Immoral. Grotesque.
That's how Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has described President Trump's massive domestic policy bill meant to enact core elements of the president's agenda.
According to an analysis released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would add $2.4 trillion to deficits over the next decade while forcing millions to lose health insurance coverage.
In an interview with All Things Considered host Scott Detrow, the Wisconsin senator said Trump's bill — which narrowly passed the House — will not pass the Senate in its current form because it will "skyrocket" the deficit.
"I can't accept this is the new normal," Johnson told NPR. "It's just unacceptable."
Now that Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" is in the hands of the Senate, some fiscal hawks — including Republicans like Johnson — are pushing back.
The senator said he wants to return spending to pre-pandemic levels and break up the House bill into separate Senate bills.
The bill would cut taxes, change federal food benefits and put work requirements on Medicaid, among many other things.
"We want people to get good-paying jobs so they can support themselves," Johnson said. "We need to … get people jobs so that they're off of welfare, so they're not dependent on the federal government. That's not good for them and that's not, certainly, good for the federal budget."
Johnson's comments come the same week Elon Musk expressed his disdain for the president's proposed spending agenda.
"I think people recognize [Musk] as a very smart individual who did a fabulous job with DOGE — exposing waste, fraud and abuse," Johnson told NPR. "[Musk] understands numbers and now he's stepped away from the administration. He's basically doing what I'm doing. He's telling people the truth."
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Scott Detrow: What to you is something that would make you come around and be a "yes" vote?
Ron Johnson: The goal should have been how do we bend the deficit curve down rather than allow it to skyrocket? This bill allows it to skyrocket. It doesn't really make a dent in that reality and that's unfortunate.
So, you need to go back to the drawing board. As I've been writing about since January, we need to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending. The only way that's going to happen is we have to do the work. We have to go line by line through the federal budget, program by program, do forensic audits, expose the waste, fraud and abuse like DOGE did in their short-term effort here.
Detrow: Why do you think he's pushing for this bill? Why do you think he leaned on House Republicans to pass it, given all of that?
Johnson: Well, again, I appreciate the fact that he's focusing on working men and women with his tax proposals. He wants to honor those promises. I respect that. He made these promises in the campaign. But he's running into a Senate — at least populated by people like me, who ran as a Tea Party candidate — saying that mortgaging our children's future is wrong and immoral. Back then, it was $14 trillion in debt. Now we're $37 trillion, on a path to $60 trillion within the next 10 years. So, we need to get off this unsustainable path and the "big beautiful bill" doesn't even begin to take us off this path.
Detrow: You're not getting direct calls from the White House?
Johnson: I got a very nice call from the president on Monday. We agreed to work together, hone our numbers, you know, so we're at least talking on the same page here.
That's what I'm doing right now, is I'm out there in the public, I'm laying out the reality. I'm talking numbers that are indisputable but describe our situation as grim and unsustainable, as opposed to, you know, talking about one "big beautiful bill" and getting it passed by July.
And again, that's all rhetoric. That's just slogans. I'm focusing on substance, which they're going to have a hard time refuting and disputing.
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