As he leads the House in building a budget plan to enact key facets of President Donald Trump‘s agenda, Johnson has run into snags with factions of his conference sparring over what the deal should look like and how it should be passed.

However, possible provisions included in the lower chamber’s budget bill that mimic DOGE’s cuts to various federal bureaucracies may be pivotal to encouraging the House Freedom Caucus to vote in favor of the deal. 

“We are going to be codifying a lot of these changes,”  Johnson said of DOGE’s findings during comments to reporters Monday, “and what they’ve uncovered is, frankly, shocking.”

Johnson’s pledge to codify DOGE’s slashing of the federal bureaucracy will hold immense appeal to Freedom Caucus members, whose focus on cutting government spending has brought them into a firm alliance with Musk.

“…Thanks to President Trump, @elonmusk, and @DOGE, the truth is finally coming to light. They’re exposing the corruption, the waste, and the misplaced priorities that have drained our nation,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX), a member of the caucus, wrote in a social media post on Monday. “But Congress cannot sit on the sidelines and pretend we weren’t part of the problem. It’s time to take action and force real cuts… We need to fight to rein in this out-of-control bureaucracy and put the American people back in charge.”

Caucus members have long expressed concern about many of the same bureaucracies Musk has scrutinized, including the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“We’ve been taking on USAID before it was cool,” the caucus wrote in a Feb. 4 post to X. 

In another recent social media post, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, praised DOGE for examining the National Institutes of Health’s policy of sending billions in taxpayer funding to universities to cover “indirect costs” of research, an initiative the lawmaker said he questioned for years. 

In 2023, long before DOGE sounded the alarm about the Pentagon failing multiple consecutive audits, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), a Freedom Caucus member, introduced legislation that slashed the Defense Department’s budget by 0.5% if it failed the financial review. 

On Monday, the caucus released a budgetary resolution, which kick-started the reconciliation process needed to pass a spending bill. With a name highlighting the similarities its goals bear to Musk’s initiative, 218 for DOGE’s focus lies on border reform, in addition to slashing $486 billion in federal spending.

In contrast to Johnson’s vision for one broad bill containing tax, border, and energy reforms and around $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, the caucus’s budget proposal calls for the House to pass two smaller bills as part of the deal. 

The House Freedom Caucus’s two-bill proposal mimics the Senate’s budget proposal, which was introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Johnson has criticized the upper chamber’s proposal and has repeatedly urged the upper chamber to let the House lead budget negotiations, saying Sunday that “at the end of the day, the House has to drive this process — and we will.”

“I appreciate the Senate’s zeal. We have it in the House as well,” Johnson said on Fox News Sunday. “But as I reminded my friend, Lindsey, I have about 170 additional personalities to deal with and he’s only got 53.”

Still, if Johnson weaves critical elements of the caucus’s resolution and Musk’s spending cuts into his budget deal, he could gain key support from hard-liners in his conference when the bill comes up for a vote in the coming weeks. 

Johnson told reporters Tuesday that the House would be “rolling out the details” of a budget plan by that evening. 

“We are right on the schedule that we need to be on,” the speaker said, adding that a committee markup of the budget resolution would likely be scheduled for Thursday.