Tag Archive for: federal budget

House Racks Up Dramatic Wins before Recess while Senate Works to Catch Up

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It wasn’t easy, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) managed to go three-for-three on some of the heaviest lifts the House GOP has faced this year: the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the framework for reconciliation 3.0, and a short-term government funding bill. In just 48 hours, the Louisianan ran the table on bills that the media had written off as impossible. But, as Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) pointed out, “House Republicans, we almost always get our work done,” even, he added, if it isn’t always a “pretty journey.”

The trio of proposals adds to the mountain of business piling up in Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) Senate, where he’s trying to game out which pieces of the House’s legislation he’ll actually pursue and which he’ll either punt or switch out for his own chamber’s version. All the while, the president sits impatiently, wondering whether his agenda items will actually make it out of Congress alive. “It’s like the Senate is a place that you send things when you want them to die,” Donald Trump told reporters.

While the House and Senate leaders seem to have a good working relationship, there’s no mistaking the tension over the two chambers’ gameplans. Right now, most observers point out, “Johnson and Thune seem to be on completely different planets.” And while the Senate is in session a week longer than the House, it still might not be enough to tie up what are turning out to be very critical loose ends.

Stopping a Government Shutdown

To foil the Democrats’ plans to shut down the government before the elections, Johnson managed to muscle through a continuing resolution that would keep the agencies funded through December 4 — well after the midterms. Six Democrats and Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.) joined the GOP in pushing the bill across the finish line (220-205). “This clean, short-term [CR] simply keeps the government open, protects the progress we’ve made, and preserves the path to full-year appropriations,” Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) explained on the floor.

His budget counterpart in the Senate, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — the successor to the late Lindsey Graham — has no illusions about the lengths the Democrats will go to score political points. “They’ve completely blown up the appropriations process,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” this week. “I think by and large, most of them are spoiling for a shutdown, thinking that would give them an advantage in the election.” But he’s also heard that there might be enough support from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) caucus to pass a relatively clean CR in the hopes that Democrats take over the House and can press for big spending.

Regardless, he shook his head, “I definitely question their motives. It’s certainly not to be helpful, certainly not to be for the benefit of the American public. It’s for their own personal political power and for growing government. But it’s just possible we might get a CR because of those motivations.”

Whose CR is the better question. On Tuesday, Thune seemed to ignore the House version, opting instead to try to strike his own deal with Democrats, since he’ll need at least seven to reach the 60-vote threshold. “That is something I intend to bring to the floor for a vote before the August break,” he vowed.

The speaker seemed to give his partner latitude, telling reporters Wednesday, “I think Leader Thune believes he’ll have some reasonable Democrats in the Senate that will assist. I certainly hope that’s true and hopefully that’ll spark some in the House as well. So I think we’ll get it done.” If not, Thune has threatened to use budget reconciliation to force the government’s funding extension through on a simple majority vote.

At the end of the day, Senator Johnson wanted people to know, “Democrats are all about power. And to the extent that they can create chaos, [they will].”

Moving on Reconciliation 3.0

Speaking of reconciliation, despite a lot of hemming and hawing, House Republicans ultimately bowed to Trump’s wishes and agreed to unlock the process to a third reconciliation bill Wednesday — overcoming a lot of conservatives’ objections in the process. The budget resolution, which was an iffy prospect at best last week, squeaked through with two votes to spare after a group of hardline GOPers flipped to “yes” at the last minute.

The House’s latest gambit partially fulfills Trump’s wishes for more defense funding to fight Iran, agreeing to another $73 billion for the Pentagon, $12 billion in farm aid, and $10 billion to implement parts of the SAVE America Act. To help secure elections, Johnson’s plan would create a pot of money for states that agree to mandate voter ID and proof of citizenship at the polls.

Reflecting on the dim prospects for reconciliation earlier in the week, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) admitted that “part of what happens with these legislative journeys is at the beginning, everybody is comparing the proposal to perfect, what they want. As the week moves on, people generally understand that they need to be comparing the proposal with some other realistic option, and that perfect is never going to happen around here,” he said. “As that happens, people across the spectrum in the House understand that what’s been proposed isn’t that bad. That’s why we’ve generally won votes Wednesday, Thursday, Friday that looked pretty bleak on a Monday or a Tuesday.”

But the journey is far from over. The Senate GOP isn’t exactly chomping at the bit to launch the fraught process. Thune has already managed expectations, insisting that he won’t move the House’s blueprint until the government funding problem is solved. “That means reconciliation won’t move in the Senate anytime soon — and passing a bipartisan stopgap spending bill could still take weeks or months of additional work,” Punchbowl News cautioned.

“I think [Thune’s] looking at all contingencies,” the speaker agreed. “…[W]e’ll coordinate on strategy, but I think there’s a lot of game to be played between now and then, so we’ll see what happens.”

Part of the hesitation on the Senate’s part has to be the terrifying prospect of a vote-a-rama right before the midterm elections. As part of reconciliation, Democrats can force an unlimited number of amendment votes on any issue they want — forcing vulnerable Republicans to take positions on a number of politically dicey issues like the Iran war, for example. And, Punchbowl adds, with the narrow margins, “it’s naïve to believe that Senate GOP leaders would be able to defeat all of them.”

Look, Ron Johnson acknowledged to Perkins, “It’s never an easy task, reconciliation. I think this one will be made easier because President Trump and the White House are really taking a leading role here. It’s a more modest; it’s a skinnier version of what a lot of people want. … Everybody’s got their own ideas in terms of what they want to do in a third reconciliation package. So this one’s going to be focused on military spending. What can we do to help farmers? And what can we do to restore integrity to our elections? Those are things that most Republicans agree on,” he noted.

Yet, they’re also, Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) observed, not exactly Schumer’s priorities. “Money for the military, and money for the farmers, and a fair chance of passing the SAVE Act — you’re not going to get it in regular order,” he argued. “And if you think otherwise, you’re entitled to your opinion, but I’ve got rocks in my driveway that are smarter.”

Another reason why Thune might hold his fire on reconciliation is that he could very well end up needing that tool to keep the government’s lights on. “I hope that’s not necessary,” he said. “We’ve had conversations, productive conversations, on both sides of the aisle on a funding resolution that would carry us past the November election.” But if not, having another reconciliation bill in his back pocket may be the only way to get the agencies the dollars they need.

Defunding Planned Parenthood

One of the major grudges pro-lifers continue to hold against Congress is its refusal to carry over the defunding of America’s biggest abortion business into a second year. After Republicans accomplished that long-awaited dream in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, stripping more than $800 million from Planned Parenthood in 2024, some corners of the party have abruptly walked away from that fight in the second and third reconciliation bills — to the dismay of grassroots conservatives. Making that sting even more, the floodgates reopened July 4, the same day America celebrated its 250th birthday.

The speaker hasn’t abandoned the idea, though, telling pro-life groups that a fourth reconciliation bill might be in play to rectify this wrong. Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) echoed that thought, insisting that reconciliation 4.0 can “do the things that are left out of this one.” Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) agreed.

The fact that it’s not a part of the current budget framework is “concerning,” Rep. Mark Harris (R-N.C.) told Perkins earlier this week. “And we’re certainly continuing to add our voice to the fact that we’ve got to do something here. I was in a meeting with the speaker just yesterday, and I do believe that he is working with a number of pro-life groups [on] that and really moving strategically as we get into the fall,” he noted. There are also things on the table “that we possibly can do that would almost change the landscape of the way Planned Parenthood is viewed,” the former pastor said without revealing details.

In the meantime, Harris stressed, “This has got to happen. The fact that we passed out of the House a one-year ban in the One Big Beautiful Bill, it got to the Senate, they cut it back to one year, and that just expired on July 4th” should mean Congress can do it again, he said. “It is at the top of our list. We’re continuing to push toward that.”

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. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. Senate Passes $70 Billion in New Funds for ICE, Border Patrol

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. Senate handed President Donald Trump a victory early Friday morning, passing a bill that would provide the Department of Homeland Security with an additional $70 billion for immigration enforcement and sending it to the House of Representatives for final consideration.

The Senate voted 52-47 to approve the legislation, with no support from Democrats and no provision to ban a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that could compensate Trump’s political allies for allegations that the government mistreated them. One Republican voted against the bill.

Senate Republican Leader John Thune said the fund was a “settled issue”, citing acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s congressional testimony that the Department of Justice would not move forward with it, though Democrats have said his word was insufficient. Trump has nominated Blanche to permanently lead the Justice Department.

“I find it very hard to believe that they’re going to submit somebody who sat in front of a committee in the House and made definitive statements about this and then somehow all of a sudden turn around and go back on them,” Thune told reporters. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Extra Money for Deportation Crackdown

Republicans have accused Democrats of “defunding” Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, despite the agencies having a combined $100 billion in unspent funds that were part of a larger DHS spending package enacted last year by Republicans, who control Congress.

The House is not expected to take up the measure before next week.

Much of Thursday’s long debate over the ICE funding bill was overshadowed by efforts from Democrats, and some Republicans, to insert language unrelated to immigration. Those proposals revolved around prohibiting the use of federal funds and even private donations for building the lavish, 90,000 square-foot ballroom on White House grounds that Trump wants.

Senators also debated provisions making it illegal for federal dollars to be used for the “anti-weaponization” fund. None of those amendments were approved.

The funding provided by the bill would help pay for Trump’s controversial migrant deportation crackdown over the next three years.

Lawmakers began voting on amendments to the immigration bill in a “vote-a-rama” session early on Thursday that culminated in the vote on the underlying measure in the early hours of Friday.

An initial move by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to kill the “anti-weaponization” fund, which Democrats call a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies, brought the session to a largely procedural halt for hours after Republican Senator Susan Collins voted for the motion. She was later joined by fellow Republicans Jon Husted and Dan Sullivan.

Schumer’s measure failed in a 50-49 vote but exposed the political turmoil among rank-and-file Senate Republicans. Some of them sought their own amendments to eliminate the fund permanently, five months before the November midterm elections.

Collins, Husted and Sullivan all face competitive races for reelection at a time when Trump’s approval rating is down, even among Republicans.

“Republicans refused to permanently outlaw Trump’s $2 billion slush fund, leaving taxpayers to rely on nothing more than a promise from Donald Trump’s personal fixer,” Schumer said in a statement after the final vote, referring to Blanche.

The fund has already been put on hold by the White House and Justice Department.

But on Wednesday, Trump declined to say whether it had actually been terminated, telling reporters: “I love it. I think it’s so important.”

Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who opposed Schumer’s motion, told reporters he would not support passage of the funding bill without a Republican amendment vote to codify Blanche’s congressional testimony Tillis argued that failing to do so would place a burden on congressional Republicans up for re-election in November who are worried about a voter backlash to the fund.

Opponents Call Trump Fund ‘Immediate and Dire Threat’

Nearly all of the immigration bill’s funding would go to DHS’s ICE and Border Patrol agencies that are carrying out the Trump administration’s vigorous deportations throughout the United States.

Tillis later offered his own amendment to reallocate the controversial Trump fund’s resources to fraud-enforcement operations. It failed in an 84-15 vote, while garnering support from 12 Republicans.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who proposed his own amendment to end the fund, joined Democratic Senator Cory Booker in a friend-of-the-court brief urging U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema to maintain the block on Trump’s fund that she imposed last week.

They argued the fund “presents an immediate and dire threat to our constitutional order and the authority of Congress.”

A number of recent actions by Trump have prompted open criticism from some Republicans, from seeking $1 billion in taxpayer funding for a White House ballroom and security upgrades to his decision to nominate Blanche as attorney general and name political ally Bill Pulte as U.S. intelligence chief.

