There are a few uncomfortable truths about the House Freedom Caucus — and the upcoming Congress, where Republicans will have unified control of government, will test them all.
The first truth is there’s a sweet spot in a House Republican majority for the Freedom Caucus to be most effective. The HFC wants Republicans to be in the majority, but if the GOP controls too many seats — like, say, a 30-seat margin — Republican leaders can overcome Freedom Caucus objections.
Of course, if the majority is too thin, almost any Republican has veto power. (House Republicans are looking at starting the next Congress with just a one- or two-seat cushion on votes.)
The next truth is that the Freedom Caucus, a group that’s principally become a cheerleader for the president-elect, has had a more tumultuous relationship with Donald Trump than many assume. The most recent chairman, Rep. Bob Good, endorsed Ron DeSantis in the GOP presidential primary, straining relationships with Trumpworld. And even though two of Trump’s chiefs of staff — Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows — were founders of the HFC, neither man left the White House on the best terms with Trump.
The Freedom Caucus was also one of the few GOP factions to stand up to Trump during his first term, sinking his Obamacare replacement bill before the president and Republican leaders adopted the Freedom Caucus’ changes undermining preexisting conditions. Those changes later doomed the bill in the Senate.
The last truth is that the Freedom Caucus may disobey Trump even before he takes office for his next term.
Speaker Mike Johnson has taken great pains to cozy up to the incoming president, earning his complete and total endorsement. But on Jan. 3, when a new Congress is sworn in and a speaker vote takes place, Johnson could face resistance from HFC members.
“Mike Johnson has been an abysmal failure for the past year, and I hope that he will be different now with this new opportunity,” Good told NOTUS last week, citing the speaker’s repeated use of stopgap spending bills.
Unlike Johnson’s fate, Good’s is known: He won’t be in Congress on Jan. 3. He lost his primary to a more Trump-friendly Republican. And if you listen to the new Freedom Caucus chairman, Rep. Andy Harris, none of these truths will be much of a problem.
“We’ll have more of a role in policy, since we’re going to have a Republican in the White House,” Harris told NOTUS as he rattled off the reasons why — as the HFC enters its second decade of existence — the Freedom Caucus is poised to be a power broker.
“There’s no question about it,” Harris said. “Pound for pound, per capita, we are the strongest supporters of President Trump on Capitol Hill.”
Over the course of that first decade, it’s true that the Freedom Caucus evolved from a group primarily founded to combat the creep of closed rules on the House floor — essentially, conservatives wanted votes on their amendments — to one that exists to reflexively support Trump.
Whether that’s by design or accident, Freedom Caucus members think it’s an advantage as Trump takes back the White House.
“We anticipate having a big role in supporting the president’s agenda,” Rep. Eli Crane told NOTUS. “I think we’re going to be pretty laser-focused on that.”
Where the Freedom Caucus of the past might have looked at a Trump presidency as an opportunity to enact policies the conservative group wants, the Freedom Caucus now seems to look at its conservative group as a vehicle to bolster the Trump presidency.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean pushing for legislation that is anathema to conservatives. But the Freedom Caucus seems to have learned from the past, from the parable of Bob Good, whose oppositional nature put the HFC at odds with much of the House GOP.
“He didn’t have a good relationship with the president, Mike Johnson and like 90% of the conference,” former Freedom Caucus member Warren Davidson said of Good. “Which, inherently, was a barrier to the success of the Freedom Caucus.”
Davidson was kicked out of the Freedom Caucus for endorsing Good’s primary challenger, incoming Rep. John McGuire, but the HFC seems to have learned something from Davidson anyway: Play nice.
When NOTUS asked Harris about Johnson, he ignored much of the controversy that has aggravated Freedom Caucus members, like Johnson putting a Ukraine funding bill on the floor, working with Democrats to keep the government open and repeatedly relying on suspension votes to pass key legislation.
“It’s a good relationship,” Harris said of Johnson. “Mike has so far delivered on what he’s promised to do. And again, you know, I have no reason to not believe that he’s going to deliver on things like not bringing an omnibus to the floor, which is a huge issue with us.”
An omnibus — especially one jammed up against the holidays — is perhaps the Freedom Caucus’ ultimate villain. A dreaded year-end spending bill, loaded up with Democratic priorities and spending numbers Democrats set, constitutes a high crime for the Freedom Caucus.
But with so few levers to force Johnson to work with hard-line Republicans instead of Democrats, many in the Freedom Caucus expressed their displeasure with the speaker by tanking historically party-line procedural votes.
This new Freedom Caucus, however? Harris told NOTUS he doesn’t envision using that tactic much next term.
