WASHINGTON — This morning, at the weekly House Republican Leadership press conference, Speaker Johnson discussed finishing FY26 appropriations, the beginning of tax season and the transformative benefits of the Working Families Tax Cuts, and his address to the U.K. Parliament.
“Once we pass the final batch this week, Republicans will have finally replaced the last of any Biden-era spending levels with Trump-era spending levels,” Speaker Johnson said. “No more Biden and Pelosi negotiated budgets. We’ve turned that page and we are not turning back.”
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full remarks here.
On finishing all 12 FY26 Appropriations bills:
For the third consecutive week now, House Republicans are going to advance another set, the final set, of FY26 appropriations bills this week. You’ll see Defense, Homeland, Transportation, and Labor-HHS. These bills are going to fund the Trump agenda and Republican efforts to restore peace through strength, to defend our borders, to deport criminal, illegal aliens, to rebuild America’s infrastructure, and to make America healthy again. All laudable goals and things that we promised, and things we’re delivering on. Now, this is our final batch of appropriations bills for the fiscal year. And there were a lot of people, and I think many in this room, that argued that this could not be done – that a regular appropriations process is a thing of the past. And, you know, it’s been a couple decades since this has happened. Critics said our margins were too slim to bring it back, to rebuild that muscle memory that I committed to when I became Speaker. They said we had too many bills left to pass and too many disagreements left to reconcile. But I’m happy to report that all those prognostications were flat wrong, and we’ve gotten it done. And it’s the most significant sign of progress in these halls in years.
House Republicans are restoring regular order. And it’s important to the people that we represent because the only way to have a good fiscal sanity and responsibility and stewardship over taxpayer dollars is to return to regular order. We’re returning the appropriations process to a committee-led, Member-driven approach, as it should be. We should not have the four corners, the top four leaders in the House and Senate in a back room, making pages and pages of decisions for the country. That’s not the way it was supposed to work. And I’ve been doggedly determined to make sure that didn’t happen. And this time it did not. Together, all 12 individual appropriations bills will provide full year government funding without unrelated policy provisions. It will spend less than another continuing resolution, and it will continue to advance our America First agenda. Once we pass the final batch this week, Republicans will have finally replaced the last of any Biden-era spending levels with Trump-era spending levels. No more Biden and Pelosi negotiated budgets. We’ve turned that page and we are not turning back.
On the benefits of the Working Families Tax Cuts for American families:
Let me give you a couple of numbers really quick. $4,000: that’s the value of the average tax refund for Americans of this year. $100 billion: that’s the estimated total of 2025 tax refunds for families. $10,000: the average increase in annual take home pay for working families. Think of it, $10,000 is the average across the country. 15%: the average tax cut for families earning between $15,000 and $80,000 dollars annually. How did we do that? We reduced federal taxes. We made permanent, the Doubled Standard Deduction. We instituted a $6,000 deduction for seniors, which will affect more than 50 million of them. We included no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. We boosted the Child Tax Credit. We made permanent the Paid Leave Tax Credit. We expanded FSAs. We increased the Adoption Tax Credit. And those are just provisions for families.
We wrote it and geared it for lower- and middle-class families. You know how the Democrats always say, “Oh, the Republicans only favor the billionaires?” It’s a joke. Go look at the facts. Everybody’s going to see that this was written for lower- and middle-class hardworking families in America, and they’re going to benefit from that, and they’re going to know who did it. As our Chair reminded you about five times this morning, Democrats voted against every bit of this. They voted to raise taxes, and they voted against all this great policy. The very people who suffered the most during the Biden years were lower- and middle-class families. And we are going to correct that. And all boats are going to rise.
On the advent of tax season:
Will Rogers, the famous actor and writer from Oklahoma, whose statue stands outside the House Chamber where we all meet to do our interviews with you, he once observed this. He said, “The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get any worse every time Congress meets.” For most of our history, his observation held true, which is why everybody kind of laughs at that. But it’s not true anymore. Republicans have simplified the tax code. We have reduced the tax burden on families. We’ve advanced a policy agenda that puts working families first. And the proof is in the pudding, as we say. Next Monday, January 26, tax season officially begins in America. For many people, it’s a dreaded time. It’s a moment that they don’t celebrate. But this year there’s going to be lots of happy surprises. Thanks to our Working Families Tax Cuts, tens of millions of American families are going to see bigger paychecks and they’re going to see bigger tax refunds.
On Speaker Johnson’s address to the U.K. Parliament:
We had the profound honor and privilege to be the first American Speaker of the House to address the British Parliament, and it was a good day there. My counterpart, Speaker Lindsay Hoyle there in the House of Commons, invited me back in the fall to come and do that. And the idea was that we would sort of launch, in a historic manner, our America 250 celebration, in the cradle of democracy where it all began. And it was surreal in that regard. And I noted yesterday, the special relationship really does exist between our two nations and that relationship really grew and flourished and was forged in the great wars of the 20th century.
And we have stood together because we have a common history and heritage, I reminded them. And one that gave rise to the greatest, most free, most successful, most powerful, most benevolent civilization that the world has ever known. And that is what Western civilization represents. And I talked with our friends there about the necessity of us standing together to defend the foundations of Western civilization because the West is in peril today. And those foundations are endangered because there are rising powers like China and Russia. And that is one of the things we have to keep in mind as we do all of our work. So that was a little history yesterday.
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