(Reporting by David Morgan, Richard Cowan and Nolan D. McCaskill, editing by Deepa Babington, Michael Learmonth, Cynthia Osterman, William Mallard and Alex Richardson)

AUTHOR

Reuters

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

New Analysis Cites 4 Ways CBO’s Budget Baseline Always Favors Increased Federal Spending

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Four key assumptions in the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analytical tool for projecting federal spending and revenue trends heavily distort its results in favor of continually increasing outlays and expanding government regulation, according to a new Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) analysis.

“The CBO baseline is important because it is used as the official benchmark against which legislative proposals are scored. The biases in the baseline allow the true costs of legislation to stay hidden from the public and members of Congress,” according to EPIC’s director of Budget Policy. Dickerson’s analysis was first delivered as part of the R Street Institute’s recent Virtual Federal Budget Reform Forum: Recommendations for Congress.

Dickerson points to four flaws in the baseline, three of which, in effect, make projected spending look much higher than it could otherwise be, and one of which makes tax revenues coming into the U.S. Treasury Department appear to be bigger than they actually are if Congress makes no changes in outlays or current law. The four flaws, according to Dickerson, include:

  • Discretionary appropriations are assumed to continue and grow with inflation each year. The result is a spending level authorized for one year for a specific program or agency which is assumed by CBO to continue throughout the 10-year period covered by the baseline.
  • Certain direct spending programs larger than $50 million are assumed to be extended beyond their statutory expiration. This means a program with an annual budget greater than $50 million is assumed by CBO to go on indefinitely until Congress acts to the contrary.
  • Entitlement programs are assumed to make all scheduled benefit payments, even if a program’s trust fundand financing are inadequate to do so. This means a program like Social Security and Medicare, which depend in great part upon trust funds — taxes paid into the system by employers, workers, and the self-employed — will continue paying full benefits using general revenues.
  • Excise taxes dedicated to a trust fund are assumed to be continued beyond their statutory expiration. Under current law, the federal government receives between $75 and $100 billion annually from excise levies on alcohol, gasoline, and tobacco products.

Together, the resulting bias “hides tens of trillions of dollars in spending in the baseline,” Dickerson contends. For example, of the $85 trillion in total spending the baseline projected for the 2025-2034 period, nearly 30%, or $25.5 trillion, is made up of spending not specifically authorized by Congress.

The EPIC analysis comes as Congress and Trump confront the reality that federal spending has increased more than 80% since 2015, zooming up from $5.01 trillion that year to $7.01 trillion in 2025. Entitlement spending on programs like Social Security and emergency spending related to the COVID-19 pandemic were the major drivers of the explosion in outlays.

The four flaws are included in CBO’s baseline budget tool due to requirements included in the 1985 Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control that was adopted in the first year of the second term of then-President Ronald Reagan. Legislation introduced in the 118th Congress by Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) — the No Bias in the Baseline Act — would eliminate all four of the flaws. The Virginia Republican is a member of the House Budget Committee.

Being in the center of controversy is a familiar position for CBO staffers. Most recently, House Republicans harshly criticized what they view as CBO’s chronically low projections of the positive economic impact of tax, regulation, and spending cuts at the federal level.

In its Concurrent Resolution on the 2025 Budget, for example, House Republicans noted one of the flaws pointed out by the EPIC analysis, noting that CBO “is obligated to produce an economic forecast that assumes an indefinite extension of current law, including the explosion of deficit and debt levels over the next decade. This is partly why CBO is forecasting average real Gross Domestic Policy (GDP) growth of just 2.0 percent over the next 10 years, well below the long-term trend of 3.1 percent in the United States.”

Similarly, in May 2025, when CBO released two analyses requested by House Democrats evaluating aspects of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) issued a sharply worded refutation.

“This is a smoke and mirrors tactic to try to deceive the American people into thinking that the One Big Beautiful Bill will benefit the top 10 percent at the expense of the bottom 10 percent. Ironically, the only thing Democrats are proving is that our policies are a massive success,” Arrington said.

“First, they’re not measuring economic benefits to low-income earners; they’re measuring federal resources distributed. For instance, there are fewer transfer payments to people on welfare if you prohibit illegal immigrants from accessing these programs and enact common sense work requirements to stop trapping people in dependence,” he continued.

“Second, when you allow Americans from every walk of life to keep more of their income, you lift millions out of poverty, just as we witnessed in President Trump’s first term. Democrats measure success by how many people are stuck on the welfare rolls; Republicans measure success by how many Americans are lifted off of them,” Arrington explained.

And Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who is also the number three ranking GOP member of the Senate Budget Committee, told the Senate in an April 2025 floor speech during debate on the OBBB that CBO’s baseline budget analysis incorrectly evaluates tax policies.

“There’s an inherent bias in Congress’s scoring process where tax policy is treated differently than spending policy. If tax rates are scheduled to increase, like they are right now if we don’t act, preventing that tax hike is counted as a ‘cost’ in uncollected future revenue. But many spending programs are assumed to be extended beyond their expiration, so the spending just continues and continues, unabated, which the budget rules say do not have any cost,” Crapo told colleagues on the Senate floor.

Spokesmen for Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chairman Arrington (did not respond to The Washington Stand’s request for comment. Also not responding were spokesmen for Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrats on the two congressional budget panels.

For all the controversy, Dickerson expressed optimism to TWS that needed changes are coming. “The CBO is an important resource for lawmakers. It can also be a source of frustration, particularly when CBO fails to be transparent about its scoring, assumptions, and biases. While Director Swagel has taken steps to improve CBO, more work remains to be done,” he said.

“There is significant interest on both sides of the aisle in addressing the shortcomings at CBO. The House Budget Committee has signaled that CBO oversight will be a major focus, including conducting regular oversight hearings and advancing the first-ever audit of CBO’s operations,” he added.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Led by Johnson, House Completes Improbable Budgeting Sweep

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Greenland, Venezuela, and the president’s spat with Canada may have stolen the world’s attention, but the real revelation may be what’s happening here at home. With the snow on its way and no time to spare, House Republicans accomplished what hasn’t been done since America’s top movie was “Titanic” and dial-up AOL was still cutting-edge technology: they finished a federal budget — just like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) promised they would.

For the Louisiana leader, witnessing history that hasn’t been made since 1997 had to be one of the most gratifying milestones of his speakership. With a majority as wide as a blade of grass, the idea that anyone — let alone this divided chamber — could put their heads down and unite long enough to do their most basic job is a colossal feat.

Johnson, the perennial underdog, cheered the achievement at a press conference Friday before members hit the road to beat the winter storm. “The naysayers said it couldn’t be done, but they were wrong. House Republicans just finished passing all 12 appropriations bills — restoring regular order, cutting spending, locking in Trump-era priorities, and ending Biden-era budgets. No omnibus. No backroom deals. Just hard work and results. Americans sent us here to fix Washington — and this is how it gets done. Huge credit to [Appropriations Chairman] Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and the House Appropriations team,” he said.

Holding signs that read “12 of 12!” the conservative crew that drove the effort took a victory lap. “We aren’t here for another stopgap or temporary fix,” Cole had insisted on the House floor before the final vote. “We are here to finish the job by providing full-year funding and closing out all 12 bills with certainty and direction. …These bills were written with those priorities in mind.”

When the herculean task was complete, something no oddsmaker would have predicted with Congress’s track record, Cole heaped praise on Johnson. “This speaker is the reason that these 12 bills happened,” Cole declared.

For Johnson, the vindication only builds on his already impressive legacy — not that the humble attorney would admit it. “This is a monumental achievement,” he agreed. “Despite the noise, despite our slim margins, despite the fact that most members in the House have never gone through a regular, member-driven appropriations process before, this team got it done,” he said.

Cole also touted the lower price tag of this year’s basket of funding. “Republicans set out to spend less — and total FY26 funding does just that.We committed to codifying DOGE cuts — and these bills cut waste and rein in government bloat.” He paused and added, “This is what responsible governance looks like. This measure is the product of sustained engagement and serious legislating. It advances reforms, delivers full-year funding, and reflects a Congress doing its job.”

In a rare spirit of compromise, several Democrats also joined the unlikely return to governing, supporting most packages by a surprising margin, messaging that they, too, had secured some wins. Even Democrat Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), ranking appropriator, cheered the passage. “We got the bills done, and we came out very well, and that should be proof enough that we need to make the process work,” she said.

For both sides, the eagerness to avoid another government shutdown was a powerful motivator after the political pain of last year’s. But they aren’t out of the woods yet.

The Senate, which spent the last 10 days in recess, will come back to a pile of work — and very little time to do it. Six of the 12 appropriations bills still need the chamber’s approval — including some of the most contentious budgets. But, as The Washington Times points out, Johnson did everything he could to lighten the load by splitting the six bills into two more manageable packages. With the January 30 deadline breathing down Majority Leader John Thune’s (R-S.D.) neck, “Senators will have to take a big swing at passing all six bills before sending them to President Donald Trump’s desk,” Politico explains. But the fact that we’re even talking about that prospect, the outlet acknowledged, “would be a stunning feat for lawmakers and leadership — especially in such a bitterly divided Congress.”

Reflecting on last week, the speaker took his usual humble, future-looking posture. Sitting down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill,” he pointed to the high stakes of the election. “We must continue what we’ve been working on, continue to move forward. … We passed the House appropriations bills through the House … [in] regular order. [It’s the] first time in many years that’s happened,” he noted. “We’re rebuilding the muscle memory, as I like to say, and it’s a great advancement to returning power to the people and being better stewards of taxpayer funds.”

And yet, with 11 months until a very significant election, it’s still a daunting task to lead this group, Perkins noted. True, the speaker nodded. “But you know, Scripture says you don’t worry about tomorrow. You focus on the troubles of today because the day has enough. And we do that hour by hour, day by day, in faith and in prayer. We walk forward, we advance these priorities. … And we demonstrate day by day that we’re doing the right thing for the right reason. And I think the voters are going to reward that,” he predicted. “I don’t think they want the chaos and the communism that comes with today’s Democrat[ic] Party. I think they want us to continue to fulfill our promises. And that’s what we’ve done so far. That’s what we’ll do this year. And that will be rewarded at the ballot box.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Payroll Costs of the Federal Swamp Exploded 24% during Biden Era

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There were 5% more federal workers — 2.77 million in 2020 to 2.90 million in 2025 — when Joe Biden left the White House, but the costs of paying this vast legion of bureaucrats exploded 24% during the same period, according to a new report by a nonprofit government watchdog.

Much of the skyrocketing payroll costs is due to spiking paychecks going to employees making more than $100,000 annually in salary during the 2020-2024 period, according to Open the Books (OTB), the Illinois-based nonprofit that maintains the world’s largest, most current internet database of public spending:

  • Federal workers making $100,000+ annually increased 49% from 532,784 to 793,537.
  • Those making $200,000+ saw their ranks grow 82%, from 37,631 to 68,445.
  • Bureaucrats being paid $300,000+ rose 84%, from 7,692 to 14,143.

Federal worker compensation increased so widely in the government workforce that the average pay exceeded $100,000 in 117 of 127 executive agencies and the White House. In 2024, 31,452 federal employees outearned every one of the country’s 50 state governors. The average salary of all 50 state governors was just under $150,000 in 2024. New York has the highest-paid chief state executive at $250,000.

Most federal workers are paid according to the General Schedule, which includes 15 grades and 10 pay steps within each grade. The lowest-paid federal worker is a GS-1 who at Step 1 was paid $21,986 annually in 2024. By advancing to Step 10, a GS-1 worker would see an increase in pay to $27,502.

