Representative Chip Roy of Texas was sitting in a suite in the speaker’s office at the Capitol on a wintry afternoon last December, laying out why he could not possibly support a year-end spending bill that would suspend the federal debt limit, when President Trump’s threat came through.
“The very unpopular ‘Congressman’ from Texas, Chip Roy, is getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another Great Republican Victory – All for the sake of some cheap publicity for himself,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site. “Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.”
It was not the first time that the president had called for his ouster, but Mr. Roy was unbowed.
Not long after, he strode to the House floor to deliver a scathing speech against the legislation Mr. Trump was pressing him to support, a move that foreshadowed the clash currently playing out, as Mr. Roy resists pressure from the president to fall in line behind his marquee domestic policy package.
“To take this bill yesterday and congratulate yourself because it’s shorter in pages, but increases the debt by $5 trillion, is asinine,” Mr. Roy said in December. “I’m absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible.”
That same ideology is driving Mr. Roy as he leads a faction of right-wing holdouts pushing for substantial changes to what Republicans call their “big, beautiful bill” of tax and spending cuts, arguing that it would add far too much to the already soaring federal debt. They are a key reason that Speaker Mike Johnson has been unable to cobble together the votes to pass the package.
Whether Mr. Roy will dig in against the package or relent — as he often has after threatening to tank a key party priority — could determine the fate of the entire effort.
“I have not decided what I’m doing,” Mr. Roy told reporters on Tuesday evening. “We’re in a better spot than we were a week ago. We’re in a better spot than we were even 48 hours ago. But there’s still a lot of things we’re ironing out.”
It is a familiar place for the fourth-term congressman from Texas, who was born in Bethesda, Md., and earned undergraduate and masters degrees from the University of Virginia before attending law school at the University of Texas. He would go on to become the chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz, with whom he shares a combative style and fondness for scathing oratory, not infrequently directed at members of his own party he deems insufficiently pure on matters of conservative ideology.
In the House, Mr. Roy was one of the lead negotiators for the group of right-wing rebels who initially refused to vote for Representative Kevin McCarthy for speaker, helping to prompt a long and divisive floor fight over his election. He is said to have maintained the only hard copy of a list of concessions the California Republican ultimately made to win the conservatives’ votes.
Mr. Roy would cite it chapter and verse months later, when he accused Mr. McCarthy of reneging on the agreement as he sought to shoot down a deal the then-speaker had made with President Biden to raise the debt limit.
In January, he left Mr. Johnson to dangle during his re-election vote for the top House post, in what Mr. Roy later described as a warning to Mr. McCarthy’s successor not to cross him the same way.
He has long had a fraught relationship with Mr. Trump, having voted to certify Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory and having endorsed Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida for president in 2023. Ahead of Mr. Johnson’s re-election early this year, Mr. Trump told Mr. Roy in an intense private phone call that he would stop savaging him online and threatening to oust him from his seat if the Texas Republican would get on board with his agenda and be “good to me.”
Several weeks later, Mr. Roy appeared to have done so, rallying conservatives around a stopgap funding measure needed to avert a government shutdown in March.
Then Mr. Roy, who had threatened to tank his party’s budget blueprint, relented and voted for it, saying he had done so “reluctantly” after receiving commitments from Mr. Trump and congressional leaders in both chambers that the domestic policy legislation would contain deep entitlement cuts.
Now, he is haggling with Mr. Johnson and White House officials over the contents of that measure, pressing for deeper cuts to Medicaid and clean energy tax credits to finance the plan. Mr. Roy was one of four Republicans on the Budget Committee who blocked the legislation from moving forward last week. He then allowed it to advance without offering his support.
After he and three other Republicans sided with Democrats to defeat the bill in the committee, Mr. Roy spent last weekend on the phone and in meetings pressing for deeper structural spending cuts.
“He was here Friday. He was here Saturday. He was here Sunday,” said Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a Republican who joined Mr. Roy in initially opposing the bill in the Budget Committee before switching his vote to “present.”
“Very few people have his courage to speak up and identify a problem that nobody can disagree with,” Mr. Norman said. “He said it perfectly one of the meetings: He said, ‘We’ve got a math problem.’”
Mr. Roy is known to carry around a tablet paired with a keyboard so he can take notes during negotiations and memorialize conversations. He is often the only lawmaker in private meetings who will do so, a habit his friends attribute to his past life as a congressional staffer, when he used to take notes for Mr. Cruz.
He is known to give impassioned speeches railing against the state of immigration at the southern border and against efforts to include women in the draft.
But no issue riles him up like federal spending and the national debt. He counts as a close friend Russell T. Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who is equally enthusiastic about cutting government spending.
His chief issue with the domestic policy package, he has said, is that it “has backloaded savings and has front-loaded spending.”
He has called for Republicans to make more aggressive cuts to Medicaid, including changing the way the program is financed. The federal government currently offers states a generous matching rate for anyone who signs up through the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of the program, a funding structure he has called “perverse.”
And he has been particularly outraged that his party’s leaders, at the behest of more moderate lawmakers, did not use the measure to immediately and fully repeal the clean energy tax credits established by the Inflation Reduction Act under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“This bill falls profoundly short,” Mr. Roy said before voting to reject it in the Budget Committee. “It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits. The fact of the matter is, on the spending, what we’re dealing with here on tax cuts and spending is a massive front-loaded deficit increase. That’s the truth.”
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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