"Politically, that would be great for us, you know, because everybody gets a check," Johnson said to the crowd. "But if you think about our core principles, right, fiscal responsibility is what we do as conservatives.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) threw cold water on the idea of using savings from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) government-slashing

President Donald Trump had said earlier this week his administration was weighing sending 20% of savings by DOGE to taxpayers.

Elon Musk drove another wedge through a conservative consensus on a budget resolution as House Speaker Mike Johnson struggled to hold his “big, beautiful bill” together. Johnson was caught between swing district doves wary of cuts to Medicaid and fiscal hawks insisting the $2 trillion spending cuts didn’t go far enough.

Mike Johnson is trying and failing to maintain the appearance of budget unity within the GOP—and Elon Musk is only making it harder. The looming Republican budget resolution is an attempt to pack Donald Trump’s beefy agenda into one “big,

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., signaled he was not a fan of a proposal to send Americans stimulus checks with the money saved by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and that he believed the funding was better directed toward the national debt.