At the highest level of the GS schedule, the GS-15, Step 10, which in 2024 received $159,950. Step 1for the GS-15 was paid $123,401. Most workers in the GS-13 to GS-15 are in supervisory positions. These salary figures do not include the cost of federal employee benefits, which on average add an additional 30% to the total compensation for each position.

The next rung up from the General Schedule is the Senior Executive Service (SES), which includes five levels with pay ranging in 2024 from $147,649 to a maximum of $221,900. Members of the SES are typically the highest-ranked career workers.

Other pay classifications in the federal workforce include those covering law enforcement, administrative law judges, and senior-level science and professional positions.

The highest paid federal worker at the end of 2024, according to the OTB report, was cardiologist Gary H. Gibbons, who was director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health and earned $519,246 last year, a 28% increase from the $406,095 he received in 2021.

Gibbons was the second-highest paid federal employee that year, trailing only Anthony Fauci, then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who got $417,608. When Fauci retired early in 2023, his salary had jumped to $480,654.

Currently, the president of the United States is paid $400,000 annually, while the vice president gets $235,100. Trump returns each of his paychecks to the U.S. Treasury.

Among the 20 largest federal departments and agencies, the Department of War tops the list, with 189,272 employees making more than $100,000 annually. The average salary for the 761,524 total workforce was $82,516. The Small Business Administration (SBA) ranks 20th, employing 7,878 employees.

The SBA was notable for being the only federal department or agency in the top 20 to see its payroll costs go down between 2020 to 2024, with a 26% decline in the workforce total, but only a 3% decline in the total cost of that payroll.

Of the other 19 departments and agencies in the top 20, 15 saw significant increases in both their total number of employees and the cost of their payroll. The average workforce jump for the 15 was 10%. On the total payroll cost side, 19 of the top 20 saw an average cost increase of 23%. The Department of Health and Human Services (39%), Department of Veterans Affairs (38%), and the Department of Energy (37%) had the biggest payroll cost hikes.

Asked about the above figures, U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) spokesman Rachel Cauley told The Washington Stand that “so far under Trump, the government workforce has shrunk by almost 300,000 positions.” After the federal government was shut down on October 1 due to the inability of Congress to approve a budget for Fiscal Year 2026, Trump was talking about firing some portion of the approximately 670,000 federal workers classified as “non-essential,” but to date, none of those employees have received notice of being terminated.

Many of the reductions in the federal workforce under Trump are the result of the activities of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Caucuses were formed in both the Senate and House to support the DOGE effort to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.

And U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kapur told TWS that “these numbers demonstrate what most people now recognize — the Biden administration did not take seriously their role as stewards of taxpayer dollars. The Trump administration is very clear about its responsibilities to Americans.”

Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), a member of the House DOGE Caucus, lauded the OTB report.

“President Trump is leading the charge to cut waste, fraud, and abuse through DOGE. I’m proud to serve on the Congressional DOGE Caucus, where I voted to claw back nearly $10 billion in reckless spending — including shutting down the left-wing slush fund at USAID. This report proves there’s more swamp to drain, and I’m ready to deliver more DOGE cuts in Congress.”

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Despite $27 Billion Surplus in June, More Fiscal Reforms Are Needed

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The U.S. Treasury Department announced Friday that the federal government ran a surplus of $27 billion in June, raising hopes that Washington may have turned a corner away from debt-bound demise. The month-in-black marked the first June surplus since 2017, the beginning of President Donald Trump’s first term, and it improved substantially upon the $71 billion deficit the government ran in June 2024. However, while the monthly surplus is a positive sign, the U.S. government is not out of the woods just yet.

Administration officials credited Trump’s tariffs for the budget surplus. “Another promise made. Another promise kept,” tweeted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “As President Trump works hard to take back our nation’s economic sovereignty, today’s Monthly Treasury Statement is demonstrating record customs duties — and with no inflation!” Indeed, the U.S. government collected some $27 billion in customs duties in June, a number strikingly close to the surplus.

Does this result signal that tariffs are the solution to America’s excessive federal debt?

The short answer is no, because the reality of government finances is far more complex.

To explain this, it’s helpful to begin with a definition. As many readers will already know, a surplus occurs when total income (receipts) exceeds total expenses (outlays). Last month, the federal government brought in $526 billion (a $60 billion increase, or 13%) and spent $499 billion (a $38 billion decrease, or 7%).

Right away, these figures make it apparent that the total surplus ($27 billion) was less than the decrease in outlays ($38 billion) and less than half the increase in receipts ($60 billion). Even though tariff income roughly equaled the surplus, it was not the largest factor in June’s budget result.

The decrease in outlays was primarily due to “calendar adjustments,” which happen when payments are made a few days earlier or later than normal, the Treasury Department acknowledged. Since June began on a Sunday, any payments due by June 1 would have been paid on the previous business day, Friday, May 30; these payments would therefore count towards May’s total, instead of June’s. Without these calendar adjustments, June would have registered a $70 billion deficit, the Treasury Department noted. (That’s a remarkably high discrepancy of $97 billion, or roughly 20% of all outlays, but there is also a remarkably high percentage of payments due on the first day of the month.)

The increase in receipts was also due primarily to non-tariff-related factors. While customs duties in June totaled $27 billion, they also brought in $23 billion in May, resulting in an increase of $4 billion. That means most of the $60 billion increase in revenue was raised from other sources, likely quarterly tax payments. “June is one of Treasury’s biggest revenue months of the year,” wrote The Wall Street Journal editors, “because it’s a month when companies and individuals file their quarterly estimated tax payments.”

This raises another essential point, which is that balancing the budget requires responsible spending across all 12 months of the fiscal year, not just a surplus in certain high-revenue months. Before the June surplus of $27 billion, the U.S. federal government ran a deficit of $316 billion in May, with nearly as much income from tariffs. For the current fiscal year, which began in October, the government has run a deficit of $1.34 trillion. In comparison, June’s surplus is little more than a rounding error (technically, $0.027 trillion).

“June was the highest monthly level so far [for customs duties],” the WSJ editors allowed, “but even on an annual basis that’s about $300 billion a year. That’s not nothing, but it won’t balance a $7 trillion spending budget.”

However, the effort to relate tariff revenue to the budget surplus does underscore one obvious point: the path to balancing the budget requires both more taxes and less spending. (Tariffs are a tax on imported goods.) Politicians don’t like to talk about this reality because both items are unpopular, but there’s no way around it, just like a family may be forced to both cut expenses and produce extra income (perhaps through a side hustle) to make ends meet.

Unfortunately, taxes have other ill effects. In economic terms, all taxes reduce efficiency by driving prices way above the supply-demand equilibrium, resulting in lost productivity known as “Dead Weight Loss.” Of course, taxes are necessary to support government, which God instituted as a means of common grace, and Scripture instructs Christians to pay their taxes (Matt 22:15-22; Romans 13:7). Nevertheless, taxes siphon off economic resources, making it beneficial to keep them as low as possible.

Already, the effect of tariffs may be slipping into U.S. inflation statistics. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 0.3% in June, after increasing 0.1% in May, for a 2.7% increase over the past 12 months, reported the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Tuesday. Subtracting the volatile categories of food and energy, the “core” CPI increased 0.2% in June and 2.9% over the past 12 months.

While overall inflation numbers were only slightly higher than average, prices increased sharply in categories that are heavily dependent on foreign imports. For instance, apparel prices increased 0.4% in June, while household furnishings and appliances increased a whole 1.0% in a single month. Even pro-Trump Breitbart News attributed these increases to tariff pressures.

(In fairness to the administration, Trump’s tariffs have caused far less inflation than some critics have predicted, as Bessent recently pointed out. However, this is partly due to the fact that the higher tariff rates have yet to take effect for many countries.)

In addition to fueling inflation, tariffs (like all taxes) will also reduce economic activity. Even when taxes are beneficial, such economic downsides are inevitable. Thus, the simplest solution is for the government to avoid spending money it doesn’t have in the first place.

Alas, such warnings have gone unheeded for decades. Given the depth of the fiscal hole the U.S. government has dug for itself, there are no easy ways out — not tariffs, not DOGE cuts, not rescissions. Only hard, deep, and painful cuts — such as serious entitlement reform — can set the nation on the path to fiscal sustainability. And that is unlikely to happen until voters, like they did in Argentina, are willing to listen to real solutions.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Republicans Hit the Accelerator on the Next Wave of Trump’s To-Do List

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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.

White House Rescissions Package Would Defund PBS Days after ‘Sesame Street’ Celebrates Pride Month

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The Trump administration has introduced a multibillion-dollar budget-cutting measure to free taxpayers from subsidizing far-left programs, including a provision to completely defund public broadcasting outlets just days after a PBS children’s show posted a social media message celebrating Pride Month.

The $9.4 billion rescissions package, delivered to Congress by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday, slashes programs conservatives have long denounced as wasteful, including $1.2 million in foreign aid projects promoting the LGBTQ+ lifestyle in such socially conservative regions as the Caribbean, the western Balkans, and Uganda. The White House says it also eliminates such wasteful or controversial programs as feeding insect powder to children in Africa.

One of every eight dollars cut by the proposal comes from public broadcasting. The rescissions package eliminates more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the parent of National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting System (PBS), which conservatives have long opposed due to its lack of constitutional authorization and overwhelmingly left-wing bias. Taxpayers furnished $535 million of the CPB’s $545 million annual revenue in fiscal year 2025. (The other $10 million came from estimated interest). The rescissions package cancels all CPB allocations for two years.

The proposed budget cut came just two days after the most beloved show on PBS, “Sesame Street,” posted a social media message celebrating the LGBTQ agenda on the first day of June, dubbed “Pride Month” by LGBT activists.

PBS Is ‘Grooming Children’ at Taxpayer Expense: Congressman

“On our street, everyone is welcome. Together, let’s build a world where every person and family feels loved and respected for who they are. Happy #PrideMonth!” exclaimed the social media account representing “Sesame Street” on Sunday. The accompanying graphic depicted the show’s Muppet characters linking arms to form a rainbow. The provocative post triggered widespread outrage.

“PBS is grooming children on American taxpayers’ dime. This is unacceptable. Congress must defund them and hold the executives accountable,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) Monday morning. “Nothing to see here: just a publicly funded puppet show promoting weird sex stuff to your three-year-old,” said Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire. Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, called the meme’s creators “[g]roomer freaks.” The Center for American Renewal, founded by OMB Director Russell Vought, cited the post as “further evidence that your tax dollars are funding propaganda for kids.”

While conservatives have documented public broadcasting’s liberal bias nearly since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, they say introducing gender confusion to toddlers is a new low. “They most certainly are trying to ‘normalize’ deviancy,” said radio talk show host Janet Parshall, sharing a video of the children’s characters featuring a flamboyant man on the HBO Max “Sesame Street” spin-off “The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo.” That program, which advertises itself as a “star-studded talk show for the whole family,” won a media award from the LGBTQ+ pressure group GLAAD in 2021.

“Is this the kind of ‘education’ PBS insists taxpayers must continue paying for?” asked the Heritage Foundation. “We must defund PBS and NPR immediately. No excuses GOP,” said Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

Conservative members of Congress have heeded the call to enact the rescissions package’s cuts to these and other programs. “I’m looking forward to defunding NPR,” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Tuesday.

Four out of 10 registered voters support cutting or eliminating taxpayer funding of NPR and PBS. “Pluralities of voters say that PBS (36%) and NPR (35%) are biased against Donald Trump and the Republicans,” reported the Napolitan News survey released last month.

