The budget framework House Republicans approved on Tuesday sets the stage for a massive number of cuts to federal programs, many of which directly help their voters. It’s a bold decision for a party whose members were already facing pushback from angry constituents at raucous town halls in safely red congressional districts. The decision to muscle through the bill — regardless of the resulting hardships — shows congressional Republicans are willing to roll the dice on their supporters’ pain not becoming a political problem for them.
It was no small feat that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., managed to get his fractious caucus to all back a single bill that smashes together most of the Trump administration’s legislative agenda.
It’s exactly the sort of punishing demolition of the social safety net that Republicans have been promising for over a decade now
The budget blueprint lays the groundwork for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, while also boosting spending on immigration enforcement and the military by $100 billion. In an entirely lopsided tradeoff, Republicans are also aiming for $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, with a major chunk coming from the $880 billion poised to be stripped from federal programs under the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s purview.
In short, it’s exactly the sort of punishing demolition of the social safety net that Republicans have been promising for over a decade now — and that has proved to be deeply unpopular among voters for the same amount of time.
During his first term, President Donald Trump sent budget after budget that would have similarly severely slashed federal spending, including deep cuts to Medicaid and nutritional assistance among other support programs. But even when the GOP controlled the House and Senate in 2017 and 2018, Congress balked at the idea of taking ownership of such draconian cuts to the federal government, even as they reduced taxes for the wealthy.
Instead, spending rose under the Republican trifecta during Trump’s first term rather than falling. As a result, even before the pandemic response, the federal deficit had grown by several trillion dollars under GOP leadership. That hesitancy to act was clearly a source of frustration among fiscal hawks who don’t really care what programs are cut if the debt and deficit go down, and the ideologues who think money spent on impoverished Americans and other liberal niceties is money wasted.
Over the last month we’ve seen what happens when Trump officials, who don’t have to run for re-election, decide to seize the reins (or chainsaw as it were) for themselves.
Between Office of Management and Budget director Russel Vought and billionaire Elon Musk (or whoever is running the Department of Government Efficiency), the Trump administration has laid waste to the federal government, even as any actual savings haven’t materialized. But despite delivering on longstanding conservative rhetoric, and the tenets of Project 2025, the chaotic slash-and-burn tactics on display from Musk aren’t resonating well even among residents living in deeply conservative areas.
Upon returning to Washington on Monday, Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., said he intended to urge Musk to be “more compassionate” when firing tens of thousands of federal workers. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., promised to get more answers for his constituents about the cuts and layoffs. But many more Republicans were nonchalant about the whole thing when asked, brushing off the confrontations as stunts from Democratic voters and leaning into their support for DOGE.
All they had to do if things went south was blame Musk and his associates for doing the right thing in the wrong way
When the funding freeze and layoffs began, it made all the sense in the world to me that most elected Republicans would be content to sit back and watch. After all, why stop someone else who’s willing to do the dirty work after years of promising the same and opting not to deliver. If they weren’t going to act to protect the power of the purse from Trump illegally withholding funds, all they had to do if things went south was blame Musk and his associates for doing the right thing in the wrong way.
But then the budget vote went through, suddenly launching that excuse off the table. Now the cuts to Medicaid and other programs that appropriators negotiate will be subject to a vote in the coming weeks. The laid-off workers in their districts who they’ve been backchanneling to have their jobs restored may not be able to hold them for long if the funding no longer exists. It is, in effect, taking co-ownership for the hardships that millions of Americans will face with little political upside to be seen.
The backlash we’ve seen has plenty of room to grow. Media Matters reports that some conservative talk radio hosts, long used to hearing only from rabid supporters, have recently had callers more than willing to vent their frustration about how the current cuts are playing out. That number would likely increase even more once tangible impacts from potential cuts to the Social Security Administration or Department of Veterans Affairs come into play.
The question then becomes whether the GOP will be forced to confront that voter displeasure before November. NBC News reported on Wednesday that House Republicans are “becoming weary and wary of in-person town hall meetings,” with leadership suggesting “that if lawmakers feel the need to hold such events, they do tele-town halls or at least vet attendees to avoid scenes that become viral clips.”
It seems that the solution to how Republicans could finally push through their most unpopular policy plans wasn’t to foist off responsibility to unaccountable bureaucrats. It’s to become unaccountable themselves, sequestering themselves from the voters they serve so as not have to see the consequences of their actions standing before them. It’s hard for me to decide which approach is the more cowardly of the two.
