As the House recently worked through adopting the Senate’s budget, there was one group of holdouts that Speaker Mike Johnson — and President Donald Trump — had to win over: The House Freedom Caucus.
“We’ve become the most significant faction in Congress, certainly,” Rep. Clay Higgins, a Freedom Caucus member, told NOTUS during the recent budget battle. “Possibly in the history of Congress.”
In exchange for their votes on the budget, Freedom Caucus members were promised substantial spending cuts. In fact, an initial memo from the White House, obtained by NOTUS, promises “at Least $2 Trillion” in cuts over 10 years.
As the House and Senate begin the difficult process of writing a reconciliation bill, the Freedom Caucus has emerged as a key player in negotiations. It’s a group with a proven track record of dissent that has to be taken seriously. And while more moderate Republicans insist the reconciliation bill can’t include Medicaid cuts, there are real doubts that those lawmakers would stand up to Trump and vote no if they don’t get their way.
There is little such doubt about the Freedom Caucus.
In its 10 years of existence, the Freedom Caucus has proven it has no problem voting against the majority of Republicans — whether that’s during speakership elections, the 2017 health care bill or procedural rule votes.
But as much as the Freedom Caucus wants to present itself as the only Republicans willing to say no, they’ve also shown a remarkable willingness to say yes.
In true Washington fashion, a day after the White House issued that memo promising at least $2 trillion in spending cuts, the White House issued a new memo, also obtained by NOTUS, now promising “at least $1 trillion in spending cuts.”
After vowing repercussions for Speaker Johnson’s decision, almost exactly a year ago, to put Ukraine funding on the floor and pass it with a coalition of Republicans and Democrats, the Freedom Caucus got onboard with handing Johnson the gavel again. It’s what Trump wanted — and no one in the Freedom Caucus dared disobey Trump.
The group’s ideological and strategic flexibility is one of the reasons that, even as these conservatives talk a big game about spending cuts in the reconciliation bill, there has been some shade from the only Republican to vote against both iterations of the budget that the House adopted: Rep. Thomas Massie.
Massie, a libertarian-minded conservative who has never joined the Freedom Caucus, thinks his colleagues got played by the promises of future spending reductions in exchange for tax cuts now.
“I knew all along they’d trade the cow for magic beans,” he recently told CNN. “These beans are like the rest; they don’t sprout.”
In terms of its ability to influence the reconciliation bill — or to ultimately vote no if its members don’t get their way — there are actually many reasons to look at the Freedom Caucus with some skepticism.
First and foremost, the Freedom Caucus is a pro-Trump group.
Several current members — most notably the group’s chair, Rep. Andy Harris — proudly proclaim the caucus as the president’s biggest advocate in Washington. As Trump violates a number of conservative principles, the Freedom Caucus has dutifully stood by, applauding a presidency marked by executive orders that step on Congress’ Article 1 authority, tariffs that constrict free markets and a reconciliation bill that will balloon the debt by trillions.
The Freedom Caucus’ evolution from a group of principled conservatives to reliable Trump cheerleaders has not been lost on former members of the group.
“One of the things Trump has demanded is absolute loyalty,” Mark Sanford, a retired lawmaker who once belonged to the Freedom Caucus, told NOTUS.
Sanford continued that there is “loyalty to ideals” and there is “loyalty to person.” And there are times when those two principles are in conflict and “you’ve got to pick one or the other.”
“The Freedom Caucus has chosen the latter,” Sanford said, “and that’s been to its undoing.”
***
When the Freedom Caucus started 10 years ago, members were most concerned about one thing: Fixing the legislative process.
Congress had become closed off. Lawmakers couldn’t get votes on bills or amendments — even ones that would pass or be adopted. Leadership, the Freedom Caucus said, had too much power. Individual members had too little.
So concerned with fixing the process was the Freedom Caucus at the time that members insisted they were willing to accept less conservative outcomes if it meant a more open process. They wanted to vote on individual appropriations bills, with open rules, and let the legislative chips fall as they may.
The Freedom Caucus today has a very different attitude.
When Freedom Caucus member Rep. Anna Paulina Luna got 218 signatures on a discharge petition to allow new parents to temporarily vote remotely, the caucus worked against her to make sure her proposal would never reach the floor.
