Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming said Sunday that he and his GOP colleagues are looking to cut $2 trillion in federal spending as part of the so-called “big, beautiful bill.”
That’s certainly something that will bring a smile to Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk, who reported to President Donald Trump last week that his team has found $160 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse in federal outlays that should be rescinded immediately.
“You’ve done an incredible job. $150 billion” – Trump
“$160 billion, but who’s counting” – @elonmusk
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) April 30, 2025
Trump chimmed in, adding, “That number could be doubled and even tripled. A lot of things are being worked on that we don’t quite count yet, because it’s not there.”
So those are again short-term cuts that could happen if Congress passes rescission legislation to return the money to the Treasury.
As far as federal spending over the next 10 years, the Republican-led House narrowly passed a budget resolution last month calling for $1.5 trillion in cuts.
It came following the Senate’s passing a budget resolution that only listed $4 billion in reductions.
However, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said following the House passage of its version, “The Speaker [Mike Johnson] has talked about $1.5 trillion. We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum. And we’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible.”
Will GOP lawmakers end up being true to their word and pulling off these huge cuts?
On Sunday, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked Barrasso, who serves on the Senate Finance Committee, “Do you believe that you will be able to match what the House has identified — $1.5 trillion in spending cuts? Because so far the Senate has come up with, what with, $3 or 4 billion in spending cuts? Tell us now definitively, do you believe you’ll be able to match the House’s spending cuts?”
“Well, I do,” Barrasso responded. “And, actually, our number’s a little higher than that of what we’d like to get to. The American people know the government is too big; it spends too much. They saw this list of things that have come out, the spending under the bloated budgets of the Biden administration for the last four years that have given us the highest inflation in 40 years.”
The majority whip then noted that he and his fellow Republican senators on the Finance Committee have been working since last summer to identify places to cut federal spending.
“Our aim is $2 trillion. I don’t know that we’re going to get there,” Barrasso said. “We’re going to match whatever the House is able to do. We need to get a bill past the House, past the Senate, and to the president’s desk, so we can make a difference in the lives of the American people and get this country back on track and get more money into their pockets.”
So both the work of DOGE and the Republican Congress are heading in the right direction in terms of restoring fiscal sanity after years of trillions in deficit spending under President Joe Biden, including last year, which was $1.8 trillion.
Just to give some perspective, in FY 2019, during Trump’s first term, the federal government spent a total of $4.4 trillion, and the deficit was $984 billion.
Last year, under Biden, total spending was $6.8 trillion, in other words, $2.4 trillion more annually. Some of that is population growth — more reaching Social Security and Medicare age, etc. — but a lot of it is just trillions in new federal spending programs such as the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, and the CHIPs bill.
Much of this new spending is still ongoing, because the legislation called for multi-year outlays.
If the Republicans whack these programs down so overall government spending is about $5.5 trillion a year, with tariff collections and a growing American economy generating more revenue, a balanced budget becomes a real possibility.
If what Barrasso says regarding $2 trillion in cuts becomes reality, that would be a very good start.
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