Mike Johnson didn’t offer a handshake. He gave a guarantee. In private, he told his own party he would carve $1.5 trillion in spending cuts into Trump’s domestic agenda package. That was the price. The commitment was locked. April 2025. Not ceremonial. Binding.
Now look at the paper. The reconciliation bill passed. The cuts didn’t. The final score from the Congressional Budget Office shows $383 billion in net reductions across ten years. That’s not a rounding difference. It’s a collapse. The original target is dead. What’s left on the table is a $3.3 trillion projected addition to the deficit. Tax cuts, credits, and structural program expansions outweighed every rescission and cap.
The Freedom Caucus was sold on enforcement. That was the trade. They swallowed Trump’s carveouts with the understanding that the number would stick. The number didn’t stick. The cuts got trimmed in markup, gutted in Senate reconciliation, and buried in the final conference report. The $9.4 billion rescissions package was the last piece standing. Everything else faded.
Leadership called it strategic sequencing. Some members called it betrayal. The clause enabling the motion to vacate remains active. That rule can be triggered by one. The Freedom Caucus has not pressed it, but the door remains wide open. It was designed after the McCarthy removal for exactly this scenario. Now the conditions are real.
The Senate removed nearly every pressure valve. Defense clawbacks, PBS defunding, foreign grant rollbacks, all stripped. That’s the actual legislative impact. What remains is mostly messaging. The optics show restraint. The math shows expansion.
The administration is calling the outcome bipartisan. They point to the modest child tax credit adjustment and the family deduction indexed through 2029. Both come with heavy scoring overhead. What’s not being highlighted is the projected 11.8% increase in net mandatory outlays over the next eight years. That is confirmed by the most recent Treasury and OMB projections.
This moment is about leverage. Johnson used the pledge to lock up the right. It bought him time. Time ran out. The Freedom Caucus watched the cuts vanish line by line, and now the ledger is on the record. The pledge is broken.
Sources
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7214/text
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/2025analysis-budget-resolution-reconciliation
https://rvivr.com/2025/06/freedom-caucus-chief-outlines-strategy-to-cut-spending-the-deficit