Rather than support an open process, where a member with a majority behind her could get a vote on legislation, the Freedom Caucus extracted promises from Speaker Johnson that he would somehow shut down the discharge petition. In fact, Freedom Caucus members withheld their votes on a rule until Johnson vowed to make sure Luna’s proposal didn’t get a vote.
Luna, so bothered by her colleagues’ efforts to stymie her legislation, quit the group.
But it was exactly these kinds of chokehold tactics that inspired conservatives to start the Freedom Caucus 10 years ago.
“So much of the dysfunctionality of Congress really went back to the whole leadership thing,” former Rep. Matt Salmon, a founding member of the caucus, told NOTUS. “And the way the budgets were decided, you’d have a couple of committee chairmen and the leadership go into a room, come up with the budget and the numbers and then shove them down everybody’s throats.”
“Nobody had a part in the process, and that’s not a good government,” Salmon said.
The Freedom Caucus today, however, seems to think it has a better chance of influencing leadership behind closed doors rather than through letting the legislative process play out.
“Ten years ago, we were the part of the Republican conference that appeared always to be just opposing the leadership,” Harris told NOTUS.
“Over the years,” Harris continued, it became clear that what the Freedom Caucus did well was “hang together, that we were a group that had to be dealt with in the conference.”
The Freedom Caucus realized it could influence outcomes behind the scenes, perhaps even more effectively than it could on the House floor, where some Republicans and almost every Democrat were inclined to vote against the group’s conservative proposals.
The closed process had become the Freedom Caucus’ friend.
***
It’s impossible to talk about the Freedom Caucus’ evolution without mentioning the two men who have influenced it the most: Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows.
A little more than a decade ago, then-Rep. John Fleming sat fuming at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport — an annoying layover on even the best of days — after voting against yet another one of Speaker John Boehner’s omnibus spending bills. Fleming knew who to call.
Fleming asked Meadows what he thought about forming a new group, one that would stand up to leadership. Then Fleming called Jordan and asked the same question.
Two months later, the Freedom Caucus was born.
The group’s mission statement, primarily written by former Reps. Justin Amash and Ron DeSantis, was about giving “a voice to countless Americans who feel that Washington does not represent them.”
“We support open, accountable and limited government, the Constitution and the rule of law, and policies that promote the liberty, safety and prosperity of all Americans,” the HFC’s mission statement reads.
It also grew out of what several members saw as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Republican Study Committee, which had once been the House’s conservative caucus, had gotten too large. Joining became a box to check off for Republicans worried about a primary challenge from the right. Boehner enlisted allies to join its ranks, trying to pacify any semblance of resistance to him.
In 2014, when then-Rep. Mick Mulvaney lost to then-Rep. Bill Flores, a leadership ally, to chair the Republican Study Committee, many conservatives were convinced it was time for a change.
It was the fulfillment of a prediction that Ed Feulner, the Republican Study Committee’s first executive director and a co-founder of The Heritage Foundation, had made more than 30 years before. In 1983, Feulner wrote that if the RSC got too large and deferred too much to House leadership, it would inevitably “sink to an impotent posture.”
“However, a new group of ideologically committed conservative House members and staff aides willing to establish and implement a conservative legislative agenda will undoubtedly move in to fill the vacuum,” Feulner wrote in the closing sentence of his book, “Conservatives Stalk the House.”
Former Rep. Ken Buck recalled that Jordan and another HFC founding member, then-Rep. Raúl Labrador, pointed him to the Feulner quote when the Freedom Caucus first began.
One former Freedom Caucus member also said the group was partially inspired by the Congressional Black Caucus.
“Most of it was seeing how other Democrat caucuses, mainly the Congressional Black Caucus, actually influenced Nancy Pelosi a lot, and so it was trying to come up with a caucus that had the same kind of influence,” this former member said.
But the Freedom Caucus also quickly realized that, by joining forces and voting as a group, individual members had more power.
That was exactly the argument leaders were trying to make to Republicans at the time of the group’s founding — that the GOP had more power to negotiate spending deals in a divided Washington if Republicans would just lend leaders their voting cards.
The Freedom Caucus ironically learned this lesson when Boehner sought retribution against the group for trying to vote down a procedural rule on trade legislation in 2015.
At the time, voting against a rule was practically unheard of. “I remember the look on their faces,” Rep. Scott Perry, a future Freedom Caucus chair who voted against the rule, recalled. “They kind of said, ‘Oh, you’ll never do it.’”
