Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., is seen in the U.S. Capitol during a series of votes on Thursday, April 3, 2025.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Sen. Ron Johnson said Sunday that he thinks he has enough GOP colleagues on board with his opposition to the House’s “big, beautiful bill” to stall its progress and make changes.
The Wisconsin Republican’s remarks underscore the potentially difficult path ahead for the sweeping domestic policy package, which just narrowly passed the House last week.
As House Speaker Mike Johnson urges his Senate colleagues not to “meddle” with the bill too much, fiscal hawks in the Senate have signaled they won’t support the package in its current form.
“We have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” Sen. Johnson said on CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’
Sen. Johnson and some of his Senate colleagues have raised concerns that the House bill will lead to skyrocketing federal deficits, a criticism that Speaker Johnson has brushed aside.
Sen. Johnson said that the “first goal” of the budget reconciliation process “should be to reduce the deficit, this actually increases it.”
He has repeatedly said that the federal government needs to return to “pre-pandemic level spending.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also on Sunday called the spending cuts in the House bill “wimpy and anemic.”
“But I still would support the bill, even with wimpy and anemic cuts, if they weren’t going to explode the debt,” Paul said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“The problem is the math doesn’t add up, they’re going to explode the debt,” he continued.
An analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the sweeping package could increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion over the next decade.
