Passing the Big Beautiful Bill was tough, but not as tough as what faces Republicans now: selling it. Getting Americans on board with the idea when both barrels of the Democratic Party’s guns are pointed at the president’s law is becoming a full-time job for the GOP. “The test will be time,” Senator Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) agreed. “If at the end of the day, the time makes everything work — and everything works to the positive — everything’s great,” he told The Hill. In the meantime, conservatives say, one of the smartest things congressional leaders can do is to keep moving full speed ahead with the White House’s main agenda: shaking up Washington.
“These are good structural reforms,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) argued in defense of the law’s reforms to bloated programs like Medicaid. “We’ll be playing offense on that,” he declared. Of course, the irony of leadership’s current position is that there are plenty of conservatives who argue that the landmark legislation doesn’t go far enough. And yet, this is the Goldilocks universe of “too soft” or “too hard” that Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have been forced to navigate since the party won its narrow majorities. As the Louisianan quipped to Wall Street Journal reporter Olivia Beavers last week in the heat of the Big Beautiful debate, “Welcome to Congress. It’s a disappointing job sometimes.”
Sure, Democrats will try to make the vote a painful one for Trump’s party (with claims that are either completely fabricated or nakedly political), but Republicans need to keep hammering home the truth. And more than that, they need to keep their foot on the gas where the law left off: slashing spending, overhauling the government, and getting America’s deficits down.
Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) was only the first lap in what Thune and Johnson’s members expect to be a long race against the machine that is Big Government. To those conservatives who were less than thrilled with the scale of the changes in the law, here’s the good news: there’s a lot more Congress can do — and they intend to.
Some of the law’s more reluctant supporters hinted at this in conversations after the bill crossed Thune’s finish line. Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), who’d been initially critical of the Senate’s version of the BBB, was one of many who huddled and talked strategy about what could be done. “[T]here was no way that we were going to get anything back from the Senate that would have been an improvement. It just was not going to happen.” So what did conservatives and the House Freedom Caucus do? “We went outside the bill to make some requests for things that might offset the damage that the Senate did to the bill.”
As he’s done before, Johnson thought outside the box — or, in this case, the bill. “We got some things that I can’t yet talk about [in an] agreement, and we will see how they work going forward,” Self explained, before adding, “there [will be] more cost-cutting across the federal government. We simply tried to find those areas and get agreement that we will work on those going forward.”
The final language itself was much better, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins agreed, “because the Freedom Caucus began to negotiate on these issues.” Absolutely, Self nodded. “They started out with $300 billion … in savings. What we got was a trillion and a half well above that.” That’s just some of the progress that the Freedom Caucus made “[along] with other conservatives,” Self reiterated. As Perkins pointed out, fiscal priorities weren’t the only things hashed out beyond the BBB. “Some of the social issues that were of concern that were taken out in the Senate are also going to be addressed,” he previewed. “We look forward to that coming out in the public here in the very near future to see what the administration has agreed to.”
For now, it’s full speed ahead on the other tracks of Trump’s train that can deliver major DOGE-like savings. One thing that will certainly cushion the blow for BBB skeptics is being served up as we speak. Before next Friday, July 18, another $9.4 billion will be on the chopping block in the form of the White House’s rescissions package — the first, administration officials insist, of many. The targets include everything from the leftist Corporation for Public Broadcasting to excessive and wasteful foreign aid — millions of dollars of which included wildly inappropriate LGBT activism.
“A vote for rescissions is a vote to show that the United States Senate is serious about getting our fiscal house in order,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought told lawmakers in his testimony last month. Although some liberal Republicans are threatening to upset Trump’s apple cart — Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) personally tanked a similar request in his first term — Thune knows that finding the 51 votes is a must to prove his chamber is serious about cuts.
“After all the tough talk by Republicans in the Senate about the need to reduce spending, if we can’t agree to reduce $9 billion worth of spending porn, then we all ought to go buy paper bags and put them over our heads,” Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) argued in his folksy, made-for-TV soundbite way.
And that’s not the only way Trump is hoping to prove his sincerity on shrinking government. A new report on the White House payroll credits the president with the lowest salaries in 16 years. According to Open The Books, the total for 404 employees in 2025 adds up to $44.1 million in taxpayer dollars — “the lowest it’s been since at least 2009 when adjusted for inflation.” That’s a 29% drop from Biden’s $62.2 million staff, which had almost double the lawyers (45 to Trump’s 27).
Of course, the best bite out of the country’s ballooning debt would be through appropriations — the process Trump quietly seems intent on bypassing. Still, as recently as last month, Johnson was ready to pivot immediately from the BBB to the string of 12 spending bills for the next fiscal year. “The appropriators will be marking up some of the legislation in the subcommittees to try to line all that up,” he reiterated to Perkins on an earlier version of “This Week on Capitol Hill.” “And you’re going to see, again, a reflection of even more savings in appropriations for the next fiscal year. We’ve got a lot on our plate this summer.”
That’s an understatement. There are just 22 legislative days on the House’s calendar until the next batch of government funding runs out on September 30. Because of the August recess, Republicans will have four fewer weeks to negotiate some of the trickiest debates across the 12 agency budgets. As Politico points out, the speaker’s chamber has made “some progress” with its appropriations work, passing one bill and advancing four out of committee. Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) was hoping to complete the dozen markups by July 30. “We’re a little behind the eight ball on it,” Johnson acknowledged, “because [we spent] so much effort [on] the big, beautiful bill. But now we turn our attention immediately to that.”
It’s through the regular appropriations process where gigantic, across-the-board savings could actually be accomplished for every pocket of government. Unfortunately, that usually takes months of talks, combing through numbers, and ironing out possible landmines. Months that this party doesn’t have.
“It takes a long time to reach consensus and equilibrium on all the various competing ideas and priorities that people have,” the speaker told Perkins. “Which is why the regular order, regular process is so important. You have to let everybody have a say so they’ll be with you on the vote at the end. And that’s kind of the grueling process of every day in a deliberative body.” Still, he vowed, the House “is going to get it done and get it to the president’s desk as well. We’re going to spend less money. We’re in a series of scaling back government. This is a big part of it.”
But there are those who wonder if even Johnson, who’s managed to leap every impossible obstacle, can beat the clock. At this point, the Senate hasn’t passed a single funding bill of the 12. And if, as Punchbowl News wonders, the speaker can wrangle his side of the Capitol to approve a short-term continuing resolution to buy more time, his counterpart will need at least seven Democrats’ help to hit the Senate’s magic 60-vote threshold. Judging by the volcanic rhetoric on the other side, the odds of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) party bailing out the GOP at this point are probably zero — leaving Republicans in a serious jam.
As Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan remind everyone, “If Congress is good at anything, it’s taking things to the brink…” And yet, with Johnson at the helm, anything could happen. “You continue to defy the critics who say you can’t get it done,” Perkins pointed out. “You’re getting it done. And I think you can get the budget process back to where it needs to be and make government accountable to the American people.”
AUTHOR
Suzanne Bowdey
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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Author: Family Research Council
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