When he and others did what they promised, Perry said he was called a “traitor” by one of his Republican colleagues in an elevator. “But the sun came up the next day and we were still alive,” Perry said.
In response to conservatives voting against the trade rule, Boehner revoked an Oversight subcommittee chairmanship from Meadows. The speaker seemed to think it would check the group and let them know he was still in control. It had the opposite effect.
The Freedom Caucus stuck together. They insisted Boehner reinstate Meadows, or else they would force votes on his removal that Boehner would lose. The speaker had no choice but to give in.
Weeks after the ordeal, Fleming was sitting with Meadows at a Mexican restaurant in Washington’s Navy Yard when Meadows told Fleming of his plan to remove Boehner.
At some point between the chips and the check, the pair solidified a ploy that would rupture the 114th Congress and change the direction of American politics. Meadows introduced a motion to vacate the chair on his birthday, July 28. Weeks later, Boehner called Jordan, Salmon, Labrador and Meadows into his office.
“We basically stared him down and didn’t give an inch, as far as saying, ‘John, you really need to look at an exit point,’” Salmon said. “And he asked me to stay behind. I think he thought he could pick me off.”
It once again didn’t work.
On Sept. 25, 2015 — the day after the pope visited the Capitol — Boehner chose to voluntarily leave Congress rather than watch the motion to vacate gather more support and become more of a distraction.
Freedom Caucus members had finally learned the lesson that leadership so strenuously tried to teach them: Stick together and succeed, act individually and fail.
Jordan would lead the Freedom Caucus for its first two years, navigating the Boehner standoff and the election of Paul Ryan as speaker. (Ryan had a number of concessions he wanted from the Freedom Caucus, and the Freedom Caucus believed if members didn’t get onboard with Ryan, they would ostracize themselves from the rest of the Republican conference.)
Meadows would take over for more than two years after that, establishing the Freedom Caucus’ close relationship with Trump and steering the group toward its current, Trump-adoring stance.
In return, Meadows was able to have a large say over the 2017 health care bill, after the Freedom Caucus insisted on a measure that would completely reshape the Affordable Care Act. (Ultimately, the health care legislation failed in the Senate over concerns that the Freedom Caucus had forced Republicans to undermine protections for people with preexisting conditions.) But Meadows was also able to have a large say over the 2017 tax cuts, which became law, insisting that the corporate tax rate be around 20%, that the tax cuts mostly not be offset and that the so-called “border-adjustment tax” that Speaker Ryan wanted be nowhere near the final bill.
As one former Freedom Caucus staffer told NOTUS, Jordan and Meadows effectively formed Capitol Hill’s version of “The Iliad.”
“It’s like you’ve got Achilles, who’s the wrath of man. He’s this great fighter,” the former staffer said. “And then you’ve got the tactician in Odysseus. Meadows was that tactician, and Jordan is the incredible fighter.”
Through it all, the Freedom Caucus learned the power of “no,” just so long as it ultimately said yes.
***
It was Wednesday, April 9, about an hour before the House was supposed to vote on the Senate’s budget, and Freedom Caucus chair Andy Harris was thinking about meetings.
A day after Freedom Caucus members and other budget holdouts had met with Trump, the group remained at an impasse. Harris notably didn’t attend the White House summit with other reluctant conservatives. (He said his schedule was “completely full.”)
He’d just left the House floor after a rule vote teeing up the Senate-adopted budget. But he and many other Freedom Caucus members were still uncomfortable with the resolution. The final vote was scheduled to come up in an hour. That didn’t matter to Harris.
“Oh, it won’t be at 5:30. I guarantee you it won’t be at 5:30,” he said, walking down the House steps on his way to a Freedom Caucus meeting.
Harris would first join members of his caucus in the Cannon Building, where they had a rough draft of the White House’s plan to discuss. Then, Harris and Perry would meet with Senate Majority Leader John Thune — without Speaker Johnson.
Harris only took over as the Freedom Caucus’ chair two months before Trump was elected. He is also just one of a handful of remaining members that have been part of the group since the beginning. And he is leading the caucus at yet another inflection point, at yet another moment of potentially huge legislative influence.
While the first Trump presidency also featured a Republican trifecta, Trump was less focused on — and less capable of — delivering sweeping changes for the American people.
Trump’s four years out of office seem to have focused him on an actual legislative agenda. And Republicans are far more unified and more intent on delivering that vision than they were eight years ago.
