-by-line” cuts to pass Trump’s “big and beautiful bill”
R-Wis. Senator Ron Johnson spoke with reporters at the U.S. Capitol after passing the A Large Beauty Act on May 22, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc, via Getty Images)
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Johnson has been disdainful of his scruples of the bill, but has so far avoided Trump’s public retribution. In fact, two speeches were made this week at the Senate Finance Committee meeting held at the White House on Monday.
The lawmaker told Trump that he is in Trump’s corner that he wants to “see you succeed”, but he has been unwavering because the bill is not enough to address state debt.
Debt continues to climb to nearly $37 trillion, according to Fox News’ national debt tracker.
House products set their spending cuts at $1.5 trillion in the next decade, with lawmakers at lower chambers taking a positive step to correct the country’s fiscal ship, a devotee of Johnson, who suffered huge losses as Republicans lowered their promise to cut down on the government.
“What’s disappointing about what’s going on in the house is all the rhetoric. It’s all the slogan,” Johnson said. “They chose a number. Literally, they picked a number from the air.”
Republican senators expressed “concern” and “suspicion of Trump’s spending bill.”
Johnson regards this attempt as a rare opportunity in the budget settlement process to “do hard things” in spending cuts, but others in the Republican Party are even more hesitant to cut them.
Johnson said the main reason Republicans have not reached this moment in most cases is that lawmakers don’t understand how much the federal government has pushed it out year by year.
The MP debated about another year later about the Comprehensive Spending Act about three years ago, when each of the dozen appropriation bills was squeezed into a swollen package that was widely condemned and almost always passed.
He asked his colleagues if they really knew how much the government spent and no one “voluntarily answered”.
“No one knows it. I mean, think of it. The world’s biggest financiers. In theory, we are 535 board members, no one knows it.” “Why are they? We’ve never talked about it.”
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Johnson has been busy better educating his colleagues, putting his own charts and charts together to cut “noise,” just like the latest nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report, which found that the legislation would add $2.4 trillion to national debt over a decade. The Republican Party has generally invested in this projection.
“We can’t accept that this is a new normal,” Johnson said. “We can’t accept that – you can’t pot shots on CBOs, but you can’t deny that reality. [It] It may be a bit out of place, but this is the trajectory, which is undeniable. ”