“That’s much less likely to happen, just the way the dynamics work,” Harris said. “We were the lone voices in the desert. Now we have the Senate and we have the president, and I think that that’ll make it much less likely.”
It might be less likely, but tanking rules will be logistically easier than ever given the margins. With a paper-thin majority, every Republican lawmaker will have de facto veto authority over the conference. There’s undeniable power in that. And some Freedom Caucus members see the margins as their greatest leverage point.
“When we have a smaller majority,” Crane said, “the Freedom Caucus definitely has the ability to have a bigger influence on outcomes.”
But the tight margin has functionally empowered any Republican lawmaker to be a Freedom Caucus of his own. HFC Policy Chair Rep. Chip Roy seemed aware of that reality.
“If you just set this close majority, we’ve got to get everybody on the same page,” Roy said. “That’s the bottom line. Otherwise, it’ll fracture.”
There are, of course, inherent benefits for the Freedom Caucus working inside a system that is, for the most part, ideologically aligned with the group.
During this Congress, Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House, so House Republicans knew that their hard-line, conservative policies stood virtually no chance of becoming law.
Freedom Caucus members voting down bills and rules forced Johnson to work with Democrats to keep the government open. But ultimately, since Johnson wasn’t interested in a preelection shutdown, he was always going to have to play ball with Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden. Standing on principle was an easy way for conservatives to grandstand without actually accomplishing much.
With a trifecta, conservatives getting in the way of a broadly accepted GOP legislation only serves to anger allies.
That gives the Freedom Caucus an incentive to try to influence policy from the inside instead.
That work starts with, as former Chair Rep. Andy Biggs dubbed them, “the DOGE guys.”
Biggs means Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk of the inaugural Department of Government Efficiency. Trump tasked the two men with targeting federal waste, and they have already announced a plan to chop $500 billion in annual federal expenditures that are “authorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended.”
With so much federal spending on the chopping block, GOP lawmakers are eager to be the ones holding the cleaver.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has already been tapped to lead an official DOGE subcommittee on Oversight, and Rep. Aaron Bean has already announced a DOGE caucus.
For his part, Biggs told NOTUS that he sees his own legislative agenda working in tandem with DOGE. Rep. Byron Donalds — another Freedom Caucus member and Trump ally — said the ultimate goal should be to bring spending down to pre-COVID-19 levels.
There’s another reason to think the Freedom Caucus might swim with the political tides next term rather than against the current: Harris is an appropriator — a senior one at that.
Harris is currently the chairman of the Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration Appropriations subcommittee. And he has respect for and intimate knowledge of the government process. For years, he’s had to work with leadership allies like Rep. Tom Cole — the current Appropriations chairman — to advance his subcommittee’s bill.
But these developments don’t mean that the Freedom Caucus is ready to abandon its iconoclastic streak entirely. As Biggs said, “The caucus is the caucus.”
It’s a brand that even influential HFC member Rep. Ralph Norman told NOTUS has become toxic for many mainstream Republicans.
“Some people, it hurts the fundraising,” Norman said, explaining why some Republicans have actually dropped out of the Freedom Caucus.
But Norman defended the group. “I get that some people think we’re radicals,” he said. “I get that everybody has their opinion. But we’re growing.”
“When they say they hate the Freedom Caucus, name me what we propose that they hate,” he added.
For Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Republican who is not part of the Freedom Caucus but has strong feelings on just about everything, the broader conference’s thoughts about the HFC boil down to a simple question: “What’s the root of the word conservative?”
“It’s to conserve,” he answered. “I don’t think the Freedom Caucus is conservative. Being conservative is about conserving things, not destroying things.”
True to form, Good may have done irreparable damage to his relationship with Trump by endorsing DeSantis. But with Harris at the helm, and Trump on the verge of his triumphant return to Washington, Freedom Caucus members who spoke to NOTUS were clear: A rocky relationship with the party leader is not the model they plan to adopt this next Congress.
After all, if Good’s fate is any indication, resisting Trump now would amount to political suicide.
“The Freedom Caucus is on board, fully on board, with the Make America Great Again and the America First agenda,” Rep. Andrew Clyde told NOTUS. “We need to make that happen and that’s what we’ll be doing.”
Biggs, too, was clear-eyed about the Freedom Caucus’ ambitions for the next term.
“What I see as the role is to support the advancement of the agenda that we all were elected on,” Biggs told NOTUS.
And, summoning the 1990s cartoon “Pinky and the Brain,” Biggs added that the Freedom Caucus would be doing “the same thing that we do every day, Pinky: We take over the world.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.