Harris himself said, during the first Trump presidency, the Freedom Caucus “didn’t deliver all that we could.”
He pointed to his experience in the last 14 years as valuable to “navigate the fairly tricky waters” of this new Trump term.
***
There’s a saying in Washington, popular among lawmakers and lobbyists, that, “If you’re not at the table, then you’re probably on the menu.”
The Trump years have proven it particularly fitting — and so has the Freedom Caucus.
During the 2016 presidential primaries, most Freedom Caucus members supported Sen. Ted Cruz, a natural ally of their cause and a personal friend of many in the group.
“Trump was not viewed at the time as a leader of the conservative movement,” former Rep. Buck, who was kicked out of the Freedom Caucus in 2024, told NOTUS. “There were stories about how he donated to Hillary Clinton, he was a New York real estate developer. He’s not like a Senator Cruz, who has a voting record, or Mike Pence, who has a record as governor in Indiana.”
Despite their reservations, once it became clear that Trump was the nominee, most of the Freedom Caucus got onboard.
The group planned to deny Paul Ryan the speakership in 2017, using the argument that the then-speaker hadn’t done enough to help Trump win and prevent a Hillary Clinton presidency, according to a source familiar with the plans.
But when Trump won, the coup fell apart.
Instead, the Freedom Caucus accepted Ryan and tried to cozy up to the new president. Many Republicans were busy doing the same. But because the Freedom Caucus had stuck with Trump during the darkest days of the 2016 campaign — like during the Access Hollywood tape — the group had an in.
They had a seat at the table.
The relationship quickly became tense, however, as Republicans wrote their Affordable Care Act replacement bill and the Freedom Caucus refused to get in line. Conservatives said the legislation left too much of Obamacare intact, and they worried the bill wouldn’t significantly lower costs. They wanted to put people with preexisting conditions into high-risk pools, undermining an essential principle of the 2010 health care law: making sure people with preexisting conditions aren’t charged more for insurance.
The Freedom Caucus refused to vote for the GOP’s health care bill until leaders made changes — changes, leaders said, that would come at the cost of support from moderates and would have massive political ramifications.
Trump tried to twist their arms. He tweeted about individual Freedom Caucus members — including Meadows and Jordan — and he bullied them at a closed-door conference meeting with House Republicans.
“Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!” Trump tweeted at the time.
It was a precarious time for members of the group, who largely came from districts that overwhelmingly supported Trump.
“We found ourselves at odds with the most popular president in modern history,” Perry said. “And he started using social media to call us out by name. It was a very, very lonely place.”
But the Freedom Caucus didn’t budge. It became clear that if Trump was going to get his health care bill, it was moderates who were going to have to cave.
“He realized, I think, that we were willing to stand on our principles, even if it cost us dearly,” Rep. Paul Gosar said.
So leadership made the Freedom Caucus’ proposed changes to the bill. And sure enough, with some negotiations between Meadows and moderate Rep. Tom MacArthur, rank-and-file Republicans got onboard — or, at least, enough of them did. (There were still 20 Republicans who voted no.)
Although those changes were, in fact, ultimately the legislation’s undoing in the Senate, Trump seemed to blame Sen. John McCain — who unexpectedly and dramatically voted against the measure in his chamber — more than the Freedom Caucus.
To Trump, the Freedom Caucus lived up to its promise: Make these changes and the bill will pass. It was true in the House, at least.
It’s why, months later, when Republicans turned their attention to a tax overhaul, it was the Freedom Caucus who largely dictated the terms of debate — not Speaker Ryan, who had made a tax rewrite his personal white whale in Congress.
During the tax battle, Trump knew he had to worry more about conservatives than any other faction. They were the most credible threat to vote no. So he tailored the bill to their demands.
On both occasions, the Freedom Caucus learned it could have real influence over the president’s legislative agenda, as long as members would eventually back something that could theoretically pass.
“That was probably some of the strongest days that the caucus had, was in the early days of the Trump administration,” one former Freedom Caucus member said. “We were willing to say no, but we were also willing to say yes.”
***
It was now just before 7 p.m. on April 9, and just as Harris had declared, 5:30 p.m. came and went without a vote on the budget.
Freedom Caucus leaders departed Thune’s office, walking past the throng of reporters waiting outside.