NPR claims it “gets only about 1% of [its] funding from the federal government,” but critics say that accounting trick ignores fees the national headquarters charges local affiliates for carrying its nationally syndicated programming. CPB figures argue at the same time that they receive little taxpayer funding and that they cannot survive without it. “Rescinding these funds would devastate PBS,” said PBS CEO Paula Kerger.

Giving the CPB a zero budget would also be a step toward codifying President Trump’s executive orders. On May 1, he signed an executive order directing the CPB to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.”

While House Republicans have introduced many bills to codify these executive orders permanently, few bills have reached the president’s desk. “We should be codifying EOs and passing rescissions by the hour — no weekends, no breaks, no vacations. We must pass ALL DOGE cuts!” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.). The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced that it has identified $180 billion in savings, or $1,118.01 for every U.S. taxpayer, so far. “We’re totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent,” pledged Trump in an Oval Office press conference with departing DOGE leader Elon Musk last Friday.

Conservatives also support the rest of the White House’s budget-cutting measures.

Rescissions Package Cuts USAID, LGBTQ, and Eat-the-Bugs Programs

The rescissions package released Tuesday also curtails controversial programs including international promotion of LGBTQ causes and programs to feed insects to children. OMB detailed numerous programs cut by the package, including:

  • $900 million from USAID;
  • $33,000 for “Being LGBTI in the Caribbean”;
  • $643,000 for LGBTQI+ programs in the Western Balkans;
  • $567,000 for LBGTQI+ programs in Uganda;
  • $833,000 for “transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks” in Nepal;
  • $5.1 million for “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements”;
  • $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia;
  • $67,000 for testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar;
  • $595,400 for training women in gender equity;
  • $500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda;
  • $6 million for “net zero cities” in Mexico; and
  • $135 million for the World Health Organization.

“I think it’s great to eliminate much of the funding of USAID,” Clyde told Perkins. “It’s ludicrous that we as American taxpayers are spending money on things like ‘Sesame Street’ in Iraq, or all these LGBTQ+ programs across the world. That is not anything that our taxpayers want their money spent on.”

This rescissions package “will be the first of many” legislative proposals to pare back spending, said Clyde — a promise made by the White House and confirmed by House leadership.

Pass Rescissions ‘Immediately’: House Conservatives

The conservative House Freedom Caucus called on House leadership to “immediately move this to the floor for swift passage,” as a demonstration the Republican Party will prove responsive to its own voters. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda. While the Swamp will inevitably attempt to slow and kill these cuts, there is no excuse for a Republican House not to advance the first DOGE rescissions package the same week it is presented to Congress then quickly send it for passage in the Republican Senate so President Trump can sign it into law.”

As of now, the date the House will vote on the package remains uncertain. “I would love to see it on the floor this week. I have not seen it on the schedule this week. But I heard that there’s a potential that it will be on the schedule for next week, and that would be fine, too,” Clyde told Perkins.

But Clyde explained moving the package through the House expeditiously may hold the key to its passage, final adoption, and the ability of Congress to deliver future rescissions packages. The cuts’ ratification “has to be done and be done quickly in order to maintain its privilege in the Senate, which means that it can bypass the Senate filibuster.” Under federal statute, both the House and Senate pass a rescissions package through an expedited process; in the Senate, debate is limited to 10 hours and both the motion to proceed to a vote and the final vote pass by a simple majority without the possibility of a filibuster.

Avoiding Democratic procedural stalling techniques “is absolutely critical, because I don’t think we’re going to get any rescissions done if we have to pass the Senate filibuster,” said Clyde. “Because it only requires 51 votes in the Senate, then we have to act on this very, very quickly. And I think that this week or next week would be sufficient. But it must be approved by the House and sent to the Senate so that the Senate can use its expedited procedures to approve it and send it back to the president for signature.”

Rescissions created by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C. 682-688) allow Congress to cut previous spending before its budgetary authority runs out, making it a powerful tool to cut back the nation’s budget deficit.

OMB Director Russell Vought has also raised the possibility the Trump administration will use impoundment, in which the president does not spend all the funds allotted by Congress, to reduce federal spending. “We may not actually have to get … Congress to pass the rescissions bills,” he said. “We have executive tools; we have impoundment.”

“Despite the modest size of President Trump’s rescission request, rescission packages can be valuable in helping policymakers eliminate unneeded and unused federal funding. Even rescissions for funding that would otherwise never be spent can prevent policymakers from later using the funds for new spending increases or tax cuts. While rescissions themselves can’t solve the nation’s fiscal challenges, they can be a step in the right direction to cut wasteful spending in the federal budget,” wrote Jordan Haring, director of fiscal policy at the American Action Forum.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. Taxpayers Must Fund Gender Transitions in Federal Prisons, per Judge

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Critics of the Big Beautiful Bill ‘Are Going to Be Wrong,’ Johnson Warns

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For months, the bright lights have been on the House, capturing the made-for-TV drama of the Republicans’ Houdini-like wins. And while people have come to appreciate House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as a sort of consensus whisperer, no one is quite sure what to make of his Senate counterpart. But now that Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is in the reconciliation hot seat, America is about to see what Mitch McConnell’s replacement is made of. And as far as first tests go, this is a biggie.

Thune, who’s had a front-row seat for the House debate, knows that the job that awaits is no picnic. Like the speaker, he understands a thing or two about small margins. With just three votes to spare and 53 different opinions on next steps, corralling his caucus will require a mix of patience and thick skin. After listening to his caucus pick apart the draft passed by Johnson’s chamber, Thune’s early message is one of caution. “It’ll have to track very closely to the House bill,” he warned Monday, “because they’ve got a fragile majority and struck a very delicate balance.”

That in itself is a shift from earlier weeks, when Thune seemed to agree with the Republicans eager to make sweeping changes. Now, the South Dakotan says more reservedly, “[T]here are some things that senators want to add to the bill or things we’d do slightly differently.” Based on the soundbites coming out of his caucus, that’s putting it mildly. Goldilocks herself would go mad trying to find the sweet spot between the five factions of senators with competing goals.

There’s the group demanding more spending cuts (Ron Johnson, Wis.; Mike Lee, Utah; Rick Scott, Fla.), and another worried they go too deep (Susan Collins, Maine; Lisa Murkowski, Alaska). There are the pro-Medicaid reform Republicans and the not-so-pro-overhaul Republicans (Josh Hawley, Mo.; Murkowski; Jerry Moran, Kan.; and Jim Justice, W.Va.). While some cheer the end of Biden’s “clean energy credits,” others pan them (Murkowski; Moran; Thom Tillis, N.C.; John Curtis, Utah). While Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) rages against the debt ceiling hike, the more rural state senators are fighting the other chamber’s changes to health and supplemental nutrition programs (Chuck Grassley, Iowa). And remember the SALT caucus of the House? Well, Senator Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) admitted, “There’s not one Republican in the United States Senate” who cares about the state and local tax deduction cap.

And that’s to say nothing of the give-and-take on tax levels, ranges of defense and border spending, and a million other flashpoints tucked in the 1,100-page draft. Add that to the Byrd Bath, which will decide what belongs in reconciliation and what doesn’t, and you have the makings of four long, stress-filled weeks. “There’s always some who think it’s too hot, some [who] think it’s too cold,” observer Neil Bradley shook his head. “Where do you find the point where a majority think it’s just right?”

Great question — one that Thune will be losing his share of sleep over. In the end, he told reporters, “We’ve got to do what we can get 51 [votes] for.”

Johnson can sympathize. In his weekend sit-down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, he spoke knowingly. “… [A]s all our friends in the Senate know, it took us over a year to reach that equilibrium point in the House,” he said on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill.” The most important takeaway, the speaker reminds Thune’s disgruntled Republicans, is that “we’re going to achieve over $1.5 trillion in savings. … It’s the largest amount of savings of any government that would ever be achieved in the history of mankind. It’s a good start. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start. And I think the Senate’s got to recognize that.”

One of the greatest misunderstandings — even with people in Washington — is that the reconciliation package was never meant to be the vehicle for all of the president’s spending cuts. When Elon Musk and others complain that the bill doesn’t reduce the deficit, there’s a fundamental disconnect about several things, the speaker underscores. For starters, he reminded everyone, “This is just the beginning of a long process. We’re going to have another reconciliation bill, possibly two additional bills, coming up in the near future.”

Secondly — and just as importantly — “you have to remember how the process works,” the speaker stressed. When Americans (including Musk) wonder why there aren’t more Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts in the “one, big, beautiful bill,” it’s simple. “There are two categories of federal spending,” Johnson pointed out. “One is mandatory spending, one is discretionary. The reconciliation package [deals] with the first category, not the latter. So it was not possible — literally, under the rules of the Senate — for us to put DOGE cuts in large measure in the reconciliation package. That has to be a separate instrument.”

And that “separate instrument” is what the White House is working on right now: a rescissions package to roll back discretionary spending that was already approved. Thanks to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, presidents can permanently cancel funding to executive agencies if it’s within a 45-day window and if a simple majority of Congress approves. As we speak, Donald Trump is teeing up the first “of many” rescission proposals, worth about $9.4 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse.

That, Johnson reiterated, is what Congress has been waiting for. “I mean, there was no playbook for what Elon Musk and DOGE were doing. They didn’t have a set of procedures to follow. They had to create them as they went.” And now, he continued, Republicans are ready to make those recommendations a reality. Nothing that Musk’s team did will go to waste, the speaker assured Americans.

“The work will go forward and continue, because what he’s done is he’s brought a spotlight into these agencies — into these bureaucracies that we were never able to see. We got a perspective on it that Congress was never allowed because the bureaucracy was hiding so much data. I mean, we didn’t know, obviously, that Congress was funding transgender operas in Peru and all these other crazy things that were happening under USAID,” Johnson said, shaking his head. Elon found it because he cracked the code. He got inside the belly of the beast with his algorithms, and he uncovered it, and we’ve got to wipe it out.”

But the headlines that the House is adding to an already ballooning deficit are baloney, the speaker argued. “I sent a long text message to [Musk] to explain to him and make sure that he understands that he was looking at [an] analysis of the bill that was not accurate.” He pointed to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the bill and emphasized, “CBO is historically inaccurate. It’s run by Democrats. … They’re not going to give us a fair score. But the important thing to remember about this is that they do not use dynamic scoring. They use static scoring. In layman’s terms, all that means is they don’t give us any credit for the growth. The Big Beautiful Bill is going to be jet fuel to the U.S. economy. It is a pro-growth economy builder. It’s going to lower tax rates, lower regulations, [and] incentivize U.S. manufacturing again. When that happens, we know what [the effect will be].”

Let’s not forget, the speaker reminded Perkins, “We already did this in the first Trump administration, [and we] had the greatest economy in the history of the world after the first two years, because we cut taxes and cut regulations. Now we’re doing it on steroids. So the tremendous growth that will be achieved by this is being totally discounted by CBO. They’re saying it will add to the deficit. It’s not true,” he declared. “By our calculations, we are going to reduce the deficit because of all the growth that we stimulated. Just watch and see that the critics are going to be wrong.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Republicans Brace for the Next Wave of Big Beautiful Debates

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When Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) hauled the “one, big, beautiful bill” over its first mountain — House passage — he had one request. To the GOP senators, he said, “I encourage them to modify the package that we’re sending over there as little as possible.” Thinking back over the warring factions in his chamber, he added, “Because we have to maintain that balance, and it’s a very delicate thing.” But in the days since last Thursday, it’s not clear if any Republicans, including the one in the White House, are listening.

