‘It Really Disturbs Me’: One Republican’s Dire Warning to His Party

Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., has a dire warning for his fellow Republicans—find a way to make President Donald Trump’s agenda affordable or face economic collapse.

“I’m looking forward to us being the Congress that actually does something other than always talking a big game,” Brecheen told The Daily Signal. 

“Just a pronouncement of the problem is not a solution and we’re guilty, as Republicans, of talking about the debt and deficit and never doing enough to correct it, because we’re afraid of losing the next election cycle—winning elections and losing the country, resulting in harm to everyone,” he said.

A citizen of the Choctaw Nation from Oklahoma, Brecheen is a fiscally conservative member of the Freedom Caucus who first entered Congress in 2022 on a platform of reeling in the United States’ ever-rising debt.

Brecheen does see some brand-new opportunities to push for fiscal conservatism under Trump. 

As a member of the House’s Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency Caucus, Brecheen admires Elon Musk and wholeheartedly supports the tech tycoon’s war against the U.S. Agency for International Development, a foreign aid organization that has been labeled by Trump and others as being expensive and politically radicalized.

Brecheen told The Daily Signal that for a long time he has sought to curb expensive foreign aid that ends up in the wrong hands.

“My team put together a measure that would have stopped funding for foreign aid that was going to the Taliban. We’ve got people getting investigative reports and inspector general reports saying that we know the Taliban is tapping into U.S. finances, and because of what we’re doing, giving money to Afghanistan,” said Brecheen. ”It is beyond madness.”

Yet another tool at Trump’s disposal is his aggressive use of tariffs, which gives Brecheen hope. Brecheen celebrated Trump’s successful use of trade threats to make Canada and Mexico guard the border.

“I think it’s great. I think it’s something that we ought to factor in in terms of what we see as the cost that we’re having to factor in on reconciliation,” he said. “Tariffs are so effectual when they are targeted.”

Brecheen also supports Trump’s freezing of federal funds—a practice that has drawn the ire of Democrats, as he argues that the cost-saving action is well within the president’s powers.

But for Brecheen, one of the biggest tests of whether or not his party means business on cutting spending is the budget reconciliation process.

Budget reconciliation is a process exempt from the 60-vote cloture threshold required in the Senate. Through reconciliation, Congress decides which areas should get more money, and which should get less based on their priorities. This process will likely decide whether or not the Trump administration can get enough money to fulfill its campaign promise and provide insight on just how fiscally conservative Republicans intend to be.

Brecheen’s hopes for the process are simple—spend more on the border and national defense, while cutting spending on almost everything else so that Republicans can finally make progress on the deficit.

“For almost everything regarding reconciliation, absent the border and national defense, I would absolutely want to see us take reconciliation and turn it into not just neutrality for the deficit … but also to drive it towards changing the trajectory of where we’re headed over the next 20 years,” said Brecheen.

Brecheen has a bleak vision of the country’s direction should the debt issue be left unresolved. He told The Daily Signal that the United States is on track toward $50 trillion in debt in 10 years, with “half of our budget eaten up just by interest on our debt” by 2050.

“We have a lag on our economy. I don’t want to miss the moment in time to correct that because long-term thinking is the only way we’re going to avoid a sovereign debt crisis and an economic collapse in the future. So, reconciliation has to be about doing both,” he said.

The problem is that, although Republicans almost universally support extending Trump’s massive 2017 tax cuts, they haven’t been able to agree on how much to cut spending to make up for lost revenue.

Brecheen, along with the Freedom Caucus, advocates for deeper cuts than many of his colleagues, and says he’s been alarmed by Republicans talking about cutting only $2.5 trillion over the course of 10 years.

Brecheen said he was concerned they were starting with low expectations and may not follow through if met with resistance.

“It really, really disturbs me that we’re willing to say things so flippantly and then abandon it at first obstacle, or the perception of first obstacles,” he said.

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