Rep. Chip Roy on Spending, Immigration, and the American Dream
"I think members of Congress believe that they get more popularity in votes by spending money. I actually disagree with that," the Texas Republican tells Reason.
Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas), who recently announced that he is running to replace Ken Paxton as Texas attorney general, has carved out a reputation as one of Washington's most unflinching fiscal hawks. His political career began as an aide to then–Texas Attorney General John Cornyn on his Senate campaign; he subsequently served as chief of staff to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. First elected to Congress in 2018, Roy distinguished himself as a lawmaker willing to buck party leadership, most notably by opposing spending bills favored by both Republicans and Democrats.
Today, Roy is a critic of runaway federal spending and at times a thorn in the side of political leadership, which has led President Donald Trump to call for primary challenges against him. He has taken high-profile stands on the debt ceiling, entitlement reform, and what he calls the "tyranny" of a government that funds itself by mortgaging future generations.
He also voted for the president's budget-busting One Big Beautiful Bill Act, arguing that its reductions to Medicaid were better than nothing. In August, at a 90th birthday celebration for former Rep. Ron Paul (R–Texas), Roy sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to explain that vote, as well as to discuss Social Security, health care reform, immigration, whether his state's controversial redistricting plan is legitimate, and why he believes Texas still embodies the American dream.
Reason: You are a rare voice of fiscal shrinking in Washington, D.C. That has put you in the crosshairs with Donald Trump in particular. You don't want to raise the debt ceiling unless there's a reduction in spending. You pushed back against the Big Beautiful Bill, although you did cave and support it.
Chip Roy: We'll come back to the word cave, but OK.
Well, you voted for it. Talk a little bit about your general philosophy. Why is it so important that government spending be either held constant or reduced?
My view is that the power of the purse is the central power of Congress, and we've abdicated it for as long as I can remember. If you don't constrain that power of the purse, then you're funding the very bureaucracy that was predicted by the Founders—and has proven to be true—to be at odds with our liberty.
To say Congress is asleep at the switch is an understatement. You came into office in 2019, but this has been going on for at least 20 years before. Why?
My observation is that we're actually at a moment where more members of Congress get it than I've ever seen in the past. That's the good news. But the bad news is, it's still a woefully inadequate group of people to change it.
I think members of Congress believe that they get more popularity in votes by spending money. I actually disagree with that. I'm a cancer survivor. I have cancer groups who come in and ask me for money. I say, "God bless you. I know what you're trying to do. Research is great. But do you have a pay-for [for] that?" No. Well, then I can't support it. Farm Bureau comes in. I love the farmers. I want to protect small farmers against corporate [agriculture]. But they come in and they want their money on the farm bill. I'm like, "Well, are we fixing the food stamps?" No. Well, then I can't support it. They get that.
It's important to not fund the tyranny that's turned on us. I think more people are seeing that now in ways that they didn't in the past.
Going to the heart of the Big Beautiful Bill debate: We were told in January, "You're not going to touch anything in Medicaid or any kind of health care." Well, we got a trillion dollars of Medicaid. We were told we weren't going to be able to do much on the Green New Scam subsidies. We were able to get 3, or 4, or $500 billion worth of cutbacks to those. Did we get everything we need? No.
There's no question that the Big Beautiful Bill is going to increase the debt, right? There's no realistic scenario where it doesn't.
I think that is likely the case based on the following facts: Medicare was not touched. Social Security was not touched. Interest payments are going up.
But understand that part of the agreement, and we got to deliver the agreement, was holding discretionary [spending] flat or lower. That was a part of the deal, which by the way, will pay dividends if we do it.
That's a part of the deal, which I'm going to fight for. And also, remember that tax cuts. I had libertarian friends who were like, "Hey, I love the no tax on tips." Well, OK, but what about no tax on the guys in the back of the restaurant? We all want lower taxes. You, I, every person who wants a limited government.
I want lower spending.
But you want lower spending to go along with that. What I would argue is, we fought to get lower spending on things that people never thought we could get, Medicaid being huge among those. Is it enough? No. Is it likely going to create front-loaded deficits? Yes.
You took a lot of heat from Trump on the debt ceiling bill. He was calling you out by name. And you also got leaned on in the Big Beautiful Bill debates. What is it like when Donald Trump, the president of the United States—a guy who, whatever else you can say about him, has the power to destroy the political careers of politicians who are very popular in their districts—says, "What the hell are you doing? You'd better get in line!"
I view it slightly differently because I don't worry about whether I'm in office or not. Come after me, it's fine.
What I do care about is what can we do in this window of time when we have some people in the administration willing—clunkily, not always what you and I and others who are fiscal stewards would do. What are you going to do when you've got that opportunity?
