joining us now with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Mr. Speaker, good to have you on America Reports. Thanks for being here. So please do give us your take on where this ends up and what it'll look like. I think we're going to end up crossing the finish line and getting this job done for the American people. We have the entire America First agenda wrapped into this one big beautiful bill. That's why we call it that. It's President Trump's promises to the American people and it's our promises. All of us said on the campaign trail, we got to deliver this product. Now, I think we will. I mean, this is part of the process. Remember, before we got it passed in the House last Thursday, there was lots of grumbling and lots of questions, a lot of doubt. The critics and the media and the Democrats said we couldn't get it done, but we did in the end. And I believe the Senate will do the same. We've been working hand in hand with the Senate from the very beginning of this process to ensure that it really is a one team approach. The House and Senate Republicans working together. And I think at the end of the day, they're going to get this job done. All right. So you think that it's going to cross the finish line, but the question is, I guess, Mr. Speaker, what's the cargo to look like? What crosses the finish line? Will it still have all four wheels in a body? Because Senator Ron Johnson told us this last week about the bill. He's not happy at all. And we need presidential leadership to get on board with returning to a reasonable prepandemic level spending. That's probably for next year, no more than six point five trillion dollars. Right now, we're on track to be over seven trillion dollars. That's completely unacceptable. And he's not the only one who's unhappy about the level of spending versus the level of saving. So it looks like the Senate is going to do some reworking with this bill. And what do you think it looks like when it comes out the other side? Well, look, I've encouraged them to do as little reworking as possible because we have a very delicate balance that we've maintained in the House and the Senate. We both have small majorities. I don't disagree with my good friend Ron Johnson. He's right. We have a big national debt problem. But I think what's being discounted here is the fact that we are achieving the largest amount of savings in the history of government on planet Earth. I mean, we're going to save over one point five trillion dollars in spending. That's a big, big thing. We didn't get in this economic situation overnight, and it's going to take us a while to get out of it. But this would be the biggest, largest, dramatic turn that we've ever had in Congress. And so it's a big achievement. Now, look, this is just the beginning. This is not the end. This is the first of what we believe will be multiple reconciliation packages and will be codifying more of the Doge cuts and putting all these things into law. So this is an important step. And I don't want them to miss that as they're debating the merits of the bill. Well, Mr. Speaker, speaking of Doge, Elon Musk taking issue on whether this can be both big and beautiful. Listen. You know, I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it. And that reminds the work that the Doge team is doing. I think I think it both can be can be can be big or it could be beautiful. But I don't know if it could be both. So how do you respond to his concerns about it? Yes, I sent my good friend, Elon, a long text message last night explaining that it can be both big and beautiful. So what I wanted to make sure that he understands is that the projection that he's referring to and others is from the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. They are historically totally unreliable. It's run by Democrats. Eighty four percent of the number crunchers over there are donors to big Democrats. They don't have our best interest in mind. And they've always been off by way of example. They were off on their projections of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in the first Trump administration by one trillion dollars. The problem is they do not use what we call dynamic scoring. What that means in layman's terms is they don't give us any credit for the extraordinary economic growth that will be spurred along by this bill. This is a pro growth package. It lower tax rates, less regulation will do exactly what we did in the first Trump administration, but this time on steroids. And so we're going to have an extraordinary growth in the economy. You're going to have more jobs created, higher wages, more labor participation. And all those things need to be factored in because that's reality. And by the way, the CBO is giving no credence whatsoever, no calculation at all to the new revenues that are being produced by the Trump tariff policies and all these other things that are happening. So we believe we're going to get the economy going. And this is going to be deficit reducing at the end of the day. It matters how you do the math. And that's what's important for everybody to remember. You mentioned this just a moment ago, and that is codifying the doge cuts into law. And the White House is soon going to be sending you the framework of a rescission package that includes cuts of 1.1 billion from PBS and NPR and 8.3 billion from foreign aid. It's obviously a big priority for the president. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted this on actually said, personally, I want to pass doge cuts every single week until the bloated out of control government is rained back in as a country. We cannot survive our national debt. And honestly, we may be past the point of return. We should be aggressively attacking our debt and aggressively cutting all waste, fraud and abuse and unnecessary programs. Our future literally is in peril. So you got more than $9 billion in cuts that the president wants codified into law. Can you do it? Yes. And Marjorie is exactly right. And she and I were talking about this yesterday. I think you'll find a big appetite across the conference. Every Republican in Congress wants to cut fraud, waste and abuse. We want government to be leaner and more efficient and effective. And the beauty of what doge has been able to do. The reason it's so revolutionary is because Elon cracked the code. He had access. All the stars aligned. We had a president who was bold enough to do it. We had somebody with Elon's talent and capability to come in and have his magic algorithms running through the data to find all these irregularities. And these are things that have been hidden from Congress, right? We've been trying to do our oversight responsibility, but the bureaucracy was hiding these things. And so this changes the way government works. And Elon's exactly right. The doge effort will go on long beyond his tenure as a temporary assistant in all this because it's changing the way people look at this. And the oversight's a really important component, and that's going to be a permanent part of government now. And it's an exciting thing.
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