U.S. Representative Andy Harris (R-MD), Chair of the House Freedom Caucus, speaks to the media after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping spending and tax bill, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 3, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
Once known for its hardline fiscal conservative principles, the House Freedom Caucus has become “impotent,” argued The Bulwark reporter Joe Perticone in a column published Tuesday, a “defanged” version of its former self that is regularly mocked on Capitol Hill by lawmakers and press alike.
“The junkyard dogs of the HFC have turned into lapdogs for President Donald Trump,” Perticone writes. “Every act of defiance and belligerence they’ve summoned – from making impotent threats to tanking ceremonial rule votes – has accomplished nothing.”
Prior to Trump’s second term, the caucus regularly shaped major pieces of legislation and secured concessions with their comparatively slim numbers of just over a dozen members. From forcing two former House speakers to resign to kicking off government shutdowns, the caucus routinely shaped discussions in Congress.
Today, however, the HRC has failed to act in accordance with its supposed priorities, Perticone argued, and instead has fallen in line with Trump at every turn, even when siding with the president flies in the face of what the group had historically championed.
“The first large-scale legislative achievement in the second Trump presidency – an inequitable tax-and program-slashing budget, now set to explode the deficit and inflict pain on their poorest constituents – passed with their overwhelming support,” Perticone wrote.
“Despite making their standard angry protestations about the contents of the bill, caucus members all fell in line. They have not returned to form since. Recently, a cryptocurrency bill elicited a 10-hour protest from HFC members; it ended after the holdouts accepted a minor concession.”
Having compromised their values, Perticone writes, respect for the caucus among their Republican House colleagues has also weakened, a development that has, in turn, only weakened the caucus further, many of whom are now “getting passed over for important roles,” such as committee chair positions like in the case of caucus member Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), who lost his bid for House Homeland Security Committee chair.
“The current HFC posture is directly at odds with the caucus’s founding principles – in fact, it contradicts the idea that the caucus would be driven by principle at all,” Perticone wrote. “The HFC’s new impotence represents a major development in the internal politics of the House, with consequences that go beyond the shaping of big votes.”