One of the few House Republicans to win a U.S. Senate seat in Tuesday's blue-wave election is urging her GOP colleagues to aggressively use the remaining days of the lame-duck Congress this year to pass multi-year budgets to protect
agencies that Democrats want to defund and to codify President Donald Trump cuts to foreign aid that the left wants to restore.
Rep. Harriet Hageman, soon to be sworn in as Wyoming's next U.S. senator, told Just the News on Thursday night that she is urging fellow Republicans to replicate their last budget reconciliation law that funded Trump's Homeland Security agenda until the end of his presidency and codify other GOP priorities and foil Democrats' ambitions in the next Congress.
Such a move would require only 51 votes in the Senate, bypassing the blockade of a filibuster rule, then allow Trump to use his veto pen to thwart Democrat efforts in the next Congress to overturn his priorities, thus securing them through the 2028 election.
"I think we ought to do another reconciliation package and fund some of these programs and agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target," Hageman said during a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.
"We did it with reconciliation for the Department of Homeland Security just this summer. So yes, we have the ability to do that," she continued. "We need to target those agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target from the standpoint of trying to either destroy them, undermine them or fundamentally change where they go."
Hageman suggested border and immigration budget items, the Justice Department and FBI priorities, and codifying the massive cuts to wasteful federal spending and the USAID foreign aid budget that Elon Musk's DOGE team implemented. Democrats have made clear they want to restore most of USAID's budget cuts.
"We need to make sure that the cutting of those programs stays permanent," she explained. "We need to make sure that the DOJ work is permanent. ... Those are exactly the kinds of things that we need to use reconciliation for. That's what it is for: to make sure that we have implemented our budget priorities for the benefit of the American people."
Hageman said there are other major actions the House and Senate could achieve that bypass the filibuster, including five Congressional Review Act resolutions that would reverse what she called "horrific policies" encoded in California state regulations that affect the whole country.
"That is very important," she said of the CRA resolutions. "So I do think that the Senate should step forward right now and do that. There are many things we could do without even getting rid of the filibuster."
Hageman's idea got an immediate endorsement from fellow Republican Rep. Randy Fine, of Florida, another of the few Republicans to have good election nights Tuesday. Fine got 5% more votes in 2026 than his first election to Congress.
"I think that's a great idea," he told the same show. "Look, I'm going back to D.C. tomorrow. I'm happy to stay there around the clock until Jan. 3 to get the job done for the American people.
"Part of the reason we lost the majority is voters didn't think we worked that hard," he also said. "They saw the Senate not even trying to pass the Save America Act, and they said, 'What's the point in having them?' Well, we've got two months left, and we should use every minute to the maximum advantage that we have."
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