Watching the House from a safe distance through its long nights, tense meetings, mark-ups, and ferocious jockeying for different priorities, senators sent a steady drip of commentary to the press about what they would change and language they thought could go farther. Now that the bill sits squarely in their laps, some have signaled at choppy waters ahead. While almost everyone is complimentary of the job the speaker has done, they also recognize that this is their chance to put a different mark on Donald Trump’s signature legislation.

“I want to get a deal done,” Florida Senator Rick Scott (R) insisted. “I support the president’s agenda. I support the border, I support the military, I support extending the Trump tax cuts … But [we’ve] got to live in reality here: [We’ve] got a fiscal crisis.”

Others, like Kentucky’s Rand Paul (R), have been more critical. For weeks, he’s tried to rally the troops to cut more spending. “… [T]he math doesn’t add up,” the chamber’s outspoken fiscal hawk warned. “They’re going to explode the debt by — the House says $4 trillion, the Senate’s actually been talking about exploding the debt $5 trillion.” Surely, he persisted, “there’s got to be someone left in Washington who thinks debt is wrong and deficits are wrong and wants to go in the other direction,” he said.

Johnson took the disapproval in stride. “I agree wholeheartedly with what my dear friend, Rand Paul, said. I love his conviction, and I share it,” he told Fox News’s Shannon Bream. “The national debt is … the greatest threat to our national security, and deficits are a serious problem,” the speaker said. “What I think Rand is missing on this one is the fact that we are quite serious about this,” the Louisianan emphasized. “This is the biggest spending cut in more than 30 years.”

The fault-finding isn’t a surprise. The speaker endured plenty of it from his own House circles, including perpetual nitpicker Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) who called the House package “a debt bomb ticking” before voting against it. Even the Senate’s Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) argued that the “number one goal of this reconciliation ought to be to reduce that 10-year and those annual deficits, not increase them.”

Sitting down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins for “This Week on Capitol Hill,” the speaker was asked about the party’s concerns. Republicans say it “doesn’t go far enough,” Perkins prodded before asking for Johnson’s response.

A beat passed, and the speaker replied, “It took us many decades to get the country into the financial mess we’re in. We cannot flip a switch and fix it overnight, but,” he paused, “we have a responsibility to get us to begin to steer out of the debt crisis. This bill is truly historic in its scope and what it does for the first time in history.” Johnson continued, “This legislation is written so that we save $1.9 trillion with a ‘T’ in taxpayer funds. There’s never been anything like that. It’s twice as much as the last time Congress even attempted such a thing, which is more than 30 years ago. So truly historic in turning the aircraft carrier and beginning us on a new trajectory,” the speaker said, referring to his oft-invoked metaphor.

To those like Paul who complain that the debt ceiling hike only enables more spending, Johnson is emphatic. “We’re going to extend the debt limit — not because we’re going to spend more money, but because you have to do that to show the bond markets and the rest of the world that America is good on its debts. That must be done. Everybody knows that.” He invoked the White House. “President Trump is insistent about it. He says we’re not raising a ceiling to spend it. We’re extending the deadline so that we can get our fiscal house in order. This is a really important thing.”

And while the president has been enthusiastic about the House’s package, he created plenty of heartburn Sunday evening when he seemed to imply that the upper chamber should have its way with the legislation. “I want the Senate and the senators to make the changes they want,” Trump told reporters over the weekend. “It will go back to the House, and we’ll see if we can get them. In some cases, the changes may be something I’d agree with, to be honest.” Hinting at conversations he’s probably had with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), the president acknowledged there would be changes. “Some will be minor, some will be fairly significant.”

Reminded that the goal is to get the bill to his desk by July 4, Trump nodded. “I think it’s going to get there,” adding that Johnson and Thune “have done a fantastic job.”

While the two sides gather their energy for the reconciliation fight’s next round, the speaker has spent his time hammering away at the disinformation Democrats keep spewing about the bill’s supposed fallout. Repeating what he’s said a hundred times in a hundred different ways, Johnson reiterated, “We are not cutting Medicaid in this package. There’s a lot of [dishonesty] out there about this.” Pointing to one of the most outrageous examples of fraud, waste, and abuse, he quantified a problem that many suspected but didn’t have hard numbers on.

“[We’ve] got more than 1.4 million illegal aliens on Medicaid,” the speaker warned. “Medicaid is not intended for non-U.S. citizens. It’s intended for the most vulnerable populations of Americans, which is pregnant women and young single mothers, the disabled, the elderly. They are protected in what we’re doing, because we’re preserving the resources for those who need it most.” Then he put the spotlight on the other problem, the legal, work-capable citizens who were added to the rolls under Joe Biden. “You’re talking about 4.8 million able-bodied workers, young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working. They are choosing not to work when they can. That is called fraud. They are cheating the system. When you root out those kinds of abuses,” he stressed, “you save the resources that are so desperately needed by the people who deserve it and need it most. That’s what we’re doing.”

And it’s not just the Medicaid soundbites they’ll have to confront but the headlines about the proposal’s “score,” as in how much the government’s financial experts at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) believe it will add to the deficit. But, as the Louisiana leader cautioned, there’s almost always more to that than meets the eye. “The last time they scored a big bill like this was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in the first Trump administration,” he explained to Perkins. “They were $1 trillion off in their calculations.”

To put the process into perspective, he noted that “the CBO is run by Democrats,” adding that “84% of the employees there who are crunching the numbers are donors to big Democrats like [Massachusetts Senator] Elizabeth Warren and [Senator] Bernie Sanders. So we dismiss that,” the speaker said. “What they do not count for is the pro-growth policies in this bill that [are] going to grow the U.S. economy. And that is how, in combination with savings, we’re going to get ourselves out of this mess.”

Still, Johnson underscored, as he has so many times, “We value everybody’s opinion. … You know, my background is in constitutional law. I’m a student of what the Founders originally intended for how the process was supposed to work. The United States Congress is the greatest deliberative body in the history of the world. It works so well, but only if it’s done as designed.” He thought back on his predecessors and other leaders who drafted major legislation “in a back room, by quite literally a handful of people. I didn’t want to do that, because I think we’ve got to get back to what was intended.” Everyone should have a voice, he insisted. Does that take longer? Absolutely. Is it more painful? His chamber just proved it was. “But it’s always worth it in the end … and it makes a better product.”

What will happen to the 1,100 pages he poured over for months? The speaker doesn’t know. But there’s one tool he’d suggest for everyone facing these big obstacles: “prayer.” “It’s not been in vogue in Washington for quite some time,” Johnson reflected, “and I’m just bringing it back. It seems like some huge innovation, but that’s exactly how our nation began. And I think we do well to remember it.”

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. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Has ‘Excellent News for Families’: FRC Analyst

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Pro-family experts are touting multiple provisions of President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” aimed at fulfilling the administration’s promises to facilitate family formation, ease adoption, and benefit homeschool students or those who attend religious schools.

The House Ways and Means Committee passed the 389-page bill on Wednesday morning by a 26-19, party-line vote. “It’s sad that every single committee Democrat voted for the largest tax hike in American history and against additional tax relief for families, farmers, and small businesses,” Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) told The Washington Stand. The bill now moves to the House Budget Committee.

In its current form, the bill contains economic provisions pro-family advocates say they have supported for years.

Increasing the Child Tax Credit

The president’s signature economic bill from his first term, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), doubled the Child Tax Credit (CTC) from $1,000 to $2,000 and raised the income families can earn as the credit phases out. Without renewal, the child tax credit would be cut in half at the end of this year. The “big beautiful bill” increases the child tax credit to $2,500 for the tax years 2025 through 2028 — the end of the Trump administration. The extra $500 CTC boost adjusts for the rampant inflation of the last Democratic administration, according to its advocates.

If Congress does not vote to maintain the increased CTC, the credit will return to $2,000; however, the bill makes that level permanent and indexes it for inflation each year, rounded to the nearest $100. The bill also requires both parents to have work-eligible Social Security numbers before claiming the credit.

“This is excellent news for families,” Quena González, senior director of Government Affairs at Family Research Council, told TWS. He singled out the bill’s proposal to increase the CTC as the fulfillment of a long-term policy goal of the organization’s. “FRC has long advocated for increasing the child tax credit. We advocated for it to be doubled the last time, and it is good to see it pegged to inflation and made permanent. In the current round of budgeting, where they’re trying to cut hundreds of billions of dollars, this is a really huge nod to the importance of family.”

Many who advocate for a pro-family tax code have singled out the child tax credit, which was created in 1997, as a way to aid struggling families while reducing the reach of government. “The relatively new child tax credit, which will slowly rise over the next several years to $1,000, should instead be immediately increased to at least $2,500 per child and indexed to inflation,” said Allan C. Carlson, then a distinguished fellow for family policy studies at FRC, during a Witherspoon Lecture more than two decades ago. Carlson has championed what he calls “a pro-family income tax” for decades.

AEI scholar Kevin Corinth made an identical proposal in February in AEI’s “Family Friendly Policies for the 119th Congress,” edited by Timothy P. Carney. “A supersized Child Tax Credit will ease the financial burdens on families raising children and those hoping to welcome new babies into the world,” agreed Patrice Onwuka of the Independent Women’s Forum.

Some of the big beautiful bill’s policies have reopened a rift on the Right, as some conservatives believe the government should make no fiscal policy promoting or discriminating against the nuclear family. Others blame tax credits for removing nearly half of all Americans from income tax rolls, shifting the tax burden onto a shrinking number of high earners.

González says the enhanced CTC will help secure America’s economic future by boosting the nation’s sagging demographics. “If you want to make the federal budget sustainable, you need a growing population to do that,” he contended. “This may be the first major policy move in that direction in years, or decades.”

Population levels are plunging globally, falling by more than half since 1950. The U.S. birthrate rose by less than 1% in 2024 to 1.626, according to provisional data released by the CDC last month, up from an historic low of 1.616 in 2023. Both levels are far below the 2.1 level needed for replacement. The pattern repeats throughout the West, where a birth dearth has stunted economic growth. “If we are unable to address our fertility crisis, the U.S. will face an existential economic crisis driven by a steep decline in fertility rates — one that could have an impact measured in the quadrillions of dollars,” wrote Jesús Fernández-Villaverde in The American Enterprise.

Child-Friendly Investment Accounts, Adoption Credits, and More

The “big beautiful bill” delivers numerous other tax policies desired by some pro-family advocates, according to a section-by-section analysis of the bill provided to The Washington Stand by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Make It Easier to Adopt a Child: One provision in the bill (Sec. 110107) gives parents a tax credit to write off up to $16,810 from their taxes in qualified adoption expenses. Under current law, the amount can be rolled over for five years. The new bill does not allow the tax to be rolled over but, beginning in 2025, it makes up to $5,000 of the credit refundable — meaning parents can receive that much money even if they do not owe taxes (have no tax liability); and the refundable amount is indexed for inflation. The credit phases out for those who have an adjusted gross income between $252,150 and $292,150. The bill also gives Native American tribal governments the same authority as states to deem an adopted child “special needs,” making the adoptive family eligible for the full $16,810 potential tax credit (Sec. 110108).

MAGA Accounts for Family Formation: The bill establishes a new category of Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement, or “MAGA accounts” (Sections 110115 and 110116). Beginning in 2026, those with children under the age of eight can contribute up to $5,000 a year (adjusted annually for inflation) to a MAGA account, which is invested in a diversified account that tracks the stock market, each year until the child turns 18. Friends, relatives, employers, and non-profits (including churches) may also make donations to these accounts and — provided the donations go to a broad class of recipients — nonprofits can make unlimited donations. For instance, a veterans organization could offer unlimited support for the children of gold star families.

