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After nearly a year, House Republicans are finally gaining momentum on Reconciliation 3.0, an affordability, anti-fraud bill that has the potential to save the party in the midterms. With their self-imposed deadline of “before the end of summer”—meaning before campaign season ramps up in August—the window isn’t open long.
Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, has been working on the framework since the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last July. With a “limited scope,” he believes they can “successfully” pass the “two-minute drill.”
“We are working very hard to further the agenda that I think Donald Trump was elected on, and I’ll tell you, it’s a tough environment,” he said on the Tuesday morning episode of the Ruthless Podcast. Pfluger describes the politically divided Congress as a “soap opera.”
“It is a sad state of affairs when you have to do partisan-only bills like reconciliation,” he said, referencing how the House is set to vote on Reconciliation 2.0, a bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—something Pfluger says had to happen because of the “lack of bipartisanship.”
However, he said 3.0 is different. “3.0 is us going into our districts, listening to our constituents who are saying, hey, things are pretty expensive. We know it’s not your fault. We know it’s Biden and the inflation that he created, but what can we do for housing, energy, and health care?”—questions he says Republicans have really great answers to.
“Number one, because our constituents are asking us to unify, to come together, to get something done,” Pfluger said. “Number two, President Trump, thankfully, is standing up for our military, and we need to recapitalize, which means we need more money—and the Democrats are never going to do that. They’re not going to spend another dime on the military, which is sad. So, for all those reasons—on affordability, on fraud, and on defense.”
While he admits it’s not going to be as big or as beautiful as the OBBB, he believes once they pass it, it will be a quick vote in the upper chamber—“damn, like that’s what we’ve been asking for.”
As chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the largest Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, he said their job is to work on “offense.”
“We heard you in Minnesota, we hear you in California, we know there’s fraud in many states, and we’re going after it, and we’re taking it seriously. We’re not going to be able to uncover every bit of it. We’re going to do as much as we can. We need some more time,” he said, emphasizing the need for another year holding the majority.
Pfluger says Rec. 3.0 will come after the fraud that has been taking headlines across the country, especially in Minnesota and California.
There were “over 400 businesses that popped up in LA County alone, and 99% of those were not valid companies. They’re stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, and that’s the surface that has got to stop … the daycare stuff in Minnesota has got to stop, and there’s so much more of that,” Pfluger continued. “This is not a partisan issue; it’s just there’s only one party who do it.”
He says the goal is to make the American dream affordable again.
Last week, the Heritage Foundation came out with a plan of its own for Congress to use. Much of it was similar to what the Republican Study Committee and Pfluger have put together, adding one key conservative provision previously left out: extending the ban on federal funding for abortion.
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