Whatever he's doing—scaling back some of the spending at the Pentagon, or getting the $9 billion of the rescissions package—there are things that are in process. Are they peanuts and crumbs? Kind of. But are they trending in the right direction? So far. Did we get material changes on spending? Yes.
The political pressures don't matter much to me. What matters to me is, how can you assemble people to build a coalition to deliver? I'm proud of what we delivered on Medicaid reforms. I'm proud of what we delivered on the subsidies, which are horrid.
Medicare and Social Security are things that Trump has taken off the table for as long as he's president. Interest on the debt, Medicare, and Social Security are the biggest chunks of the federal budget. How do you get to a smaller budget without addressing those?
We're legally prohibited from touching Social Security. You got to come up with some sort of bipartisan way to address Social Security, or you can't really get to it.
I fundamentally believe for Medicare and Medicaid, and frankly, [Veterans Health Administration], [Children's Health Insurance Program], and these other health programs, you have to have fundamental health care reforms from top to bottom that starts with the individuals, doctors, and liberty. I'm not saying liberty because I'm talking to you; that's what I mean.
One of the first bills I introduced was the Healthcare Freedom Act, which would do that. By the way, we did force into the Big Beautiful Bill DPC—direct primary care—being able to be used within your health savings accounts.
Look, fighting the health care swamp is brutal because the insurance companies, pharma, big hospitals, they're all colluding to make it where you and I can't go to the doctors of our choice.
I'm a member of Congress and I'm on Obamacare. If my cancer comes back, which I had 13 years ago, I can't go to MD Anderson [Cancer Center], which is an hour up the road right here in Texas, because Obamacare won't let me go to MD Anderson. That's asinine. And yet, millions of Americans are on that system. We've got to blow that up to get people control.
Why didn't the Republicans—and this is before your time in Congress, but when you were chief of staff for Sen. Ted Cruz—do any of this during the first Trump administration? We heard, "When we take over, we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare." Then they were like, "Yeah, we didn't really mean that."
Republicans in Congress suck on this and are running afraid to touch and deal with health care. To the credit of the administration, we were told that we weren't going to touch health care at all, and we did touch Medicaid in a very big way. I think that's a baseline to now give us some offense.
Is there anybody in Congress doing anything about Social Security? Or are they all just going to wait and then blow out the cap on earnings that are taxed to pay for Social Security?
I think [Sen.] Rand [Paul (R–Ky.)] has been right for a long time: this penny plan, which now probably has to be the nickel plan for all I know. You have to have something where, across the board, you're shrinking everything, and then force everybody to deliver.
This is actually really important. For what everyone thinks about the Big Beautiful Bill, we broke the orthodoxy in Washington that we can just have all the tax cuts we want without spending restraint. We forced that in the budget committee. Myself, [Reps.] Ralph Norman [R–S.C.], Josh Brecheen [R–Okla.], Andrew Clyde [R–Ga.]. The four of us took down the bill in the Budget Committee; we killed it. That brought everybody back in. I can tell you, those were some intense meetings where we said, "We're not doing this if we don't get this level of spending restraint at least as a model to guide what we do on the floor." That was before we sent it to the Senate.
That's actually a big shift. The fights we've had to have inside the Republican Party to say, "I know we're products of the '80s, and we believe in the Laffer Curve, and we believe in lower taxes, of course we do. I do. But you also have to do math. You can't just keep cutting taxes and then not do the spending side, because the inflation/turning over of all our freedom to government is eating up any of the value you get."
How do you define the American dream?
The ability to live free. The right to live your life, work, produce for your family, own a home, get a doctor. Right now, if I look at my staff in their 20s or 30s, can they buy a house? They don't know. Can they go get a doctor and get health care? Increasingly limitedly. Can they buy a car? Can they send their kids to a school of their choice? Those things are at the center of existence.
I think we've got to reclaim that ground. I think we're too corporatist. Free trade, I believe in, but you've got to be smart about what we're doing here in this country, in making sure that we've got workers here who have jobs in the United States. You don't have corporatists that are buying up every farm in the state of Texas, and I'm unable to actually go have the small farm that my parents passed down to me.
It gets complicated, but what's wrong with corporate farms? Especially if they can run more acreage cheaply and produce more crops on it.
I'm all for the freedom to move capital around and make it efficient. But there is still something about your home and your community. There is still something about being able to say, "I own this dirt, this farm. I'm building and growing for the people here." The overcorporatization, frankly it's not pure free enterprise. The federal government is subsidizing big ag at the expense of local farmers. The big government that's subsidizing massive hospitals at the expense of local doctor-owned facilities. We put all these bans in place, and we funnel all this money, and now it's no longer the balance of a market. I think that's where we've gone awry.
I'm not asking for restrictions. I'm just believing that community and the American dream are tied together. You want to be able to have an investment in your local area. And the free flow of capital is important. But you also have to have the non-government-interfered-with free flow of capital.
Should those small farmers be able to hire who they want, or should they need to go through the federal government? What is your view about legal immigration and about letting people come here who want to and who can get jobs here?
In a gathering of my libertarian friends, I'm a little more "protect our sovereignty as our country." It's important that we know who's here and why they're here. And making sure that Americans have jobs.
In a perfect utopian libertarian world, where free flow of capital is unfettered by government regulation, government interference, or crony capital, then things would work out much better with respect to that flow. But you still have to have borders. You still have to know the bad guys are coming.
Sure. Nobody's questioning that.
Well, some do. I've had some pretty good fiery responses from some of my Cato [Institute] brothers when they've been at hearings. It's fine, and I get it. Should you be able to go get labor if you can't get it? Sure. But there still has to be a component that is factoring in things like anchor babies and birthright citizenship. Again, erase all the public programs. I think it was Milton Friedman who said very famously in the '70s, "I'm all for open borders if you get rid of the social welfare state."
Actually, he basically just said, "I'm all for open borders." He said to build the wall around the welfare state, not around the United States.
But the component being with a welfare state, which we massively have, which then completely alters the culture of our country. We in Texas are the ones that are sitting here with elementary schools where we have to do English as a second language, we have to do all of the things that cost with that, the hospitals, the health care locally. It's a real issue.
But at the end of the day, we have a problem right now where there are American workers who are not working because we're subsidizing them not to work, while we're then complaining about needing labor. We've turned it all upside down is my main point.
Is there a libertarian flavor to the MAGA movement? With Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, which included Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, [former Rep.] Justin Amash [L–Mich.], it really seemed like a libertarian version of the Republican Party: anti-war, end the Fed, limit the government. Gears shifted heavily with the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA.
Well, that's an interesting question and I haven't really thought about it. I'll give you my gut response, and then I'll think about it a little bit. I think where we are right now is in a blend of different factors. We've had this evolution from 2008 onward. Now we're 17 years into the post–Tea Party, where all of those factors are a part of where we are. Obviously, the overriding dominant force is the president and MAGA, but all of that is a piece of the fabric.
I do think the part about immigration right now is just recognizing we're at a point right now where we have, depending on which reports you look at, 51.5 million people who were foreign-born. People will say, "Well, who cares? We often have that." That's the highest percentage as an overall population we've had in at least the modern era, if you go back to the early 20th century.
When America became great, yeah.
But we also had a culture at that time that was assimilating, and saying learn English, and join in the American dream. Now, we've had this counterculture saying, "No, you don't have to do that." How does that produce a unified nation with an overall environment for success?
Is it immigrants' fault that we don't have a robust conception of what it means to be American? Because when I grew up, America was a nation of immigrants. That was our whole thing—that what is great about us is we can take people from shithole countries and turn them into great Americans.
Trump got in trouble for saying that.
Because he meant it, whereas I'm ironic about it.
Of course, we're a nation of immigrants historically speaking, but understand that we're still a nation. And that has to matter. I actually don't care where people are from. What I care about is whether they're proudly putting the American flag up instead of another nation's flag, whether they're proudly joining in with our cause.
But bringing this back to the point, there are a lot of hard-working American families that are hurting right now. They need to be able to have access to jobs. They need to be able to have access to their schools, and to their hospitals, and to their police.
I'd love to have the free flow of trade, people moving about being able to work. But you've got to have barriers, in the sense of restrictions and processes that work. At the end of the day, what you really need to do is have a smaller federal government focused on its core responsibilities. Because if it was actually doing the basic job of defending the country and defending the borders, instead of meddling with all aspects of our lives, then I think they would do a better job of that.
Let me ask you about foreign policy. At various points you have said that we should not be intervening, we shouldn't be giving any countries a blank check. But you also say we should be supporting some countries. Can you explain your foreign policy? And do you think you're reflecting a new Republican consensus that may not be a Ron Paul anti-interventionist but is certainly not a George Bush neoconservative?
Funny you say it that way. When I was Sen. Cruz's chief of staff, we talked about it in terms of a third way of thinking about foreign policy and national security.
I grew up a child of the '80s. I was a proud American. It was like, beat the commies, let's tear down the wall, all that stuff. Then fast-forward, and you have these wars that are ongoing, and I'm studying the Middle East, and then 9/11. Then you're backing the president. He's standing on the rubble. You're all there, patriotic, wanting to say, "Yeah. What the hell? Get the bad guys." Then somewhere in that timeframe, I started to go, "What are we doing? We're in endless conflict with no clear mission." That reset my thinking.
I took a rule-of-law trip to Baghdad in the middle of the war. I was getting a tour from a three-star general. He's taking me up and showing me soccer fields they're building. I'm going, "This is all well-intended, but what the hell are we doing?" It just became very clear to me that there was this whole industry built around this.
Where I am today, I just generally believe we should be highly skeptical of—I'll use "endless wars" as the moniker. Our driving policy should be, what do we need to do to defend our interests as a nation? If you're going to intervene, what is the mission? When can it be done? Can it be done quickly with the least amount of cost, loss of life, etc.? Defend our position, and then get out. But we shouldn't be out meddling in nation building.
We can't own every skirmish or conflict around the world. I think when we do, we sometimes make them worse: notoriously, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union.
But that all being said, where I break from some of my libertarian brothers and sisters is, I do think there are things where we have very specific national security interests where we should be engaged. I think that they [pay] long-term benefits. I do think the work with Israel and Iron Dome is beneficial for us. But obviously, there's some different tensions going on now after the October 7 issue. I hope that'll get drawn down and get to peace, and that they can get busy rebuilding and dealing with what they're going to do.
By and large, the United States needs to focus on its own house. We have not done that. We're $37 trillion in debt. We've spent, what, $10 trillion-plus, at least, on whatever we've done in the Middle East in all of our engagements over the last 20 years. That doesn't even count the burn pits, by the way [the PACT Act, which pays for health claims related to personnel exposed to trash pits on military bases]. Which I didn't vote for because it was a $600 [billion] or $700 billion entitlement. That's what we do though. That's a perfect example. Overextend, endless wars, our guys and gals get hurt, then we create a massive entitlement that we can't afford. Then our kids and grandkids are paying high interest rates and inflation.
Let's talk about Texas. As we're speaking in August, the Texas Legislature is doing a novel mid-decade redistricting. How do you feel about that? Is this legitimate, or is this the worst kind of politicking?
Gerrymandering goes all the way back to the founding. Texas is not as gerrymandered as some of our blue states. I think representation matters to match the culture and the community that you represent. Those are my driving principles, but politics are part of it.
Is it OK to redistrict anytime, rather than every decade, based on the Census?
There's nothing that says we can't. It's very clearly political. Not saying anything anybody doesn't know. Gerrymandering is political. I think there are seats to be gained there. In full disclosure, we were probably a little soft in how far we could have gone in 2020. I say "we"; we have no vote in that in Congress. It's the Legislature in Texas. They're taking it up. I think in light of the very close divisions and wanting to make sure that they've got a majority in the House, and also in light of, without reopening the immigration debate, a Census issue about noncitizens represented…I think when we factor all that in, I do think that there's room here for the Legislature to redistrict. My personal philosophical bent is cleaner lines, less gerrymandered districts. But you can't unilaterally disarm, so I get the political desire of the Legislature to act. But I don't get a say.
Texas is becoming the destination. Florida can say whatever it wants, but Texas is going to become the most populous state in the country by 2050, if not before. It is also increasingly the cultural heart of America. It has an identity in a way that California and New York do. Why do you think people are coming to Texas? Is it the weather? Is it the fire ants? Is it the floods?
You picked the three things not to come here.
When my great-great-great-grandparents moved out to Dripping Springs, Texas, it was 1853-ish. They came from Georgia. Then my Roy side of the family came via Tennessee, Arkansas, in the 1870s. The reason I bring that historic perspective up is, it was tough living. You had to want it. It was tough, so you had tough people. I think that bred a culture that was mixed with a great historic culture that was the Tex-Mex mix. Then the Germanic mix that came in—somewhat illegally too at the time.
Texas has been under six flags. Different countries. It's one of the great mixing pits of America.
I think all of that has combined to create a culture that people are proud of. They want to adopt that.
Importantly, I worry about preserving that culture. That culture of independence, of personal responsibility, where government isn't providing for you. I'm very worried. The Texas government is bigger than it should be. We spend more than we should. Texas isn't as free as it should [be]. It is highly regulated. Cato has done some big studies on that.
I don't think we're safe enough. I don't think we're free enough. There are things that we need to do to improve. But the reason people come to Texas is because of what it represents.
I think we're at a crossroads. I think in order to maintain that Texas spirit and that Texas culture, we're going to have to double down on the things that made us great. That means, in my opinion, a hard move to freedom; a hard move to a truly limited government. You can't go around saying that Texas is the best thing since sliced bread and the federal government's the problem when our state government is bureaucratic. We've got work that we need to do there, but it's a great state with a great mix of people, and people who respect what it means to work hard and to make their own lives.
I think from a free enterprise standpoint, Texas is pretty free. I think from a regulatory, compliance standpoint, property taxes, there are things that we need to do to improve freedom in Texas and be the beacon of hope for the next century.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.