(DCNF)—Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy said Monday on Fox Business that he would like President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” to address “deficit numbers” and tax policy before giving his approval on it.
Late Sunday, the House Budget Committee narrowly pushed through the president’s budget reconciliation package, with Roy among three other conservatives who pushed back against approving the legislation and voted “present.” While discussing his vote on “The Bottom Line,” co-guest host David Webb asked the representative what else he would need to get him to vote yes, noting he “mentioned the Green New Scam.”
“Yeah, I’d like to see more of the deficit numbers that we’re seeing that are front loaded be brought down. Right now, if you look at the chart with the data and the analysis that is most favorable to the big, beautiful bill, it still shows about 1.4 trillion in additional deficit spending over the first five years,” Roy said. “Then it drops off. In the last five years you get significant deficit reduction so that it works out to be close to a wash.”
“Now, my problem is I’ve been in D.C. for a little bit, but anybody watching this, would you go bet your life savings that in five years we’re going to wake up and find those savings?” Roy asked. “No. The problem is we’re going to be ramping up deficits for the next three or four years. Now, some of that’s OK. Tax policy that we want to put in place for growth, and we want to make sure that we’re dealing with the border and the defense. I get that.”
Prior to its approval, the budget reconciliation package suffered a setback Friday as Republican South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, Republican Oklahoma Rep. Josh Brecheen and Republican Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde joined Democrats in voting “no” against the bill. However, the four Republicans eventually allowed the package to move forward as it had made “progress” on being more fiscally responsible.
Roy went on to say that his second point would be to address the tax policy within the budget reconciliation package, highlighting how he is still “skeptical” of the “high growth tax policy.”
“But the idea that we’re going to have magical savings in five years never materializes,” Roy said. “I think one other point about this. The tax policy is not high growth tax policy. The expensing is important, but the corporate rate reductions are already permanent. We’re talking about a lot of stuff like child tax credits, standard deductions, lower marginal rates for lower-end brackets. None of that is high growth tax policy.”
“So I’m a little skeptical of the out year on that. I think the growth we’re going to get is from the stuff we’re hearing Scott Bessent and the president talking about. That, by the way, is why we assume 2.6% growth and we assume two and a half trillion dynamic scoring. What I just told you about was all dynamically scored. We still have massive deficits in the first five years,” Roy said.
With Republicans aiming to push through Trump’s legislative agenda, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that he hopes to send the reconciliation package to the Senate by Thursday, with the next vote scheduled for Wednesday in the House Rules Committee. Republicans seek to finalize the package by Memorial Day.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox Business/”The Bottom Line”)
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
