Ten years ago this month, nine conservative House Republicans, frustrated with the party’s leadership, met at the conference’s retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to form their own caucus. “The original working title was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus,” recalled Mick Mulvaney, one of the founding members. “Reasonable nutjob” was “sort of a thumbing our nose that John McCain would call us a bunch of nutjobs,” Mulvaney told The Dispatch.
Before they settled on their name—the Freedom Caucus—those representatives had been derided as nutjobs not only for their staunch fiscal conservatism but for their support of using particularly aggressive tactics to achieve fiscally conservative outcomes. After the rise of the Tea Party and the red wave in the 2010 midterm elections, the Tea Party threat of a government shutdown over federal spending led to real budget cuts in 2011. But an actual government shutdown over a push to defund Obamacare in 2013 resulted in little more than greater hostility between the rebels who pushed for the shutdown and the members of the GOP establishment—that is, party leadership and their allies—who felt they had been dragged along for a bruising and pointless ride.
Mulvaney said that the establishment’s efforts to quash the GOP rebels—by cutting off campaign funds, denying them plum committee assignments, and using heavy-handed tactics to keep them from leadership of the Republican Study Committee, the existing House GOP conservative conference—led to the creation of the Freedom Caucus in January 2015. Later that year, the group played a key role in forcing the resignation of Speaker John Boehner.
Ten years on, the rebels in the House GOP Freedom Caucus (HFC) have become an important part of Donald Trump’s GOP establishment. “We started as a way to try and make the Republican leadership more fiscally conservative, and to try to drive more fiscally conservative legislation out of the Republican-controlled House,” Mulvaney said. “It changed a little bit then during Donald Trump’s first term in office, when it was sort of Donald Trump’s shock troops.”
Many of the original nine founding members of the HFC have gone on to have wildly successful careers in the Trump era. Two—Mulvaney and Mark Meadows—would go on to serve as White House chief of staff, and another, Ron DeSantis, was elected governor of Florida in 2018 and, for a few months at least, looked like a formidable challenger to Trump for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. The original Freedom Caucus chairman, Jim Jordan, is one of Trump’s most reliable allies in Congress and a mainstay on right-wing cable news—and was a serious contender to be speaker of the House after several Freedom Caucus members helped defenestrate Kevin McCarthy in 2023.
The HFC doesn’t publicly disclose their membership numbers, but there are more than two dozen members. Jordan and fellow Freedom Caucus member Mark Green are now the chairmen of significant committees (Oversight and Homeland Security, respectively), and three Freedom Caucus members currently sit on the powerful Rules Committee—the last stop for any piece of legislation that comes to the House floor under regular order. “I don’t think if you’d asked anybody 10 years ago if we’d have proportional representation on Rules that they’d say that would even be possible,” a senior House GOP aide close to the Freedom Caucus told The Dispatch.
But what has the HFC actually done with that power? When the Freedom Caucus was founded on the principles of fiscal conservatism in January 2015, the national debt stood at roughly $18 trillion. Over the past decade, that figure has doubled. Asked if he could recall any Freedom Caucus achievements on spending, Mulvaney was circumspect. “My guess is that we didn’t,” he told The Dispatch. “If anything, we raised awareness, and that was about it. We just didn’t have numbers.”
The House GOP aide close to the Freedom Caucus was similarly unable to point to any significant victories for fiscal conservatism. “We are a small band versus the ocean of spending, so we’ve at least tried,” the aide said, while maintaining that the Freedom Caucus has driven the party to the right on other issues. The immigration bill passed by the House GOP on a party-line vote in 2023, for example, would have been a pipe dream a decade ago, the aide observed: “Your average Republican member from 2017 is at this point almost a fringe centrist in this era.”
While the House GOP writ large has certainly evolved over the course of the Trump era, so too has the Freedom Caucus, with its members more than willing to temper their tactics when Trump is the one signing big spending bills. “I don’t remember them opposing us,” Mulvaney said of his time as Trump’s budget director during his first administration. “Sometimes I wish they had because, back before I was chief, Trump signed a couple appropriations bills that I think he regretted it, and I wish the Freedom Caucus had been more assertive and encouraging not to sign big spending bills that [Paul] Ryan and [Mitch] McConnell had put forward.”
As Trump’s second term kicks off, caucus chairman Andy Harris is striking a conciliatory tone toward the administration. “The best way to advance the conservative agenda is to not be constantly viewed as an obstacle,” Harris told The Hill earlier this month. “Pound for pound, or per capita, we are the strongest supporters of President Trump anywhere in Washington. This group is it.”
It’s hard to envision many Freedom Caucus members getting crosswise with Trump in his second term—the few who have in the past have paid a steep political price. Former Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan was a founding member of the HFC and wrote in the group’s mission statement that it would be dedicated to “the Constitution and the rule of law.” But when Amash concluded in 2019 that Trump had committed impeachable conduct with his attempt to dig up dirt on the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine, he was condemned by his Freedom Caucus colleagues and resigned. Former Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a onetime HFC member and a Trump critic, lost a primary race in 2018 to a pro-Trump Republican who proudly declared that “there will never be a seat at the table” for someone like Sanford. Former Rep. Bob Good lost his primary in Virginia last year while he was the sitting chairman of the Freedom Caucus in large part due to his support for Ron DeSantis in the presidential primary.
Most members of the Freedom Caucus backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and as a new term begins, some rank-and-file members are falling over each other to demonstrate who loves the president the most. “Daddy’s back,” declared Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida recently introduced legislation to put Trump’s face on Mt. Rushmore. Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Trump—but not Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama—to run for a third term.
Perhaps the most interesting Freedom Caucus member to watch in the new Congress will be Chip Roy of Texas, who has been willing to buck the leader of his party on occasion. Following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, for example, Roy ultimately voted against impeachment but made clear that Trump “deserves universal condemnation for what was clearly impeachable conduct—pressuring the vice president to violate his oath to the Constitution to count the electors.” He easily staved off a primary challenger in 2022, but Trump never seemed to move past Roy’s criticism.
When Roy opposed a debt-limit deal favored by Trump last month, the president-elect called for another primary challenge. “Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy, with no talent,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I hope some talented challengers are getting ready in the Great State of Texas to go after Chip in the Primary. He won’t have a chance!”
Roy is one of the few members of the House who could conceivably stand up to Trump on fiscal issues in 2025. “Being the conscience on spending is at the core of the Freedom Caucus,” Roy told The Dispatch in the Capitol last week. He doesn’t believe that all tax cuts simply pay for themselves, and is determined to prevent any bill passed on a party-line vote to renew tax cuts from raising the deficit. “Speaking for myself, I think reasonably consistent with the Freedom Caucus … I just want it to be deficit reducing, no worse than deficit neutral,” Roy said, acknowledging that assessing a bill’s precise effect on the deficit is a “little art, not science” that depends on assumptions about how much the economy will grow.
While imagining several members of the Freedom Caucus bucking Trump on any given issue is difficult, the House GOP’s majority is razor-thin, meaning two or three House Republicans of any ideological or temperamental persuasion could kill any party-line legislation. “The leverage is obvious to everybody, which is the problem,” said Mulvaney. “Anybody can be another Freedom Caucus right now.”
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