Johnson's spending nightmare points to grueling GOP problems next year

Speaker Mike Johnson is dealing with a nightmare before Christmas. And it won’t be his last.

GOP leaders are now considering a plan B to avert a shutdown deadline on Friday as conservatives, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance have excoriated the original spending plan, which included several add-ons like $100 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill extension. Trump and Vance, while objecting to the current bill in a long statement, also surprised lawmakers by demanding that Congress address the debt ceiling now and explicitly opening the door to a shutdown.

Plus, at least one hardliner is vowing to oppose Johnson for speaker next year, citing the funding issues, and others are noncommittal. Several conservatives have now also escalated their demands to offset ambitious policy bills on the border, energy and taxes next year with major spending cuts.

In theory, most Republicans support the latter idea, but looking for trillions of dollars in savings could drastically slow down an agenda that the GOP hoped to accomplish in the first 100 days of Trump’s administration.

It all points to Johnson’s almost impossible balancing act next year. He will need near-unanimous GOP support on both his speakership and President-elect Donald Trump’s priorities, so he needs to find a way to keep an ideologically diverse conference satisfied. Meanwhile, Trump’s notoriously unpredictable nature could throw curveballs into the planning at any time, and Johnson needs to keep him firmly on his side to remain speaker.

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a frequent Johnson antagonist, on Wednesday became the first Republican to publicly say he will vote against him for speaker on Jan. 3. Other Republicans, including some who previously said they would support him, now won’t commit to backing him, despite Trump endorsing Johnson just over a month ago.

“I’ll vote for somebody else,” Massie said. “I’ve got a few in mind. I’m not going to say yet.”

Members of the House Freedom Caucus are already publicly floating alternatives to Johnson. And Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who told POLITICO last week that he would support the speaker, told reporters on Wednesday that he was not committed to backing Johnson. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who said earlier this month that he would vote for Johnson if the speaker race were held on that day, said on Wednesday that he was not deciding at this point.

“Let’s look at the way this has been handled, it’s been horrible,” Biggs said.

Then there’s the statement Trump and his incoming vice president released Wednesday afternoon, demanding action on the debt ceiling and opening the door to a shutdown. And Musk is publicly weighing in against his spending bill and urging anyone who supports it to be booted out of office during the next election. As Johnson faces growing opposition to his plan, he is considering pulling it and instead passing a “clean” short-term bill into next year.

“If Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,” Trump and Vance wrote in a statement posted to X.

Less pressing, but still looming over the other developments, is what the stark divisions mean for next year. There was already an existing Republican standoff on the most basic strategy question: Should Republicans divide their trio of policy priorities into two packages, with the first tackling border and energy priorities, or pass them all in one?

Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the House’s top tax writer, has been pushing to do all of the priorities in one package. And he’s using the latest demand from conservatives — that any new spending next year is offset with cuts — to reinforce his point.

“People should look at that statement showing how difficult it is going to be to thread the needle, and that’s why one package as a whole will make it easier, so that you can have a lot of buy-in from everyone,” Smith told POLITICO on Wednesday.

But there are potential personal drawbacks for Johnson. Some of his most vocal critics are among those pushing for a two-track and are the biggest potential threats to his speakership. And they are already fuming over the dragged-out government funding fight.

Conservatives, particularly those housed in the House Freedom Caucus, want tax changes to have offsets. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), for example, caught the attention of his colleagues this week when he said that he is digging in on requiring spending cuts to pay for corresponding tax cuts. And some of his colleagues are going even further.

“I honestly don't know why people up here are talking about tax cuts. There's really no way to afford them,” Massie said.

Then a group of House and Senate conservatives on Wednesday released a letter backing the two-step spending strategy. In it, they notably stressed that the border and energy bill, which would be the first step, should “not only be fully offset with real mandatory spending cuts … but also achieve deficit reduction with additional spending cuts at a level the conferences require and are realistic for passage.”

Conservatives have got allies on that point among some of the tax writers, including deficit hawks like Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.). But other Republicans have their own ideas — or are at least warning their colleagues not to slow down a top legislative priority, tax, in order to enact sweeping spending cuts that might divide the conference.

“You need to do both, and you need to do both effectively. But I would hope that we don’t hold up great economic growth through good tax policies because we can’t get all the spending cuts that we want initially,” said Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas).

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.