Most members of Congress vote on other people's bills. August Pfluger writes the plan.

Pfluger chairs the Republican Study Committee, the largest bloc of conservatives in the House. On January 13, 2026, he unveiled what the RSC calls its "Making the American Dream Affordable Again" framework — a roadmap for a second budget bill, following the one that passed in July 2025.

Here is how he described it, in his own words:

"This blueprint cuts costs where families feel it most—housing, health care, and energy—slashes woke and wasteful spending, and locks in President Trump's deregulatory agenda through the only process Democrats can't block: reconciliation."

Read that last part again

"Reconciliation" is Washington's word for a special fast-track process. A bill moved through it can't be filibustered — it needs only a simple majority in the Senate, so the minority party has no way to stop it. It exists to move budget legislation quickly.

Pfluger didn't hide the appeal. He named it as a selling point: "the only process Democrats can't block."

He added a deadline, too: "We have 11 months of guaranteed majorities. We're not wasting a single day."

That's a plan to move as much as possible through the one route that requires no negotiation, before an election might take the majority away. Whatever you think of the policies, that sentence tells you the design goal was speed and unstoppability, not agreement.

What the last one did to Texas

We know what a budget bill built this way does, because Pfluger voted for the last one on July 3, 2025.

For his own state, the Texas Tribune's breakdown is blunt: an estimated 1.7 million Texans will lose their health coverage, and Texas hospitals stand to lose $39 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade.

About 3.47 million Texans get SNAP food benefits every month, and 1 in 4 Texas kids faces hunger.

Pfluger's own district is West Texas — small towns, long drives, rural hospitals. The distance to the next emergency room is not an abstraction in Sterling City or Eden.

"Over $1 trillion in net deficit reduction"

The framework's headline number is more than $1 trillion in net deficit reduction.

That's a big number, and the honest question is where it comes from. Congress can reduce a deficit by raising revenue or by cutting spending. The framework's own description of its health care pillar is about "ensuring taxpayer-funded benefits serve American citizens—not bureaucrats or special interests" — which is the language used for tightening eligibility and paperwork requirements on benefit programs.

The last bill hit that $1 trillion mark in a way that's now documented: $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts to fund $1 trillion in tax giveaways for the richest 1 percent, according to the Center for American Progress.

Pfluger says the new framework is "not a wish list. It is a governing blueprint."

He's also taking credit for the last one

At a January 8, 2026 Ripon Society forum, Pfluger described the RSC's role in the first budget bill this way:

"I'm going to credit the RSC for being the incubator, the place where we were able to talk about these ideas in the lead up."

So this isn't a case of a member who got handed a bill and voted for it. Pfluger is telling you his organization grew the ideas, and he's building the next one the same way — nearly 190 RSC members, a menu of policies already tested against the Senate's procedural rules, "nearly 70 percent of which have already been introduced or passed by House Republicans."

He also told that audience: "We are governing conservatives. We have a responsibility to be the conscience of the conference."

The people in his district already told him

On July 28, 2025, three weeks after that vote, hundreds of people packed a town hall in San Angelo. They confronted Pfluger over health insurance, immigration and tariffs. His mention of the budget bill drew boos. A 92-year-old woman who said she'd worked the border told him: "We don't want to hear you talk — you're here to listen." Many people walked out before it ended.

Give him this much: he holds real in-person town halls. Plenty of his colleagues don't — Ohio's David Joyce answered a similar demand from his constituents with a telephone town hall that ran about 30 minutes. Pfluger shows up and takes it.

Then, five months later, he unveiled a framework for doing it again — and named as its chief virtue that no one who disagrees can stop it.

Who he answers to

Pfluger has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 0% lifetime score. His top donors are the oil and gas industry his Energy and Commerce Committee regulates — Valero, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental, KOCHPAC, and Permian Basin operators. Only 7% of his money comes from small grassroots donors.

The framework's third pillar is energy: "cutting red tape, accelerating permitting." That is, word for word, what his donors want.

The affordability crisis the framework names is real. Groceries, rent, insurance, power bills — West Texans feel every bit of it. The question is whether a plan built to be unblockable, by a chairman funded by the industries it deregulates, is going to fix the part that hurts them.

The last one took health coverage from 1.7 million Texans.

Source

Making the American Dream Affordable Again: RSC Officially Unveils Reconciliation 2.0 Framework — Republican Study Committee, January 13, 2026. Photo: The Ripon Society.