Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he'd "love" to attach spending cuts to the next debt ceiling increase — but his office won't say how hard he'll fight for them, and the last round of promised cuts never materialized.

The debt ceiling, currently sitting at $41.1 trillion, will need to be raised by early 2027, Punchbowl News reported. Thune told the Daily Caller he wanted cuts included, saying: "I would love to have some spending cuts associated with the debt limit debate." But when pressed on how hard Senate Republican leadership would push for those cuts in any deal, Thune's office declined to comment on the record.

That silence speaks volumes. The last time Republicans raised the debt ceiling — a $5 trillion increase under the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act signed July 4, 2025 — fiscal hawks held out for spending cuts. Speaker Mike Johnson promised future reductions to get the holdouts in line. Those cuts have still not materialized, the Daily Caller reported.

The White House is already signaling it doesn't want a fight. Budget director Russ Vought attended a private lunch with Senate Republicans and advised them to keep the third reconciliation bill focused on the SAVE America Act, defense spending, and farm aid — and to avoid adding spending cuts or a debt ceiling increase to that package. The House version of the budget resolution runs $95 billion, including $72 billion for the Iran war and $12 billion for farmers, with zero spending offsets. Thune reportedly pushed for even more defense spending than the $67 billion already in the House bill.

So the pattern is clear: leadership says they'd "love" cuts, then loads up spending packages without offsets, and the promised reductions vanish into the Washington ether.

A few Republicans are pushing back. Senator Rick Scott said July 15 that "on any reconciliation, we ought to, one, pay for it; two, see how we can reduce the deficit." Representative Nancy Mace also expressed concern about the package's impact on the deficit. But they're outliers in a conference whose leader won't commit to a fight.

Meanwhile, the cost of this bipartisan spending addiction falls directly on working Americans. Consumer prices have compounded upward 30.6% over the past decade through 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average college graduate carries $36,491 in student loan debt per New York Federal Reserve data — over $60,000 in Washington, D.C. alone. The Congressional Budget Office projects that mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt will permanently exceed all federal tax revenue by 2027. The national debt has already surpassed total U.S. economic output.

Fortune, covering an unrelated story about reality TV winners spending prize money on bills and student loans, noted that $100,000 in 2026 buys what roughly $130,000 bought in 2019. That's the real tax of uncontrolled spending — not a line on a budget spreadsheet, but the slow erosion of every dollar you earn.

Thune says he'd "love" spending cuts. The word "love" is doing a lot of work there. What Americans need to know is whether any leader in either party is willing to actually demand them — or whether this is another round of theater before the ceiling goes up and the bill gets passed to your grandchildren.