The members returned to the House side and met with GOP leadership in the speaker’s ceremonial office just off the House floor. Hundreds of members gathered for the vote were, for the second time in 24 hours, waiting. At one point in the meeting, Speaker Johnson stepped into a side room for a call with Trump. He updated the president on the situation.
It wasn’t looking good.
This wasn’t just about a budget vote. This wasn’t just about a meeting with Trump. It was a moment, another breaking point for Freedom Caucus members to determine their future. Would they stand with Trump, or would they stand against him?
But just as notable as who was in the room was who wasn’t: Jim Jordan.
The Ohio Republican was on the House floor, sitting near the front of the chamber, chatting with a few members. Among them was Rep. Jack Bergman, who is decidedly not a Freedom Caucus member. The two were planning Jordan’s visit to Bergman’s district to help rally conservatives there.
Jordan, hardly hiding his leadership aspirations, has been hitting the road for more moderate Republicans. In August, Jordan even did a tele-town hall for Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of two remaining House Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment. But he has also tried to take a backseat on the Freedom Caucus’ strategy sessions.
“Many years ago, he would’ve been in that room,” Bergman said of Jordan. “But, you know, now there’s new leadership in the Freedom Caucus.”
Bergman compared it to a departing commanding officer.
“That timeframe comes to an end, you bid it adieu, and you do not come back and get in the way of the new commanding officer, because now it’s their time to lead,” Bergman said. “You become just kind of an emeritus.”
Ten years ago, Jordan was the primary target of leadership’s ire, the leader of the renegade group. Now, sitting in the chamber as others waged the war, Jordan seemed content to not be on the front lines.
Over an hour after the group left the floor with Johnson, they emerged. But leaders knew they were still short on support for the Senate budget. They cancelled the vote. Negotiations would drag on another day.
Leaving for the night, Rep. Eric Burlison said it was “an amazing moment” to be in the room, fighting alongside his fellow Freedom Caucus members.
Elected in 2022, Burlison is part of a new crop of Freedom Caucus members that weren’t in Congress during Trump’s first term, let alone the Boehner and Ryan sagas. Trump won Burlison’s Missouri district by 43 percentage points, and it’s hard to find a more outspoken defender of the president in the House.
To Burlison, it’s the Senate that’s standing in the way of Trump, not him and his fellow Freedom Caucus members. (Trump told Republicans to “stop grandstanding” and “close your eyes and get there.”)
“I think when he said, ‘Vote for this,’ I think that there’s…”
Burlison paused. He thought about his words and changed directions.
“This town has got a lot of snakes in the grass who don’t want to actually accomplish getting it done in any way they can,” Burlison said. “I want to ensure that we don’t end up in a place where we let the president down in that regard.”
***
From the group’s inception, the Freedom Caucus has partially defined itself by who isn’t part of the Freedom Caucus.
“We made a real conscious decision at that time, we would like to be seen as a credible entity and not just a forum for cringe goofballs,” Salmon said, specifically noting that former Reps. Steve King and Louie Gohmert weren’t invited to join.
Salmon said that the group’s original members were “extremely committed to their ideology above a person.”
“And I don’t think that’s the way it is anymore,” he said.
Over the years, as the caucus has evolved, a number of Republicans have been kicked out, iced out or left out.
(In Gohmert’s case, he notably became a Freedom Caucus member in early 2017.)
But a number of members have chosen to disassociate from the Freedom Caucus — or had the Freedom Caucus choose to disassociate from them.
After Sanford, a frequent Trump critic, lost his primary in June 2018, Trump taunted him during a GOP conference meeting. The Freedom Caucus did nothing.
At a caucus meeting, Amash — a founding HFC member who always skewed more toward obedience to ideology than to party — said the group needed to make a statement. If Trump could make an example of Sanford, Amash contended, he’d do it to any one of them.
“It was one of those moments that you sort of remember in life,” Sanford said, recalling how his colleagues reacted. They basically stared at their shoelaces.
“They didn’t want to end up in Trump’s political crosshairs,” Sanford said.
Amash quietly left the group about a year later, after making yet another appeal to his unconvinced colleagues that they needed to stand up to Trump. It had become clear that, whatever group Amash helped to start, it hadn’t existed for a while.
Other exits weren’t as quiet.
Marjorie Taylor Greene quickly rose the ranks of Trump acolytes during her congressional campaign in 2020, getting national attention for spouting QAnon conspiracy theories and repeatedly spreading racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic videos and comments.
