Near the beginning of his reign as speaker, Kevin McCarthy famously told colleagues he had “no confidence” in House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington.
More than half a dozen people told The New York Times in April 2023 that McCarthy viewed Arrington as “incompetent.” And the bad blood festered between McCarthy and the Texas Republican for the entirety of McCarthy’s speakership.
Now, as Republicans place almost all of their hopes of a legislative agenda under Donald Trump on the budget reconciliation process — a process where Arrington will play an immediate and key role — more GOP sources are raising concerns about the budget committee chair.
Once again, more than half a dozen Republican sources told NOTUS that Arrington had become a problem for Republican leaders, sowing confusion among the GOP conference and complicating the reconciliation process with his push for substantial spending cuts.
As one House Republican member told NOTUS, granted anonymity to discuss Arrington’s leadership on reconciliation, “We’re so fucked.”
One of the biggest questions this Congress is whether raising the debt ceiling — and cutting $2.5 trillion in spending to accompany the debt ceiling hike, as Speaker Mike Johnson promised — will be part of reconciliation. While Arrington suggested this week that he would support those cuts being part of reconciliation, he’s also suggested he will write a budget that conforms with the GOP plan on reconciliation — whatever that may be.
“The conference is going to decide this, not the budget chairman,” Arrington told reporters last week. “I’m just simply helping facilitate the conversations, the discussions, the debate.”
But sources said Arrington is becoming more difficult to pin down on what he intends to include in his budget. And they suggested he keeps saying things that may make it harder for GOP leaders to ultimately get a reconciliation bill through the House.
“He’s so ill-equipped,” one source who’s worked closely with Arrington told NOTUS. “The worst people are the people who are ignorant and arrogant. He thinks he knows everything, but he knows nothing.”
The big complaint seems to be that Arrington is pushing for major spending cuts in the reconciliation bill, regardless of whether a debt ceiling hike is part of the legislation. That was a complaint Arrington seemed proud to own in an interview with NOTUS on Thursday night.
“We talk about the debt being unsustainable and mortgaging our children’s future. Everybody talks about it on the campaign trail,” Arrington said. “But now we have an opportunity to actually do something about it, and that makes some people uncomfortable.”
While some sources accused Arrington of saying different things to different groups, other sources said the problem was that Arrington isn’t tactful enough. They said he is unabashedly forceful in his pursuit of cuts, even though many of his suggested reductions would come at a steep political cost.
“He should be our leading messenger on saying we can’t get 218 votes on something that’s fully paid for,” one of the sources said. “But because he doesn’t want to make his friends upset, Jodey has to throw these crazy pay-fors out there.”
The “crazy pay-fors” seems to refer to a document Arrington recently circulated, which NOTUS obtained last week. The document lays out roughly $5.7 trillion in spending cuts, and among the cuts are reductions to Medicaid (up to $2.3 trillion, in fact), Medicare ($479 billion), the Affordable Care Act ($151 billion) and President Joe Biden’s climate policies ($468 billion). Many of the suggested cuts aren’t just politically unpopular; they’re also in areas where the budget committee doesn’t have jurisdiction, which further angered some members.
Another GOP member likened Arrington’s list of proposed cuts to “a list a kid would send to Santa when he was 5.”
“I want a pony, I want an airplane, I want a truck,” the member said.
But many of the cuts on the list have been standard suggestions from the budget committee for years. Arrington said that some members just get “nervous” when cuts go from “academic to real.”
Still, sources said Arrington’s leadership style, where he seems to include a menu of options, wasn’t helpful for actually passing a reconciliation bill. For some Republicans, he’s simply raising expectations of gargantuan cuts. For other Republicans, he’s making them nervous that they may have to support policies that would make vulnerable Republicans much more vulnerable.
“He is all over the place and doesn’t understand what the fuck he’s doing,” one senior GOP aide said of Arrington.
Other sources suggested the problem was that Arrington just frequently puts his Texas-sized boot in his mouth.
During a meeting with the Republican Study Committee last week, Arrington suggested a number of offsets that lawmakers could use to save money in the reconciliation bill. One of his proposals, a source familiar with the matter said, shocked the room: raising the corporate tax rate.
Trump has consistently proposed lowering the corporate tax rate further, and most Republicans support that idea.
Potentially making the flub worse, Arrington told Punchbowl News, who first reported the incident, that he pitched the corporate tax rate hike by “mistake.”
In an interview with NOTUS Thursday night, Arrington once again said the corporate tax hike was an accident, blaming his staff for the error.
“One of my staff members transcribed my notes onto the PowerPoint in a way she missed it,” he said. “I put corporate SALT cap as an example, and I think she put corporate rate.”
Arrington has also started going to outside conservative groups to ask them to score his legislative proposals, rather than using the Congress’ official scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office.
And even though some Republicans might support Arrington’s efforts — Republicans have almost made a sport out of disagreeing with the CBO — other Republicans have concerns.
One of the sources feared that if conservative groups begin scoring draft portions of a reconciliation package, some of the organizations may try to blow up the deal for not being conservative enough. Meanwhile, other Republicans are just frustrated that Arrington would decide he can flout traditions and not listen to anyone.
“I think he believes we should do what he wants instead of what the conference can actually get done,” a third GOP member told NOTUS.
Two sources also said Arrington should understand what the conference can and cannot accomplish when it comes to spending cuts. And rather than muddying the discussion by bringing up a myriad of possible cuts, he should be setting realistic expectations.
Still, not everyone is concerned about Arrington. One senior GOP member told NOTUS that it’s just “Jodey being Jodey” and said him floating different cuts is just because he’s “passionate” about reining in spending.
And other Republican lawmakers defended Arrington for that passion.
“JOD[E]Y HAS BEEN A WORK HORSE TO GET A CONSENSUS FOR A CONSERVATIVE BUDGET AND HAS BEEN A UNIFYING VOICE OF REASON AS OUR BUDGET CHAIRMAN,” Rep. Ralph Norman, a member of the House Freedom Caucus and the Budget Committee, texted NOTUS.
Despite the positive words, Arrington said he wasn’t surprised that some people had negative things to say.
“I think some people feel uncomfortable with the things that you have to do to reduce spending,” Arrington told NOTUS.
“I’m not surprised that there are people who are frustrated, because some folks just have a lower tolerance for this sort of thing, but it’s a necessary deal,” he said.
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Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS.