In Donald Trump’s whirlwind of a first week, very little in the federal government has been left untouched. The president is taking aim at Joe Biden’s policies with laser-like precision, toppling four years of failures, international embarrassments, wokeism, and across-the-board malaise. But not everything can be done with a stroke of the president’s pen, and heading into the next several days, the biggest question mark is how much he can accomplish with Congress. Could America find its way back to fiscal sanity again? America is about to find out.

The toughest hill to climb will be the next batch of federal budgets. Already, Republicans on every committee have been meeting to comb through the agencies’ requests, highlighting major items to cut. As leadership knows, the only way to get the support of the House’s fiscal hawks is to cut a dollar for every dollar spent. Whether that will actually translate into a passable piece of legislation is still anyone’s guess.

“I’m well aware of the grotesque dysfunction here in Washington D.C.,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch” Friday. “[I’m] also very well aware of the slim margin in the House. We got a little bit more leeway in the Senate, but again, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee success.”

Like a lot of Republicans, he has his own ideas of what Congress should tackle first. “The first goal,” Johnson insisted, is the one Trump ran on. “We have to secure the border.” Then, he went on, “We need to make sure this administration has the resources and funding for the full four years. That’s something we all agree on. Then, we have this massive automatic tax increase barreling toward us. … Let’s take that off the table,” the senator urged, a plug for extending the Trump tax cuts. “I think that would be very good for our economy. The private sector wants to build. They want certainty. And then let’s take our time to simplify [and] rationalize our tax code and make sure that whatever we do is permanent. So we’re not facing … another fiscal cliff like this.”

All of that, plus the debt ceiling debate, will make passing a fiscal 2025 budget tricky. “We’re four months into that fiscal year already,” Johnson reminded viewers. Once they get that off their plates, they could turn their attention to 2026 spending — and that, the senator underscored, is where Republicans can reduce the size of government. “We’ve not returned to pre-pandemic levels,” he pointed out. Instead, the Biden administration and Democrats kept borrowing. “We spent $6.5 trillion. So we need to work hard to reduce the level of spending.”

During the president’s speech in Davos at the World Economic Forum, he mentioned that because of “this gross mismanagement” by Biden, we’re spending $1.5 trillion more than we would have under his projections. “So I’ve actually been talking about the budget he proposed, [and it was] about $5.5 trillion versus the $7 trillion,” Johnson calculated. “So we need to in some way, shape or form return to that pre-pandemic, pre-pandemic baseline. And again, that’s going to be complex to do.”

But it’s not impossible, the senator argued — referring back to President Bill Clinton’s baseline back in 1998 when America had its first surplus since the late 1960s. If Congress adjusts for population growth and inflation, he said, “and you use this year’s Social Security [and] Medicare at current levels, you spend what you need to spend. That also would be $5.5 trillion in spending and $5.5 trillion in savings. We’d have a balanced budget.” 

So what stands in the way, Perkins wanted to know? “Republican votes probably,” Johnson replied frankly. “… We really need presidential leadership, because if we have [it], I think House members [and] senators will get behind this concept. Again, we can do this quick[ly]. … I’d vote for it. All Republicans should vote for that.”

The problem, Johnson acknowledged, is that Democrats aren’t the only ones who like pork. “We have big spenders in our Republican Party here in Congress too. So that’s why we need [Trump to weigh in]. Obviously, he ran on reducing the size, scope, and cost of government [and] its influence over our lives. If you want to do that, don’t fund it again.” He paused before adding, “…Hopefully, it’s not going to be much of a fight.”

The idea enthused Perkins, who said, “That would be absolutely amazing if we could balance our budget. I mean, it can be done, but if we had the intestinal fortitude to actually accomplish it … [imagine] the impact that would have on our economy.”

In a “sane world,” Johnson insisted, “COVID spending levels would have been an extreme aberration, and we would have already returned to a more reasonable level of spending. But we haven’t.”

The groundwork is already being laid to change this, the senator explained. “We’re in talks. We’re meeting with the House Freedom Caucus, individuals who are being more than reasonable, as I think we are being more than reasonable. … So if President Trump gets behind this effort, we’ll plow ahead. We can get this done literally in weeks.”