CNN
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Speaker Mike Johnson’s agenda has been repeatedly seized by a group of GOP hardliners who have used the party’s razor-thin margin in the House to score their own political wins.
Now, Republicans from the party’s center are prepared to try the same.
As Congress returns Monday to the enormous task of drafting President Donald Trump’s first policy package, Johnson will be hearing an earful from an even larger faction of his conference with big red lines on the bill: the middle. And those GOP centrists insist that unlike in past votes, they won’t be the ones forced to swallow whatever leadership puts to a floor vote.
“There is a strong and loud group of us that are not going to be bullied into supporting something that we don’t agree with,” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, whose 2022 upset helped propel Republicans into the majority, told CNN. “The only reason we have the gavels is because of folks like me.”
Many of these members — a loose coalition of several dozen centrists, purple seat and pro-governing Republicans — told CNN they are tired of the House GOP’s longtime playbook in which right-wing members have refused to compromise and, in effect, have cornered Johnson into supporting their own ideas. And they say the stakes are even higher now, as Republicans prepare for a potentially difficult 2026 midterm cycle that some already fear could wipe out their House majority.
Their biggest concern now is preserving benefits for Medicaid, which has become a target of party fiscal hawks as they seek to cut at least $1.5 trillion from government programs — a large chunk of which must come from federal health programs. But the centrists have plenty of other priorities, from federal nutritional programs to state and local tax deductions to clean energy programs — and policy fights are about to come to a head in the House in the next month.
One centrist — Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a self-described “populist Republican” — is already flexing his political muscle. He’s spoken with Trump about Medicaid four times, including once in recent days. He was also one of 12 members who signed a rare public letter to their leadership demanding that they preserve the health program benefits in a final bill. (Behind the scenes, more members were supportive but decided not to put their names on it, according to three people familiar with the discussions.)
Van Drew said he will not vote for any bill that “cuts eligible recipients — whether they be entities such as hospitals and nursing homes — or human beings” from Medicaid. The New Jersey Republican said a group of right-wing Republicans have repeatedly dictated their own agenda to leadership, but that he and others would not – in this case – accept “business as usual” for the sake of their constituents and their House GOP majority.
“You don’t take stuff away from people who are legally and appropriately receiving it. Don’t do that. That’s bad,” Van Drew said. “If you want to do a one-hour tutorial on how to lose your majority, do that. Go ahead and do that stuff and you can write a game plan on how to lose your majority.”
The party’s political fault lines on Medicaid are bursting into public view with just weeks to go until Republicans are expected to release their first draft of the plan. The panel charged with finding those savings — the Energy and Commerce Committee — will meet the week of May 5 and the GOP will have to publicly show how they plan to shave $880 billion in their jurisdiction.
For weeks, GOP lawmakers and senior aides have stressed to party leaders that it would be a terrible idea — both policy-wise and politically — to go after Medicaid, according to multiple people who have been part of the conversations. The program enrolls more than 80 million Americans, including many who voted for Trump. Democrats have already signaled they’ll seek to make it a defining issue of the 2026 midterms.
The president said in a recent interview with Time magazine that he would veto a bill that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Republicans have argued there are ways to cut hundreds of billions in wasted money on federal health programs without slashing Medicaid benefits – but it remains unclear where those cuts would come from.
Top Republicans believe they have found some politically palatable ways to trim spending — including potential new rules requiring recipients to work to get coverage, rules requiring recipients to reapply every six months to ensure eligibility and tightening existing rules that ban coverage to anyone who is in the country illegally. (One GOP member estimated that those alone could have saved a half-trillion dollars over a decade — but still far short of leadership’s $880 billion goal.)
Last week, Georgia Rep. Austin Scott, however, reignited a political firestorm in the conference when he told Fox News that Republicans are eying big reductions to the federal government’s matching funds to Medicaid, which was expanded in many states under the Affordable Care Act. That was something that many of his colleagues believed had already been ruled out, according to two people briefed on the discussions.
“There have been a gazillion things talked about but with very little specificity. Now is the time in the game for people to actually put proposals on the table,” one GOP member said.
The difficulty for Republicans on programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, will be finding ways to reduce wasteful spending in these massive federal programs without causing any disruptions to those who rely on those benefits.
Some Republicans are anxiously thinking back to the 2018 midterms, when their party was similarly accused of trying to take away health care for millions.
“We know how the movie ends,” a senior GOP aide said of that election. “We lost 40 seats.”
For months, Johnson and his leadership team have punted their toughest choices about how to proceed with Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” papering over major divisions within their ranks.
Now Johnson and his leadership team are eying a vote on the House’s version of Trump’s agenda as soon as the week of May 19, though few in the party are taking that self-imposed deadline seriously.
But even if the House can overcome deep party divisions to move this quickly, the Senate is expected to move far slower. And that reality has further stoked anxiety among GOP centrists who do not want to walk the plank on a contentious bill that dies across the Capitol in the Senate.
The next month in the House will consist of marathon committee meetings and markups to hash out policy — including trillions in tax cuts, massive increases in border and military funding and sharp spending cuts to federal programs.
So far, GOP leaders have kept any details largely under wraps. That includes another issue that will be critical for Republicans like Lawler and his New York colleagues: the state and local tax deduction issue, known as SALT.
Republicans from New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California have spent months crafting a compromise to restore a state and local tax deduction that was capped in Trump’s 2017 tax bill. These members are waiting on leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee to present a final proposal on what the change may look like — language that will almost certainly cause headaches within the conservative House Freedom Caucus as well.
Most Republicans in Congress — including those in the GOP controlled Senate — hail from lower-tax states and therefore detest the expensive policy change. House conservatives have balked at some of the proposals in the past to raise the deduction.
But Republicans like Lawler and fellow New York Rep. Nick LaLota have insisted they will not support a bill that doesn’t include major SALT changes back home.
“I would not have voted for the 2017 tax bill if I were in Congress. It is unreasonable to ask me to lend my vote to extend the status quo,” said LaLota, who won his Long Island seat in 2022.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to take 218 votes in the House. The fact is, with a very slim majority, the majority was delivered by seats like mine,” Lawler added. “We’re not going to do things that harm our districts or our constituents. The fact is, there’s going to need to be compromise along the way.”
