Senator Ron Johnson on the Senate showdown over Trump's Big Beautiful Bill | All-In Interview

The episode opens with a montage of lines that set the stakes. Government is described as power that has been corrupted. Nobody is said to know total federal spending, and the first goal of Republican budget reconciliation, in the speaker's words, "should be don't add to the deficit." Defeating the "deep state" is presented as incompatible with continuing to fund it. The montage also warns that the Republican base may conclude its representatives are "really no better than Democrats."

You don't defeat the deep state by continuing to fund it

The opening also makes the speaker's support conditional. The speaker calls the bill "our one opportunity" and says "right now, we're blowing it." The speaker says they cannot be pressured by President Trump and will offer support only if Trump will sit down, look at the numbers, acknowledge them and work toward a reasonable plan. The montage also says President Trump is not unfocused on reducing spending.

The host then explains why the episode is an emergency pod. The common assumption was that the House-passed reconciliation bill would clear the Senate with minor changes and go to President Trump for signature. Several Senate hardliners, however, have said the budget and fiscal deficit problems arising from the bill are insurmountable and that they will take a hard stance on voting no. The host introduces Senator Johnson of Wisconsin as the leading voice of that position. The host notes that Johnson was elected in 2010 and has won two reelections since, and that the conversation will cover both the House bill and the broader US fiscal picture.

The transcript also includes a fragment of the show's outro, with lines such as "People love the interviews" and "We crush your questions in minute." It has no bearing on the substance of the discussion.

Asked for a basic primer on reconciliation, the speaker first describes their own political origin. The speaker recalls first running in 2010 out of the Tea Party with no previous political involvement, deciding to run in April, announcing in May and campaigning through the summer parades. The speaker says they still identify as "more tea party than Republican party" and acknowledges that the Republican Party has big spenders too. The speaker also says they ran because of Obamacare, which they believed would not work. They argue it is not working and that today's Medicaid problem is that Obamacare "is now called Medicaid expansion."

We're mortgaging our children's future. It's wrong. It's immoral. It has to stop.

On the mechanics, the speaker says reconciliation comes from the Budget Act, "I think it was 1974." A budget, which is not a law, can pass with a simple majority of 50 or 51 votes. Legislation can then be reconciled to that budget, which also avoids the Senate filibuster. The speaker calls one feature odd: reconciliation can only address mandatory spending. It cannot touch discretionary accounts, about 25% of the budget, or Social Security. Changes must have a primarily budgetary impact, so policy can change only insofar as it affects the budget. The speaker concludes: "it's an insane system and it doesn't work."

The speaker argues that a major reason the budget has grown out of control is that so much has been placed in the mandatory category. Mandatory spending originally meant entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The speaker says all kinds of discretionary spending were then "deviously" moved into "other mandatory" spending, which excludes those three programs. By the speaker's figures, other mandatory spending was $642 billion in 2019, rose to well over $2 trillion during COVID, was about $1.3 trillion last fiscal year, and will be over $1 trillion this year and stay near that level for the foreseeable future. The speaker calls this a trillion dollars of non-entitlement spending "that we never looked at."

Asked what has been placed under mandatory that should be discretionary, the speaker says it covers "the entire gamut of federal spending": education, welfare, food stamps and veterans benefits. Moving these into mandatory leaves them "out of sight, out of mind, unaccountable."

An interviewer asks whether discretionary money gives the administration authority to spend up to a limit, while mandatory money must go out. The speaker answers by describing the appropriations process instead. Discretionary spending is supposed to be passed each year through appropriations, which the speaker calls completely broken. Individual appropriation bills do not pass. At best, Congress passes minibuses or omnibuses, multi-thousand-page bills that members must vote on within 24 to 48 hours. "Nobody reads them," and nobody knows what is in them. For the current fiscal year the government is operating under a continuing resolution that tweaks a few things but largely keeps last year's levels. The speaker puts the split at about 25% appropriated and 75% mandatory.

Asked for the alternative, the speaker says there currently is none. Unlike the states, the federal government has no balanced-budget requirement and can print money, which it is doing while running up enormous debt. The speaker lists a series of failed controls. Appropriations committees were created because authorizing committees were big spenders, and that did not work. The Budget Act, Simpson-Bowles and the Budget Control Act did not work either. The speaker says the Budget Control Act restrained discretionary spending for a couple of years "until we weaseled our way around it."

Drawing on private-sector experience, the speaker says they probably spent more time reviewing their own business's budget line by line than Congress spends on the entire federal budget. The speaker cites DOGE as the model for a better process and wants the same work done across thousands of budget lines. The speaker says nobody is willing to take the time to do it.

Go contract by contract, expose the grotesque waste, fraud, and abuse.