Why Mike Johnson Will Struggle To Keep His Promises

Speaker Mike Johnson scored a big win last week by advancing his budget plan for President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic agenda. To do it, he made a series of competing and sometimes contradictory assurances to different parts of his conference.

Republican senators now have the opportunity to revise that plan over the coming weeks. But soon the two chambers will have to unite behind a common framework, and Johnson, after muscling his budget ahead by a single vote, will likely have little room to maneuver.

Among those he now needs to placate are tax writers who want a costly permanent extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts, hard-liners who want even deeper spending cuts if the tax provisions expand, swing-district members who want assurances on safety-net programs and even billionaire Elon Musk, who has raised public concerns about Johnson's plan.

That’s to say nothing of Trump himself, who has sided at times with all of those competing factions.

Already the tensions are playing out in public. The hard-liners, for instance, are calling on Johnson to stand strong against Senate attempts to water down the deep cuts they secured.

“The House has spoken,” head rebel Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said. “And I think we need to defend that position.”

But others are counting on changes to soften the potential backlash vulnerable Republicans face — especially easing the eye-popping $880 billion of savings demanded from the House panel that oversees Medicaid, among other areas.

“The Senate will never agree with [those cuts] — that's just the fact,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who represents a district Democratic nominee Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election.

Johnson himself is already showing some fancy footwork as he dances his way through the various demands.

He suggested last week, for instance, that he’s increasingly embracing the Senate GOP’s thinking on how to permanently extend the 2017 tax cuts — adopting an accounting method that essentially zeroes out the cost of continuing with existing tax policy.

That makes the math a lot easier for Republicans, especially if they want to pile additional tax cuts on top of those extensions — such as by enacting Trump’s pledges to exempt tips, overtime earnings and Social Security benefits from income tax. It could also make it easier to roll back the cuts secured by House fiscal hawks last month.

But Roy and other members of the House Freedom Caucus say they will be watching closely to ensure that cuts are maintained — and potentially deepened if more tax cuts are added to the package.

“We've stated there was a floor [for cuts], and we ought to stick to it being a floor,” Roy said. “If the Senate wants to move to permanence, and if any of that is going up, we're going to have to see even more cuts.”

“They're welcome to debate it,” added Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), a Freedom Caucus member, about the potential accounting change. “But as long as we stick to the instructions in the resolution itself, I don't think it matters.”

Johnson also last week said he would not pursue some of the most drastic proposed cutbacks to Medicaid, the safety-net health program that covers 72 million Americans. Taking per-capita caps on state reimbursements off the table as well as reducing the federal match rate — both of which Johnson suggested in a CNN interview — has some Republicans wondering how they can find the necessary cuts elsewhere in the program.

But it eased the minds of GOP members like New York’s Nicole Malliotakis, who said in a X posting last week that Johnson had given “important assurance” with his comments.

In both cases, Johnson was moving in line with Trump — who last week publicly demanded permanent tax cuts and said that Medicaid would be left untouched save for “fraud.” The thinking among senior Republicans is that the budget blueprint can be adjusted to account for the president’s desires — potentially using tariff revenue to fill any holes. Ultimately, they believe any holdouts will go along.

There is one alarming wrinkle for Johnson and senior Republicans, however: Musk has aired criticism of the speaker’s plan — most recently on Friday, when he approvingly shared an X posting by the only Republican to vote against it, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

Massie has argued that Johnson’s plan would continue adding to the national debt, and Musk appeared to agree. (Other Republicans claim economic growth generated by Trump’s agenda will close any fiscal gaps.)

“Inflation is the worst tax of all, as it punishes those who are just barely making ends meet or have gathered some savings,” he said in response to a recent Massie post disparaging Johnson’s plan.

Johnson has tried to brush off Musk’s online criticism, saying in a brief interview that he had “no concerns” after the tech mogul launched a broadside on X the night before the budget vote last week. In December, Musk rampaged online against a spending deal Johnson had forged with Democrats, forcing the speaker to scrap it.

Johnson also has other, more bespoke promises to keep — including one that has nothing to do with the budget framework.

Some House Republicans want cuts to discretionary spending included in the upcoming spending bill expected ahead of a March 14 shutdown deadline. Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio extracted a pledge along those lines in exchange for his budget vote last week.

Davidson posted on X that he supported Johnson’s plan after he “finally received the assurances I needed that there will be cuts to discretionary spending by 3/14 and that we will work together to develop a plan for further discretionary spending cuts that could survive passage in the Senate.”

He added: “Promises made …”

Jordain Carney contributed to this report.