Chip Roy backs down on budget opposition after spending cut assurances from Trump, House speaker

WASHINGTON – The San Antonio Express-News reports that U.S. Rep. Chip Roy backed down on Thursday from his promise to vote against a Senate budget resolution, saying he had gotten assurances from President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders that the final budget would include trillions of dollars in spending cuts. The turnaround came a day after Roy, R-Austin, criticized the Senate budget bill as failing to reduce spending to match proposed tax cuts, likely resulting in a $3 trillion increase in the federal deficit.

In a post of X Thursday, Roy said Trump had assured him on $1 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending programs included in former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and to Medicaid. He also said House Speaker Mike Johnson guaranteed him that the tax cuts central to Trump’s budget plan would be tied to a reduction in spending and that Senate Majority Leader John Thune had committed to a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. “I would have preferred we amended the Senate bill to reflect these commitments. But, in the interest of comity, I will take them at their word,” Roy wrote. “But, to be clear, failure to achieve these baselines including deficit neutrality will make it impossible for me to support a final reconciliation product.” After delaying a vote Wednesday, House Republicans passed the Senate budget resolution 216-214, with just two Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Victoria Spartz, R-Ind. — voting against it. Now the Senate and House Republicans must do the hard work of deciding what’s in and what’s out of the federal budget, which they can pass without any Democrats’ support through the reconciliation process.