Sen. Ron Johnson says the spending cuts in President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” amounts to a “rounding error” in the amount of money Uncle Sam spends each year.
Mr. Johnson said the United States is slated to add $2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, and the bill the House passed Thursday will add $4 trillion more.
“We have to focus on spending, spending, spending,” the Wisconsin Republican said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “You don’t defeat the deep state by funding it.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, has celebrated the spending reductions in the bill that passed his chamber, saying the measure will yield $1.5 trillion in annual savings.
However, Mr. Johnson said that does not go far enough when the nation spends over $7 trillion annually and brings in about $5 trillion.
“This is a budget reconciliation process, so we ought to talk about numbers,” he said. “One of my disappointments with the House process is about the only number we heard about is $1.5 trillion [in spending reductions], which sounds like a lot, but is only $150 billion per year.”
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Federal spending has jumped by nearly $3 trillion since 2019, meaning “$150 billion on that is basically a rounding error,” he said. “So we need to get serious about this.”
Mr Johnson is pushing for $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade without changing Social Security and Medicare, the biggest drivers of federal spending. He said Congress must return to pre-pandemic spending levels, but did not highlight where the reductions would come from.
Mr. Johnson said if lawmakers go line by line through the budget, they will find “hundreds of billions of dollars” to cut that “no one would even notice … other than the grifters who are sucking down the waste, fraud and abuse.”