The Freedom Caucus’ PAC put $90,000 toward her primary in her deep-red Georgia district. Trump called her a “future Republican star.” Jordan declared her “exactly the kind of fighter needed in Washington to stand with me against the radical left.”
Naturally, Greene gravitated to the ardently pro-Trump Freedom Caucus. But her personal style rubbed many the wrong way. She was formally kicked out of the group in June 2023, shortly after she called her fellow Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Lauren Boebert, “a little bitch” on the House floor. Greene had also backed leadership on a previous debt ceiling bill and publicly supported Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid, as other Freedom Caucus members held out for guarantees before giving their support.
Other departures also seemed to have some personal animus behind them.
Rep. Warren Davidson — the very first member the Freedom Caucus recruited, running to replace Boehner in his Ohio district — was ousted for not being a member “in good standing.” Davidson’s primary crime seemed to be breaking from the group’s then-chair, Bob Good, who had supported DeSantis in the 2024 presidential primary.
Davidson never thought Good was the right choice to be chair — something he made clear in a letter to the group just before Good was elected to the position — but he seemed to cross a line when he backed a primary challenger against Good.
For some members, it wasn’t ideology that cost them their membership; it was attendance. Rep. Randy Weber, who joined the Freedom Caucus in 2015, told NOTUS that Good kicked him out for not showing up to enough meetings. Weber admitted his attendance had suffered — he said his “beautiful bride” was coming to Washington more and, “nothing personal, guys, but I’d much rather be with Brenda Gail” — but he also had another theory.
“Bob Good had no use for me because I was a Kevin McCarthy supporter,” Weber said.
Meanwhile, Buck was ousted from the group mere days before he was set to retire from Congress. Caucus members knew Buck was disappointed by the group he had helped create. Any criticism Buck was going to level against the group, the Freedom Caucus seemed to think it would sting less if he were an aggrieved former member.
Whether he would have spoken out or not, this much was true: Buck saw firsthand how the caucus had evolved.
“How many people were there in ’15 that are still there? I mean, maybe four, maybe five, so yeah, the membership changed,” he told NOTUS. “And the people, it’s not that they came in and said, ‘We’ve got to change the Freedom Caucus,’ they had no idea what the Freedom Caucus was originally.”
The Freedom Caucus members who were elected to Congress before Trump first took office had largely won by preaching fidelity to conservative ideologies, by speaking some Tea Party truth about a ballooning debt and out-of-control spending.
Voting for those principles — “Doing what you said you were gonna do,” as Jordan is fond of saying — was what got these members reelected in their primaries.
But over the last decade, as Trump took over the Republican Party, the main thing needed to win a GOP congressional primary is Trump’s endorsement.
“If Trump’s against you and you’re in a conservative district, it could really hurt you,” Buck said.
“I get that,” he continued. “When you’re looking at a legislative body, you’re going to get more wins for conservatives if you’re supporting the leader of the party and the president and what he’s doing.”
“But,” Buck added, “a lot of us didn’t get into the Freedom Caucus to support a person. We got in to support certain principles.”
That tension — between supporting a certain person over certain principles — is largely what has given the Freedom Caucus the most heartburn over the last 10 years. And as Trump prepares another reconciliation bill that will dramatically increase the deficit, it’s clear what side of that battle the Freedom Caucus plans to ultimately fall on.
Freedom Caucus member Rep. Michael Cloud succinctly summed up what the group is about these days, telling NOTUS that “the Freedom Caucus is leading the way on every righteous battle in Washington, D.C.”
“Regulatory reform, restoring energy, President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda,” Cloud said. “The president has no stronger supporters than the people in the Freedom Caucus.”
***
By Thursday morning on April 17, Freedom Caucus members were making their way to the Capitol for one last meeting with Johnson.
Earlier that morning, Johnson and Thune had committed to a $1.5 trillion floor for spending cuts, despite the Senate passing a budget that intentionally kept spending levels open to negotiation.
Despite years of crusading against backroom deals, the Freedom Caucus was willing to take this one.
“What we’re doing, the reason we’re even negotiating, and you call it the back room, you can call it whatever, is because they know we’ll carry through on our votes,” Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ralph Norman told NOTUS. “They know we will vote no. And to get to a yes with us is about deficit reduction. Now I don’t care how we get there.”