For children born between 2024 and 2028 — the second Trump administration — the government will deposit $1,000 of taxpayers’ dollars into these MAGA accounts. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) made a similar legislative proposal this week, introducing the Invest America Act on Monday.

When the child turns 18, he may take out up to half of its amount for college, vocational training, to start a business, or to purchase his first home. At age 25, he can withdraw the full amount for those purposes; at age 30, he can remove the full amount of the account for any reason.

The Trump administration has sought to promote family formation. “It is the task of our government to make it easier to have kids, to welcome them into the world,” Vice President J.D. Vance told the 2025 March for Life.

Encouraging School Choice and Homeschooling: The proposed “big beautiful bill” creates a new tax credit for those who contribute to charities that provide scholarships for elementary or secondary students to attend private or religious schools (Sec. 110109). It also allows parents, including homeschoolers, to withdraw funds from tax-advantaged 529 accounts to cover a broader array of educational expenses (Sec. 110110), including:

  • curriculum and curricular materials
  • books or other instructional materials
  • online educational materials
  • tutoring or educational classes outside the home
  • testing fees
  • fees for dual enrollment in an institution of higher education, and
  • educational therapies for students with disabilities.

Decreases Government Policies Encouraging Gambling: One provision modestly discourages gambling by reducing how much wagering losses a person can write off (Sec. 110014). Currently, gamblers can write off only gambling losses up to the amount of their winnings, and other gambling-related expenses in excess of the amount they won. The bill reduces all gambling-related deductions to the amount of his winnings.

González was not alone in praising those parts of the bill. “We are encouraged to see the House Ways and Means Committee increase their response to the needs of American families, especially support for young and growing families through the child tax credit and the foster and adoption tax credit,” said John Mize, CEO of Americans United for Life. “We at March for Life are grateful for the pro-life, pro-family reconciliation bill text released today,” according to a post on the annual pro-life event’s social media account. “These provisions will strengthen a longstanding family that benefits all American families,” said Concerned Women for America LAC. And ACLJ Action held that “this Child Tax Credit update sends a powerful message: We value children. We value parents. And we value the American family.”

The bill’s supporters note its overall fiscal impact, as well. “Instead of a $1,700 tax hike, working families still recovering from Biden’s inflation crisis will now receive on average a $1,300 tax cut and workers will get $3,300 more in real income back into their pockets,” said a press release the committee emailed to The Washington Stand Wednesday morning. “Permanence of the 2017 Trump tax cuts will save 6 million jobs, including 1.1 million manufacturing jobs.”

“This cornerstone of President Trump’s economic agenda will put the interests and needs of working families and small businesses ahead of Washington, bring jobs and manufacturing back to America, and usher in a new golden era of prosperity,” Rep. Smith told TWS.

How much of the bill will survive the Senate legislative process remains to be seen. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) told Fox Business on Wednesday morning the bill will see Senate action “probably sometime in the early fall.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Planned Parenthood Committed 402,230 Abortions, Received $792.2 Million in Taxpayer Funding in 2024

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House Republicans seeking to end federal funding of abortion businesses received two enormous boosts to their efforts on Monday, as a legislative provision inched closer to adoption and Planned Parenthood released an annual report showing it received more taxpayer funding than any time in history. The report has pro-life experts telling The Washington Stand, “Planned Parenthood must be defunded.”

Planned Parenthood committed 402,230 abortions and received $792.2 million in taxpayer funding in 2024, according to its 2024 annual report, released Monday. Last year, U.S. taxpayers became Planned Parenthood’s largest financial contributor, supplying 39% of the organization’s $2 billion in revenue — up from 34% in the last report.

“Planned Parenthood carries out over 1,100 abortions per day and receives over $2 million a day in taxpayer funding. This should absolutely disgust Americans. Our hard-earned dollars should not be going towards the slaughter of innocent unborn children. The federal government must end this horrific use of funds,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “It’s past time for Congress to say, ‘American taxpayers will not be forced to pad the wallets of Planned Parenthood executives while women receive shoddy treatment in unsanitary conditions and their unborn children are killed.’”

“Planned Parenthood must be defunded,” Szoch remarked.

Planned Parenthood had net revenue of $2 billion and ended the year with total net assets of $2.52 billion. More than a dozen Planned Parenthood executives make more money than Anthony Fauci. Yet financial data remain murky, co-mingling multiple years and not including all affiliates.

The report indicates a massive increase in both abortions and taxation extraction since last year. Planned Parenthood committed 392,712 abortions and received a $699.3 million in 2023. Taxpayers were “forced to give them a 13% increase in funding while most of America received only a 3 to 5% increase,” SFLAction President Kristan Hawkins told TWS via email. The abortion business carried out 374,155 abortions and received $670.4 million in taxpayer funding during its 2021-2022 fiscal year — itself an increase of 9,252 abortions over pre-Dobbs levels.

“Leave it to Planned Parenthood to reveal their billions of dollars in abortion income on the heels of Mother’s Day weekend,” observed American Life League (ALL) Director Katie Brown Xavios. Planned Parenthood’s actions “included 402,230 abortions, sex education for young children, cross sex hormone distribution, and of course, the distribution of the deadly abortion pill.” ALL noted the report did not specify the number of abortions carried out by telehealth medication abortion.

Planned Parenthood increased its promotion of transgender procedures, primarily cross-sex hormone injections, introducing “Virtual Health Centers” at 23 Planned Parenthood affiliates. But as it did last year, Planned Parenthood lumped in the number of “transgender services” with “other procedures,” which fell dramatically to 77,858 from 177,237 in the 2023 report.

At least one Planned Parenthood affiliate has begun advertising transgender surgeries. “Planned Parenthood also offers some gender affirming surgeries to patients in the St. Louis area and refers to other providers when needed,” proclaims Planned Parenthood Great Rivers (PPGR) in Missouri.

“For yet another year, pregnant women seeking help at Planned Parenthood are sold an abortion 97% of the time, while prenatal services, miscarriage care and adoption referrals make up a minuscule minority of the options they offer. Meanwhile their priorities include their assault on parental rights, transgender ‘treatments’ and political spending to defeat Republicans,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America told TWS. “This report heightens the urgency to defund Big Abortion and stop forcing taxpayers to fund an industry that destroys unborn lives and preys on women and girls.”

Planned Parenthood employs 90 “patient navigators” whose actions “potentially break laws in pro-life states,” noted SFLAction.

Yet the “health care provider” reduced its health care services sharply since last year: Cancer screenings decreased 8.1%, pap tests fell 12.3%, and primary care visits declined by 13.7%, according to Michael New, a professor at The Catholic University of America.

Planned Parenthood: Undergoing STI Testing Is a Time of ‘Hope’

The nation’s largest abortion business styled its work as inspiring hope. “Every time a patient walks through the doors of a Planned Parenthood health center, it is an act of hope,” begins Planned Parenthood’s annual report. “Every time someone … goes with their partner for STI testing, they are filled with hope that the future they plan is possible.”

The report boasts of its ties to partisan political figures in the Democratic Party, noting Democrat Kamala Harris became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion business, choosing a Minnesota Planned Parenthood. It vows to continue its activism “to educate people about sexual and reproductive health and rights” — a concept Planned Parenthood believes endows all American minors and illegal immigrants with the right to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy, as well as transgender procedures.

Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson also vowed Planned Parenthood will continue to promote “abortion care” to “communities of color, low-income communities, those without documentation.” Her promise would cheer Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist who once attended a Ku Klux Klan rally. “That’s who Planned Parenthood is and who we’ll continue to be,” promised Johnson.

House Committee Moves to Defund Planned Parenthood

The report came as the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee, chaired by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), approved language to end federal funding to any entity that carries out abortions. On Monday, 183 legislators from almost every state urged Congress to defund Planned Parenthood.

“We commend our House Republican allies for working hard on a budget reconciliation process that finally gets taxpayers out of the abortion business and we encourage them to persevere,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America told TWS. “Now more than ever, we can hardly wait to see the ‘one big beautiful bill’ advance in Congress.”

Yet defunding efforts are reportedly opposed by Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Penn.), Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), and Jen Kiggans (R-Va.).

“Demanding that Americans prop up an organization that sells wrong-sex hormone treatments, that sterilizes minors, and that ends precious lives in the womb violates the consciences of many Americans,” Hawkins told TWS. “Planned Parenthood is a case study in how access to power equals wealth, and for those in the GOP who are inclined to support them, remember at election time they are coming for you!”

Until the bill passes, pro-life advocates vowed to fight on. “The fight isn’t over,” said an email sent Monday night by FRC Action, urging recipients to take action. “In fact, it’s really just begun.”

“As Congress looks to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, it’s high time that we end taxpayer funding of gender transition procedures and abortion providers,” says the FRC Action letter.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

PERKINS: For Congress, This Tick Tock Is Not about an App

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If you already battle high blood pressure, you may want to skip this next exercise. But for the rest of us, open a browser to USDebtClock.org and watch the neon-red digits spin faster than Reverend Al Sharpton when a TV camera blinks on. In the next few minutes, the display will rise by roughly $40 million, pushing the debt far beyond $36 trillion and accelerating toward $37 trillion. That’s more than $265,000 for every American household. And every added dollar is another chain of bondage for our children and grandchildren, a silent tax on their freedom and future.

Why the relentless rise? One reason is the waste, like that exposed last week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. His report confirms that President Joe Biden’s 2021 withdrawal left the Taliban with 78 aircraft, 40,000 military vehicles, and more than 300,000 weapons — hardware American taxpayers bought for roughly $25 billion. Terrorists are now better armed than when we entered Afghanistan in 2001, funded with borrowed money

That was the Biden administration. Surely Republican leadership will reverse course — right? Not so fast. Keep your eye on that spinning debt clock.

Congress is assembling what the president calls the “one, big, beautiful bill,” a massive budget reconciliation package that needs only 51 Senate votes. Reconciliation is a rare chance to rein in spending and strip out policies that violate the GOP’s professed values —v alues that have grown hazy in the absence of a formal platform but still generally include protecting life, safeguarding children, and practicing fiscal restraint.

Yet about 20 House Republicans are threatening to torpedo the entire bill unless Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion business — continues to receive roughly $700 million a year in fresh taxpayer funding. Let that sink in: self-described pro-life lawmakers are ready to keep borrowing from your grandchildren to bankroll an organization that Congress has investigated for trafficking in baby body parts, an organization repeatedly accused of shielding sexual predators from justice.

With chemical-abortion pills now accounting for as many as two-thirds of all abortions, Planned Parenthood is eyeing its next profit center: cross-sex hormones and other so-called “gender-affirming” drugs — even for minors.

Do you really want your federal tax dollars underwriting permanent medical harm to confused children?

Here’s the bottom line: Planned Parenthood is not in the business of saving lives; it is in the business of ending or permanently altering them — about 400,000 last year alone. A Republican White House and a Republican-led Congress have zero moral or fiscal justification for sending one more dime its way.

So pray for courage — and then pick up the phone. Tell your representative to pass a reconciliation bill that cuts spending, protects the unborn, and refuses to subsidize Planned Parenthood. The debt clock is ticking, and so is the conscience of the nation.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Explainer: How Trump ’s Proposed 2026 Budget Impacts Transgenderism, Abortion, Education, Immigration, and More

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President Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to end divisive, taxpayer-funded programs, and his proposed budget for the next fiscal year proves he is willing to save your money where his mouth is. The president’s budget specifically asks Congress to cut billions of dollars from government programs promoting “radical transgender ideology,” “LGBTQIA+” programs, and government “targeting [of] peaceful pro-life protesters” while transferring power back to the states and increasing federal funding for national defense, border security, and public safety.

