Sen. Johnson to Newsmax: House 'Botched' Budget Proposal

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Wednesday that Republicans should focus on lowering spending to "pre-pandemic levels" and said the House Budget Committee "botched" its proposal to cut spending.

The committee this month released a fiscal blueprint for GOP budget legislation that would raise the debt limit by $4 trillion, includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and a $300 billion increase in border and defense funding, and would cut spending by $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

"If we would have taken a multi-step approach, President [Donald] Trump already would have his border funding, we probably would have plussed-up defense, we could have just extended the current tax code and taken an automatic tax cut or tax increase scheduled for 2026 off the table," Johnson said on "Wake Up America." "Then we could start working on what's going to be a very difficult bill to put together.

"The big, beautiful bill is also a really big complex one, so I'm not sure that's still going to be possible."

Johnson said he will suggest to Trump that he "change course and embrace … a three-step process there."

Johnson went on to say that the budget proposed by the House "is way too high. We have to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic baseline of spending, I've presented a number of options, Lindsey Graham, our budget chair, picked one of my options using President Trump's own budget for 2025."

Johnson said his proposals would place the budget "between $5.5 and $6.5 trillion compared to the $7.3 trillion of spending today. And by the way, you can achieve those numbers without touching Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid."

He continued: "You could hit $6.5 trillion by … excluding those programs from just taking 2019 spending, increasing it based on population growth, inflation, that puts you at $6.5 trillion. That saves $700 billion a year, $7 trillion. And the House budget resolution is only calling for $1.5 trillion over 10 years, so it's completely inadequate."

Johnson said the House "just completely botched that. I hate to say it, but they completely botched that. I think we need to rethink this."

He said that while meeting with Trump his month, the president "loved the concept of returning to a pre-pandemic baseline, using his his total outlays from 2019 and literally bringing spending down by at least $70 billion. Why don't we embrace that? So that that's where we're kind of digging our heels in the Senate from that standpoint. But we'll see what the president and Speaker [Mike] Johnson do in response to our digging our heels in."

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