Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Thursday that he’s “not particularly optimistic” that Congress will pass the budget bill under consideration in the House by the July 4 deadline Republicans set for themselves.
House Republicans are still negotiating a wide-ranging budget bill that GOP leaders in the lower chamber hope to pass by Memorial Day, allowing the Senate about a month to review the bill before voting on it in the upper chamber.
Johnson, during an interview on “Wake Up America,” was asked if he was confident the spending bill could be passed on time.
“No, I’m not,” he said, adding that “I’m not particularly optimistic right now” due to the “spending levels” in the bill.
Johnson said he won’t vote for the bill without major spending cuts.
He said that the budget proposal would increase federal spending to more than $7 trillion, a 60% increase from the $4.4 trillion spent in 2019, and noted that “the spending reductions that the House is dealing with would be $1.5 trillion over 10 years” and the Congressional Budget Office’s “latest projection for ten years spending is $89 trillion. So they’re going to reduce that $89 trillion by a underwhelming $1.5 trillion. It’s 1.7%. It’s a rounding error.”
Johnson said the federal government has reached an “unprecedented level of increased spending” after the COVID-19 pandemic and warned that Congress and the Trump administration must “get serious about returning to a reasonable pre-pandemic level, spending just like every American family would do, live within your means.”
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