Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, says President Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill doesn’t do enough to reduce the deficit.
In an interview with Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd, Johnson criticized the bill for not bringing government spending back to pre-pandemic levels and didn’t answer whether he would commit to voting for it if Trump asked him to compromise.
“I will talk to him,” Johnson said.
3 questions with Ron Johnson
Have you changed your mind on the bill?
“No, as a matter of fact, the more people I talked to that I enlighten with the actual facts and numbers. When they see that, and I think they agree that the primary goal of this Republican budget resolution ought to be to reduce the deficit. Now, we’re worth $37 trillion in debt. [Congressional Budget Office] projects we’ll add $22 trillion to that over the next 10 years, bumping up to about $59 trillion. As I do the math, we’re probably going to be increasing the deficit, pushing it up to $60 [trillion], $61 [trillion], $62 trillion when we should be trying to control it. And so that ought to be the first goal, but you know, and we’re not accomplishing that. I know people, it sounds like $1.5 trillion is a lot of money, but that’s about 1.3% of the $89.3 trillion we’ll spend over the next 10 years. So it’s just, it’s falling short of the mark.”
What do you want to cut?
“So I refer to it as returning to a reasonable pre-pandemic baseline of spending, and I’ve laid out a number of options. Go back to [former President Bill] Clinton, [former President Barack] Obama, or Trump, to their actual allies in 1998, 2014, 2019. Leave Social Security, Medicare, and interest alone. You can actually exempt Medicaid and still get down to by taking those outlays, increasing by population inflation, a very reasonable control. You’d have to for the baseline budget of somewhere between $5.5 and $6.5 trillion. This year we’ll spend over $7 [trillion] next year, you know, over $7 [trillion] again.”
Do you support work requirements for Medicaid?
“Well, let’s describe what we’re talking about now. We’re primarily talking about Medicaid expansion, which is Obamacare, which pays providers $.90 on the dollar versus $.60 on the dollar for disabled children. And so it’s that Medicaid expansion for single, able-bodied, working-age adults, childless that is crowding out spending for disabled children. So we need to fix that. It’s also leading to literally the states stealing from the federal government.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
____
Lynn Menegon produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Scotto also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR