Missouri Rep Eric Burlison urges GOP lawmakers to support Trump via reconciliation package

Missouri Republican Rep. Eric Burlison on Thursday urged his fellow conservative lawmakers in both chambers to support President Donald Trump by uniting behind his reconciliation package.

Congressional Republicans have until September 30 to pass a major spending bill that will keep the government funded, which is expected to include tax reform and spending cuts. Trump has pushed to drastically reduce federal spending.

Burlison said Congress should trust the president and that he has "earned" their support after surviving an assassination attempt last year, in which a bullet pierced his ear. 

"Let's give him the grace to carry through on the things that he campaigned on, and the voters knew when they went to the polls to vote for him," Burlison said on the "Just The News, No Noise" TV show. "I think we need to back him up when it comes to this reconciliation package the President wants to have. He wants to check a lot of boxes, and I think that they're achievable if we cut spending. 

"He wants to move towards a balanced budget. He wants to reduce interest rates, he wants to reduce inflation," the lawmaker continued. "All of that can be done and we can pay for the Trump tax cuts and make them permanent, if we can find the spending cuts that we need to find and Congress needs to do the difficult work of identifying and cutting spending, just like Elon Musk and [the Department of Government Efficiency] has been doing."

The Missouri lawmaker praised Musk and his department, and claimed that the executive branch is doing a "heck of a lot more" than Congress, even if there were members of the president's Cabinet he felt could do more.

"We've got to step up. And I think that one of the ways that we can step up is to cut mandatory spending in this reconciliation package," he said. "That means finding savings, waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid, that means eliminating the green new scam tax credits ... We could probably identify 5 trillion or more in ... savings over the next 10 years. But look, I think the modest version of that is a $2 trillion savings over the next 10 years."

Burlison said that if Congress is able to reduce spending by even $2 trillion over the next decade, then it would help the economy by driving down inflation and reducing interest rates. 

"If we could just figure out how to cut spending, we will solve a lot of problems and make Donald Trump the most successful president in the history of the United States," he concluded.

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.