Chip Roy Says Promise of Deep Entitlement Cuts Won His Vote

For days before the House voted on Thursday to adopt the Republican budget blueprint for slashing taxes and spending, Representative Chip Roy of Texas made it clear that he did not believe the measure contained enough cuts to government programs.

“The math isn’t mathing,” he would repeat to reporters.

Mr. Roy ended up being one of more than a dozen G.O.P. holdouts who ultimately supported the resolution on Thursday.

Not long afterward, he explained his turnabout. He said he had “reluctantly voted” for the measure only after President Trump and his party’s House and Senate leaders had promised privately that they would embrace far more spending reductions, specifically deep cuts to entitlement programs including Medicaid and the elimination of clean energy tax credits.

Those commitments, which Mr. Roy outlined in a lengthy statement released not long after the vote, were aimed at preserving the kind of deep spending cuts Mr. Roy and other conservatives in the House had agitated for, and some senators had resisted.

Finding the votes necessary to pass legislation that adheres to those vows will be difficult.

Mr. Roy said that Mr. Trump had committed to “a minimum of $1 trillion in real reductions in mandatory spending,” the portion of federal funding not controlled by Congress, most of which goes to entitlement programs for the poor, older people, veterans and others. He also said the president had committed to “efforts to fully repeal the damaging ‘green scam’ subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act” and “Medicaid reforms addressing eligibility, waste, fraud, abuse, and the disastrous money laundering schemes pervasive in the program.”

Some of Mr. Roy’s more moderate colleagues, in both the House and the Senate, have chafed at the prospect of cuts to Medicaid and other safety net programs. They have also objected to the wholesale repeal of the inflation law in an effort to protect the clean energy tax credits it provides to businesses in their districts and states.

Mr. Roy said that Speaker Mike Johnson had “made a specific commitment to guarantee the House framework tying tax cuts to spending cuts.” In the House, Republicans pledged that if they ultimately found less than $2 trillion in spending to eliminate, they would shrink their planned $4.5 trillion tax cut by the amount of the shortfall. For instance, if Republicans cut only $1.5 trillion in spending — the floor set in the budget plan — the tax cut could ultimately drop to $4 trillion.

And Mr. Roy said that Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, had promised that his chamber would approve at least $1.5 trillion in spending, a number Republicans in the House have said they plan to achieve largely through the committee that oversees Medicaid.

Mr. Roy warned that his support for the final budget package was contingent on all of those commitments being kept.

“In the interest of comity, I will take them at their word,” he 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.”

Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.