President Trump detailed his proposed FY 2026 budget in a 46-page overview of major discretionary funding changes, revealing a fiscal and ideological break with his Democratic predecessors. In all, Trump would spend $1.69 trillion, including requesting more than $1 trillion in defense spending for the first time in U.S. history to assist in “repelling the invasion of our border” and “to clean up the mess President Trump inherited from the prior administration.”

Yet the White House refers to the spending guidelines as the “skinny budget,” since it offsets significant spending hikes with $136 billion in reductions that slash 22.6% from non-defense discretionary spending. “Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide,” according to a White House fact sheet that accompanied the budget release.

If the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed FY 2025 budget sought to insert equity into every program through a whole-of-government approach, the second Trump administration has set out to uproot every vestige of compulsory taxpayer funding of the radical Left. “Over the last four years, Government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism … and even our own invasion” by illegal immigrants, said Russ Vought, director of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB). “No agency was spared in the Left’s taxpayer-funded cultural revolution.” The administration cited $315 million the Biden administration spent on grant programs “to push ‘intersectionality,’ ‘racial equity,’ and LGBTQIA+ programming for preschoolers,” adding that the FY 2026 budget “ends all of that.”

The budget also promises to advance “the Administration’s goal of restoring federalism,” tying the well-being of families to the U.S. government’s respect for states’ rights and constitutional order. “Just as the Federal Government has intruded on matters best left to American families, it has intruded on matters best left to the levels of government closest to the people,” writes Vought in a letter transmitting the budget.

Here are the specific cuts and dollar amounts removed from the federal budget.

Abortion and the Right-to-Life Movement

President Trump’s proposed FY 2026 budget slashes or eliminates abortion funding while protecting pro-life advocates’ constitutional rights. Specifically, the budget would cut $6.2 billion from Global Health Programs and Family Planning initiatives. “The United States is the largest global contributor to programs that provide so-called family planning services through liberal NGOs, and have funded abortions. This stands in direct conflict with the President’s action reinstating the ‘Mexico City Policy.’ The Budget protects life and prevents a pro-abortion agenda from being promoted abroad with taxpayer dollars.” The president reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) policy, which bars any group that receives taxpayer funding from carrying out or advocating for abortion overseas. But the budget maintains funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) for current recipients.

The proposed budget also safeguards pro-life advocates’ rights by eliminating $545 million from Biden-Harris administration policies that charged the FBI with “targeting peaceful pro-life protesters, concerned parents at school board meetings, and citizens opposed to radical transgender ideology,” as well as erasing “DEI programs.” The budget also reestablishes fairness by cutting $193 million from General Legal Activities at the Justice Department, prioritizing criminal prosecutions but reducing the budget of the Civil Rights Division, “which the previous administration weaponized against States implementing election integrity measures, local police departments, and pro-life Americans.”

Slashing LGBTQ Radicalism and DEI Programs

President Trump made eliminating DEI, critical race theory, and government-sponsored racism and sexism a focus of his successful 2024 campaign, cementing the approach through a series of executive actions that prosecute race-based discrimination. Similarly, the Republican Party spent $65 million on ads highlighting the Democratic Party’s extremism on transgender ideology, making it the top reason swing voters decided not to vote for Kamala Harris, according to the Democratic polling firm Blueprint. The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts tens of billions of dollars in DEI and LGBTQIA+ funding, as well as climate change ideology.

The proposed budget cuts $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to restore “accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH. NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health” by denying the likely lab leak origin of COVID-19 and promoting gain-of-function research, which the president recently banned by executive order. Yet “NIH has also promoted radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth. For example, the NIH funded a study titled ‘Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones,’ in which two participants tragically committed suicide,” the budget notes. The president also cuts $3.6 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a blueprint that “eliminates duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary programs.”

The president would cut $8.3 billion from Economic Support Fund, Development Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, as part of a broader foreign policy to place American interests first and save Europe from itself, but also because “U.S. economic and development aid has been funneled to radical, leftist priorities, including climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and LGBTQ activities around the world.”

The budget cuts $3.5 billion from the National Science Foundation’s grants and research on “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” That comes in addition to another $1.1 billion cut to NSF’s Broadening Participation activities, which have underwritten such programs as “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM”; “addressing White Supremacy in the STEM profession”; and preparing “the next generation of DEI leaders to promote long-term, sustainable racial equity initiatives.”

The president moved dramatically against the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after taking office: exposing their radical grants before firing most of their staff and placing the agency under the authority of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The FY 2026 budget cuts $2.5 billion from USAID and “eliminates non-essential staff that were hired based on DEI and preferencing practices” while implementing executive orders 14169 to realign foreign aid and 14151 to eliminate DEI programs.

The budget cuts more than $1 billion in grants nestled under the Department of Justice, such as “$1 million to the National Opinion Research Center to ‘investigate the social ecological context of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime reporting.’ Further, the Budget realigns Violence Against Women Act funding with its original core mission to combat violence against women and directly serve victims — eliminating extraneous programs that divert resources from these core functions. For example, grant funding from the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) had been offered for biological men. In addition, OVW’s Rural Program grants were sent to train community-based Fa’afafine advocates — an organization of biological men that describes themselves as a ‘third-gender.’”

Pro-family experts singled out the VAWA proposal as a welcome gesture. “VAWA programs are intended to help women who are the victims of abuse and in recent years it has been invaded by gender ideology. Currently, women who escape abuse in a VAWA funded shelter could be forced to share private spaces with a man,” Mary Beth Waddell, director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “We are grateful that the president is calling out this injustice.”

The budget cuts $4.5 billion from the Department of Education while maintaining full federal funding for K-12 schools, consolidating 18 programs into one formula grant that allows the DOE to do as much work with fewer employees. “The new approach allows States and districts to focus on the core subjects — math, reading, science, and history — without the distractions of DEI and weaponization from the previous administration,” notes the budget. It also saves $127 million in administrative costs.

At the college level, the budget cuts $195 million from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Ed (FIPSE), noting that Congress has “abused FIPSE by using it to fund initiatives unrelated to students or institutional reforms, including earmarking $1.2 million for San Diego Community College’s LGBTQIA+ PRIDE Center staffing.” It also cuts $1.6 billion from TRIO and GEAR UP, two programs that incentivized colleges to engage low-income students. The administration argues that economic incentives have eliminated the need for the federal government to continue underwriting colleges and universities’ outreach. “A renewed focus on academics and scholastic accomplishment by [Institutions of Higher Education], rather than engaging in woke ideology with Federal taxpayer subsidies, would be a welcome change for students and the future of the Nation.” The budget also removes $691 million in cultural exchanges for foreign exchange students that prevent American students from acquiring high-demand skills, which the foreign students then take back to their home countries.

The budget cuts $1.6 billion by consolidating the Labor Department’s Make America Skilled Again (MASA) grants, defunding nonprofits promoting DEI, and “the hiring of illegal aliens and migrants; sometimes providing them subsidized housing in addition to a job.”

It cuts $1.3 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), scrutinizing NOAA grants for “George Mason University’s ‘Policy Experience in Equity Climate and Health’ fellowship, a workshop for ‘transgender women, and those who identify as nonbinary.’”

Trump’s budget cuts $646 million from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s non-disaster grant programs, seeking to curtail such FEMA activities as “webinars promoting the distribution of disaster aid based on ‘intersectional’ factors like sexual orientation and prioritizing ‘investment in diversity and inclusion efforts … and multicultural training’ over disaster prevention and response.” Under the Trump administration, “FEMA will no longer ‘instill equity as a foundation of emergency management.’” The document rightly notes that “FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the President in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated.”

The budget cuts $624 million from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) and Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), specifically citing an EDA grant “constructing a ‘Pride Plaza’ in Portland, Oregon.”

It cuts $602 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), effectively eliminating “wasteful, woke programming in NIFA, such as activities related to climate change, renewable energy, and promoting DEI in education that were prioritized under the Biden Administration.”

The Trump administration aims to gut federally funded woke programs aimed at Americans at both ends of life. The proposed FY 2026 budget eliminates $405 million from the Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), which is supposed to subsidize jobs and employment for poor senior citizens but “is effectively an earmark to leftist, DEI-promoting entities like the National Urban League, the Center for Workforce Inclusion, and Easter Seals.” At the same time, it cuts $315 million from Preschool Development Grants (PDG), which was “weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to extend the Federal reach and push DEI policies on to toddlers.” For instance, the “guiding principles” implemented by the Minnesota Department of Education for its PDG program include “intersectionality” and “racial equity.”

The budget cuts roughly $19 billion from programs promoting what the White House calls the “Green New Scam.”

The government’s proposed budget generally reins in government grants flowing to radical causes:

  • It cuts $167 million by consolidating the Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneurial Development Programs (EDP), deleting such programs as SCORE, “which in 2023 posted ‘Six Ways to Support LGBTQIA-Owned Businesses.’”
  • It cuts $129 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which “pushed radical gender ideology onto children, funding a project at the Seattle Children’s Hospital titled, ‘Using Telehealth to Improve Access to Gender-Affirming Care for BIPOC and Rural Gender-Diverse Youth.’”
  • It cuts $112 million from programs aimed at “Strengthening Institutions,” noting, “It is not the responsibility of Federal taxpayers to support a new ‘Guided Pathways Village, expanding the current Learning Communities and creating a new Ethnic and Pride Inclusion Center for historically underserved students, including LGBTQ+ students.’”
  • It cuts $100 million in “divisive racial discrimination and environmental justice grants that were destined to go to organizations that advance radical ideologies.”
  • It cuts $70 million from Teacher Quality Partnerships, which field grants indoctrinating teachers to begin “acknowledging and responding to systemic forms of oppression and inequity, including racism, ableism, ‘gender-based’ discrimination, homophobia, and ageism.”
  • It cuts $55 million from Complex Crisis Fund, “a catch-all slush fund for nation-building projects and political interference” which “has been weaponized to mandate DEI and LGBTQ policies be implemented in recipient countries as a condition of aid to small businesses.”
  • It cuts $49 million from the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, a 35% strategic reduction to “refocus away from DEI and Title IX transgender cases … while removing their ability to push DEI programs and promote radical transgender ideology.”

The proposed FY 2026 budget also cuts a total of $19.2 billion from Energy Department initiatives it describes as part of the “Green New Scam.”

Getting the Government Out of the ‘Disinformation’ Business

The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts $491 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as part of its efforts to eliminate “weaponization and waste.” The budget “eliminates programs focused on so-called misinformation and propaganda as well as external engagement offices such as international affairs. These programs and offices were used as a hub in the Censorship Industrial Complex to violate the First Amendment.”

It also cuts $315 million for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which supported Ukrainian government efforts to brand critics as exponents of Russian disinformation and “funded the now-infamous Disinformation Index Foundation that targeted and blacklisted conservative media outlets like Federalist, Newsmax, TAC, the Blaze,” and others.

Restoring National Sovereignty

President Trump has identified himself with the words “America First,” and his budget stakes out similar priorities. It cuts $1.7 billion from the United Nations, UNESCO, and World Health Organization dues, implementing executive order 14199. However, the president may fund these organizations out of a separate funding source “to preserve maximum negotiating leverage.” It also eliminates $1.6 billion from United Nations “peacekeeping” missions that wage war under the U.N.’s blue-helmeted auspices. And it cuts $1.5 billion from Food for Peace, recognizing the waste and abuse of foreign aid transfers from U.S. taxpayers to foreign oligarchs.

