On Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) spoke to CNN's Jake Tapper about the deficit spending in the House's budget.
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00:00Well, we need to establish goals. Listen, this is the weekend we honor the service and sacrifice of the finest among us.
00:05You know, more than a million that died to defend this nation.
00:08I don't think they served and sacrificed to leave our children completely mortgaged.
00:13Their future and their prospects diminished because of it.
00:18So we need to be responsible.
00:19The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit.
00:24This actually increases it.
00:26But let me describe the mess.
00:28President Obama averaged about $910 billion of deficits per year.
00:32President Trump in his first three years averaged about 810.
00:35Then COVID hit over $3 trillion in deficit.
00:38It should have ended there.
00:39We should have immediately returned to a pre-pandemic level spending.
00:42But President Biden averaged $1.9 trillion of deficits over his four years.
00:48And according to CBO, those deficits now average $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years.
00:53We'll add $22 trillion.
00:54And I'm sorry, the House bill would probably add, I've calculated $4 trillion.
00:59You're saying you have these independent analysts saying it's $3.3 to $4 trillion.
01:03I agree with that.
01:04We have to reduce the deficit.
01:06And so we need to focus on spending, spending, spending.
01:10You don't defeat the deep state by funding it.
01:14Right.
01:14So what changes are you going to push for in this bill when the Senate takes it up?
01:19You want to make $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, you say.
01:24Just for comparison, that's the equivalent of almost the entire federal budget from last year.
01:28Here's where all that money went last year.
01:30We're just holding up a chart.
01:31You already know the percentages here of how much it's going to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Pentagon, and on and on.
01:37Where would you make cuts?
01:41First of all, you take a different approach.
01:44You don't start at $7 trillion, a completely unjustified level spending, and then subject yourself to death by 1,000 cuts.
01:50You start with a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending.
01:53You've heard people talk about zero-based budgeting.
01:55I'm talking about a budget of $5.5 to $6.5 trillion.
01:59Those are options from Clinton, Obama, and Trump, where you just take their actual outlays, plus them up by population growth and inflation, leaving Social Security, Medicare, and interest untouched.
02:10That would leave you somewhere between $5.5 and $6.5 trillion.
02:13So you start there, but you have to do the work, and you need the time to do the work.
02:18I have to believe when you go through $7,000 billion of spending, if you go by it line by line, like Doge has done, you will find hundreds of billions of dollars.
02:28And I've proven this in terms of where the spending occurs.
02:30Hundreds of billions of dollars of spending, if you eliminate, nobody would even notice it, other than the grifters who are sucking down the waste, fraud, and abuse.
02:39So President Trump has suggested that—
02:42So you've got to do the work.
02:43Yeah.
02:43President Trump has suggested that the debt is not really top of mind of his concerns.
02:47He wants Republicans to fall in line.
02:49He wants Republicans to pass the bill.
02:51You told CNN, quote, somebody's got to be the dad that says, I know y'all want to go to Disney World, but we can't afford it.
02:58I guess I'm going to be that guy, unquote.
03:00So how determined are you to be that guy if it actually means telling President Trump you are going to vote against the bill and you're going to try to get other Republican senators to join you unless there are major, major changes?
03:13Well, in 2010, I sprang out of the Tea Party movement, and as I did parades, I would shout, this is a fight for freedom.
03:23We are mortgaging our children's future.
03:25It's wrong.
03:25It's immoral.
03:26It has to stop.
03:27I haven't changed.
03:28My campaign promise in 2010 and every campaign after that was to stop mortgaging our children's future.
03:34It's immoral.
03:35It's wrong.
03:36It has to stop.
03:37And so he may not be worried about that.
03:40I am extremely worried about that.
03:42That is my primary goal running for Congress.
03:45This is our moment.
03:46We have witnessed an unprecedented level of increased spending, 58 percent since 2019, other than World War II.
03:55This is our only chance to reset that to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending.
04:00And, again, I think you can do it, and the spending that we would eliminate, people wouldn't even notice.
04:05But you have to do the work, which takes time.
04:07That's part of the problem here is we've rushed this process.
04:10We haven't taken the time.
04:12We've done it the same old way, exempt most programs, take a look at a couple, tweak them a little bit, try and rely on a CBO score, and then have that score completely out of context with anything that, you know, really we ought to be talking about, like the $22 trillion of additional deficit over the next 10 years.
04:27So we're out of time, but I'm just wondering if you could just give me a number.
04:32How many other Republican senators do you think share your concerns and are willing to make work to make major changes to this bill?
04:41I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.
04:49That's it.
04:49That's it.