After meeting with Johnson, the vote began. The members once again huddled in the room of the House floor, where, for a third time, hundreds of Republicans and Democrats waited with no end in sight to see if the dozen members that had held up the House had finally reached a deal.
But instead of meeting in the side room, Johnson was on the House floor, huddling with a group of moderate Republicans. The Freedom Caucus members, meanwhile, were taking a final tally of their votes, Rep. Andy Ogles told reporters.
Just after 11 a.m., the final Freedom Caucus members voted. In the end, all the holdouts came around to a budget resolution that, they said for days, they couldn’t possibly support.
Massie, who voted against the House’s initial budget, was joined by Rep. Victoria Spartz in voting against this newest spending blueprint.
“I didn’t agree with him a lot of times on different things, we had our differences,” Salmon said. “But I’ve gotta say, I really admire Thomas Massie.”
“I know he’s not a Freedom Caucus member, but to me, that’s the way a Freedom Caucus member ought to be: standing for principle over political fear,” Salmon said.
The Freedom Caucus members had gotten an agreement from the White House, at first, seemingly, for $2 trillion in cuts, and then a day later, apparently, for $1 trillion. Meanwhile, they’d agreed to a plan that included a $5 trillion increase to the debt ceiling and tax cuts that would reduce revenue by an estimated $4.5 trillion.
But the Freedom Caucus was finally satisfied.
“It all worked out,” Norman said after the vote.
He was walking back into the Capitol to Johnson’s office, waiting for the White House letter that would detail the cuts they’d all voted for.
Those details are still scant. Republicans have said they’ll target student loan reforms made under the Biden administration, they’ll repeal “Green New Deal tax credits” and root out “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid. Those are all cuts the Republican conference unanimously supports.
They’re also cuts that, budget experts agree, won’t come close to the benchmarks set by the House.
Johnson and Trump have repeatedly emphasized they won’t cut individual Medicaid benefits. It seems impossible to come anywhere close to the Freedom Caucus’ spending-reduction targets without those cuts. But it also seems impossible to pass a reconciliation bill with the full extent of the cuts conservatives want, as moderates and some senators promise they won’t go along.
The question is, as it’s always been with the reconciliation bill, who will cave?
One former Freedom Caucus member suggested the legislation was doomed if conservatives and moderates don’t get on the same page soon.
“Just going to the committees and having them write it without having a pre-agreement between the moderates and the conservatives is a recipe for failure that ultimately, if past is prologue, will end up with a very long, protracted, finger-pointing exercise,” this former Freedom Caucus member said.
“The best thing for the White House to do right now is to get a group of conservative and moderates together and let the conservatives work on getting something passed that moderates can embrace, and let the moderates work on something that conservatives can embrace,” this former member said. “Let each one of them work at it from the other person’s perspective.”
Which is to say, there is still room for compromise. This source suggested a final deal that raises the state and local tax deduction to $30,000 a year, includes about $50 billion a year in Medicaid cuts by making people regularly reapply to the program and extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
Such a deal would fall well short of the Freedom Caucus’ spending-reduction targets and would be a huge boon for the national debt. But Trump would also treat that kind of deal as a major accomplishment. And that may be the Freedom Caucus’ No. 1 goal.
For now, its members are insisting they want every bit of the deal they’ve already been promised.
“If they don’t live up to this, we will be at the table,” Norman said. “It’s got to be real cuts, it can’t be smoke and mirrors. If what they offer’s not enough, we won’t let it get out.”
But how prepared is the Freedom Caucus really to deny Trump his legislative agenda?
They’ve already shown throughout this process that they want to get to ‘yes.’ And previous fights — from the 2017 health care bill to this one — indicate that members don’t want to be standing against Trump in the end.
Time and again, the Freedom Caucus has sided with Trump as he trashes individual members of the group, violates conservative principles and excommunicates former leaders like Mulvaney and Meadows, both of whom Trump made life miserable for as his last two White House chiefs of staff in his first term.
The Freedom Caucus’ insistence that it’s the most pro-Trump group practically gives up the game. They want to get to “yes.”
“We’re not just a bunch of obstructionists,” Norman said. “I mean, we don’t let perfect get in the way of the possible.”
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Katherine Swartz and Ben T.N. Mause are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Matt Fuller, who is Capitol Hill bureau chief at NOTUS, contributed to this report.