The budget also acknowledges that the free market and local business development create sustainable prosperity, not foreign aid. “The program also distorts and undermines local and regional markets where the aid often could be purchased for less and with less waste,” says the budget. Similarly, it cuts $75 million from Transition Initiatives, a program that leads to “further destabilization” around the world and “funds a wasteful tangle of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and partisan cutouts pushing a leftist agenda around the world.”

Borders, Patriotism, National Unity

The budget increases funding for the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees many border enforcement and deportation efforts — by a whopping 65%, or $43.8 billion in additional funds. It cuts nearly $2 billion from programs for refugees and Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs), funds which “were weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to give cash handouts, medical services, and job training to illegal immigrants” and to release children in the custody of “insufficiently vetted sponsors,” effectively making the government complicit in child trafficking.

It cuts $650 million from the Shelter and Services Program earmarked for “non-citizen migrants,” tax payments which “funded radical leftist NGOs, who spent funding to facilitate mass illegal migration into the interior of the Nation … weakening the United States from within, taking resources away from American citizens, and promoting crime and decay in America’s cities.” And it cuts $247 million from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which the Biden administration used “to facilitate mass illegal migration by allowing illegal migrants to fly into the interior without proper documentation.”

Yet the budget radically increases funding for the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to hire more air traffic controllers; for Rail Safety and Infrastructure grants to prevent tragedies such as the train derailment and intentional detonation of a train in East Palestine, Ohio; for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to intercept fentanyl; and for stronger trade enforcement against technological and competitiveness threats from the People’s Republic of China.

“Linking proposed decreases in funding to areas of egregious mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and reorienting these dollars to their intended purpose, as opposed to ideological ones, sends a strong message that taxpayers deserve respect, and the use of their hard-earned money should be stewarded well,” Waddell told TWS.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Republicans Face a Come-to-Jesus Moment on Reconciliation

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It was only a matter of time before House Republicans stepped on the big landmines buried under the landscape of reconciliation. For months, GOP leaders had been tiptoeing around the tripwires, desperately trying to keep the fragile peace. But this week, with the clock ticking down to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) self-imposed Memorial Day deadline, there was nowhere else to step but smack-dab onto the most explosive debate of the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”

For Johnson, who had to be dreading this part of the negotiations, finally getting his 220-member family to sit down and slog through the sticking points on Medicaid reform is a feat in itself. Whether he can cobble together a unified majority at the end of it is the $1.5 trillion question. Part of his headache, as hardline conservatives are quick to point out, is that moderate Republicans are about as enthusiastic about reducing the deficit as their big-spending Democratic counterparts. Especially if it involves paring down bloated programs that Democrats are crying wolf over.

In a two-hour meeting Tuesday night, the collision course Republicans have been on since the 2024 elections finally came to a head. By the end of it, about a dozen GOP members from deep blue states seemed to emerge victorious, somehow managing to persuade the speaker to back off of two pools of taxpayer dollars that were ripe for reform: Medicaid’s Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) and the state and local tax deduction (SALT). For the swing-state Republicans, it was a coup, but one that came at a very steep price.

If those programs are off limits for a major overhaul, House Freedom Caucus members warned, Republicans have lost the biggest bites of the apple when it comes to Medicaid savings. Some experts estimated the changes to both FMAP and SALT could be worth as much as $600 billion of the GOP’s $880 billion target. And frankly, conservatives worry, they’re running out of places to cut. No one understands that better than Mike Johnson, who gave his word during the war over the budget framework that the House would find at least $1.5 trillion in savings in the final bill. And yet, in this “ultimate group project,” as some are describing the reconciliation package, he had little choice.

The problem for the speaker is the same one that’s given him nightmares for the last year and a half. “[H]e can’t please the moderates without risking an uproar from conservatives. And vice versa,” Punchbowl News’s reporters point out. It’s the “dynamic that’s plagued the last three Republican speakers. Moderates help give Republicans their majorities. Yet they’re often forced to swallow conservative policies that don’t fit the political makeup of their districts.”

Unfortunately for everyone, these concessions only make the path to enacting Donald Trump’s agenda that much murkier. Somehow, Republicans have to find a way to pay for the extension of the president’s 2017 tax relief — or else, Johnson cautioned, everyone is going to have “an increased tax amount [of] $2,000 to $3,000 per family. That’s what’s going to happen if we don’t make the tax cuts permanent.”

Now, as Johnson and his committee chairs scramble to come up with a Plan B to find the dollars they need to offset those costs, even he’s had to adjust his thinking — and his calendar. “It just made sense for us to push pause for a week to make sure that we do this right,” the speaker told reporters Tuesday. Instead of rushing the process, the thorny mark-ups that were scheduled for this week have been pushed off until leaders can find a solution that pleases both sides. “It’s going to take a lot more of these kinds of conversations, ultimately, to get to an understanding that 99% of the House Republican Conference can agree with,” Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) admitted.

So what exactly are the programs that were taken off the table? The short answer is a hugely complicated web of payments, tax caps, and reimbursements that have been abused since Barack Obama expanded Medicaid to people who had no business being on it. But there’s a lot more to these four-letter acronyms (which are more like four-letter words to fiscal hawks).

State and Local Taxes (SALT)

“For as long as Americans have paid federal income taxes,” Bloomberg explains, “they’ve been able to subtract some of what they pay to their state and local governments from their taxable income. This federal deduction for state and local taxes — the SALT deduction, for short — has a big influence on how the tax burden is divided. It tends to help taxpayers in wealthier, more urban states, where sales taxes are higher and real estate costs more.” Back in his first term, President Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 in every state.

With that cap set to expire, GOP moderates (especially the ones from wealthier blue states like New York, New Jersey, California, and Maryland, where things like property taxes and the cost of living are much higher) want to raise the deduction to anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000. Most conservatives would rather keep the number where it is or eliminate the deduction altogether. After all, most of them represent people who would never be able to claim that write-off. (Only 10% of Americans who itemize their taxes do.) Not to mention that expanding the cap would cost money that the government doesn’t have.

“Lifting the SALT cap to $15,000 for individuals and $30,000 for couples,” House Republicans have warned, “would cost around $500 billion relative to extending Trump’s expiring tax cuts.” Enter the fiscal hawks’ outrage. Instead of finding cuts, moderates are finding ways to spend even more. Still, Johnson vows, “We’re going to find the equilibrium point on SALT that no one will be totally delighted with, but it’ll solve the equation, and we’ll get it done.”

Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP)

Heads collectively exploded when Johnson was asked about a far more egregious practice: Medicaid’s FMAP. When reporters pressed the speaker about changing the federal cost share, the Louisianan replied, “No. … I think we’re ruling that out as well, but stay tuned,” he said.

This debate goes back even further, all the way to the Obama administration when Democrats grossly expanded the government’s health care program to entire populations of previously ineligible, able-bodied Americans. Thanks to that White House and Joe Biden’s, millions of people have flooded the Medicaid rolls, most of whom aren’t seniors, children, or disabled — and who, by their very participation — are robbing truly needy people of the care and benefits they deserve. That problem only ballooned under COVID, as Biden bogged down the program with financially-strapped — but otherwise unqualified — Americans.

Now, years later, Medicaid is struggling to keep up with the burden of enrollees it was never meant to serve — pushing legitimate patients with disability or chronic illnesses to the sidelines.

Republicans have been clamoring to radically overhaul the system and return Medicaid to its original parameters, saving taxpayers billions of dollars in the process. But states have been reluctant to do that because of this FMAP loophole that actually encourages them to grow the program beyond its original purpose. As Stefani Buhajla explained in National Review, the deep dark secret of Medicaid is that its federal funding actually “undermines the program’s core mission.”

Right now, the federal government reimburses a whopping 90% of expenses of those “working-age, able-bodied adults” who were folded into Medicaid under Obama, “regardless of the state’s level of wealth.” In other words, “the federal government provides more-generous support for less needy individuals and comparatively less support for those who are in greatest need of care,” Buhajla emphasized. Those same states don’t receive anywhere close to that reimbursement for the participants who belong in the program.

“It’s nuts,” Family Research Council’s Quena González told The Washington Stand. “It incentivizes states to continue to expand services and eligibility and availability — but only to the expansion population. To those who are disabled or who truly do need some sort of help like this, the states are less incentivized.”

But, he insisted, the FMAP itself is broken, because no state is reimbursed at less than 50%. It’s a great deal for them. “Every state is robbing the American taxpayer by reaching into the till. But they’re hyper-incentivized to do this when they expand beyond the traditional Medicaid populations. See the perverse incentive here? If you’re a blue state Republican from New York or New Jersey, and your state expanded Medicaid by going into these ineligible populations, you get a 90% federal match.” If your colleagues want to cut that, González explained, “it’s not going to be popular back home. So now you’re over a barrel. You’re wedded to this lopsided expansion category — which, by the way, penalizes states that refused to expand Medicaid like Florida and Texas.”

Instead, he continued, Florida and Texas are put in the position of subsidizing the bad choices of leaders in the northeast. It creates this impossible situation where liberal and moderate Republicans from these blue states are “fighting tooth and nail to keep a mega-subsidy that never should have existed.” And the conservatives’ point is that just by returning Medicaid to its original parameters, Republicans could probably save hundreds of millions of dollars.

The House Freedom Caucus understands this. There are more able-bodied Americans “on Medicaid now than any other group,” they stressed, “which means the neediest Americans get lower priority. … This is why Medicaid spending has skyrocketed 51% in the last 5 years alone. This isn’t ‘cutting benefits,’” they reiterated in rebuttal of the Democrats’ claims. “We’re trying to fix the program and protect the most vulnerable.”

On the Senate side, Dr. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) agreed. “We have over 90 million people on Medicaid now. Ninety million,” he repeated on “Washington Watch” Monday. “It was meant to be [for] those who need that help, [who] need that hand up. It was meant for folks in a nursing home [who] maybe that can’t afford nursing home care or folks with a disability. The poorest amongst us is who it was meant for.” And yet, he shook his head, “It’s on a rocket ship as far as the amount of money we’re spending on it.”

Johnson’s Dilemma

“But if you take FMAP reforms off the table and also raise the SALT cap, where do you look for savings?” González wonders. “You can’t say, as a House moderate, ‘We get 100% of everything we want, or we take our marbles and go home.’ At some point, we have to tell them, ‘We can’t afford all of this. We can’t afford the president’s tax cuts, the push for border security and defense, and also make the tax cuts permanent.’ Everyone is realizing that there’s just not enough money to go around and do everything they want to do.” Not only are we “robbing from our children,” he argued, “but we’re playing fast and loose with the truth about where we are financially.”

While there are still ways to salvage some reforms — new work provisions for the Medicaid expansion category is one — the speaker is walking a tight line with conservatives, who are very aware how much they’ve given up already. “I don’t make promises that I can’t keep,” Johnson underscored, presumably about his pledge to conservatives to cut spending. “This is a consensus-building operation,” he implored. “We’ve been working really hard to take all the input and find that kind of equilibrium point where everybody is at least satisfied. Some people are not going to be elated by every provision of the bill. It’s impossible.”

And let’s be honest, Marshall piled on, “It’s an uphill battle. There’s no doubt about it.” But, he insisted, “I have a lot of confidence in Speaker Mike Johnson [and Rep.] Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) over there on the Budget Committee. Those folks, I think they’re doing great work. I think we’ll get it done.” He paused and smiled. “But there’ll be a little bit of hair-pulling yet to get it all the way across the finish line.”

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. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.