(DCNF)—Senate Republicans scored major wins during the first ten weeks of the 119th Congress, but the bulk of Trump’s legislative agenda is still awaiting passage.
GOP senators have moved quickly to confirm 21 cabinet nominees, pass legislation to aid President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts, roll back regulations issued by former President Joe Biden and put Democrats on the record for opposing GOP efforts to protect women’s sports and the unborn. Though Senate Republicans are touting the conference’s “historic first two months” during the longest continuous session in more than a decade, many GOP lawmakers acknowledge they have much more work to do to pass the president’s first-year legislative agenda.
The majority of Trump’s first-year legislative priorities, including a permanent extension of his signature 2017 tax cuts, is not expected to be passed until later in the year as the House and Senate continue to iron out the details. Failure to extend the tax cuts would result in a tax increase for most U.S. households in 2026.
Congressional Republicans are in the beginning stage of the budget reconciliation process, which allows the Senate to pass the president’s spending and tax priorities by a simple majority vote, circumventing Senate Democrats’ opposition.
GOP lawmakers are aiming to provide additional funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to fast-track the president’s deportation agenda, boost defense spending and increase oil and gas leases in a budget reconciliation package this year. They are also working to enact the president’s sweeping tax priorities, which include no taxes on tips, overtime pay or Social Security benefits, in addition to raising the state and local tax deduction cap in the budget bill.
“We are rolling up our sleeves and preparing to follow through on reconciliation, on securing the border, on rebuilding the military, on unleashing energy and extending the 2017 tax cuts and making them bigger and bolder,” Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “All of those are a clear mandate.”
“If you had to give any grade, you’d probably give the grade of incomplete, because the bulk of our work is still ahead of us,” Cruz continued.
GOP senators have taken a victory lap on the record confirmation pace of Trump’s cabinet nominees, which outpaced both the Biden administration and first Trump administration.
The Senate has sent several pieces of legislation to the president’s desk, including the Trump-backed government funding bill that Senate Republicans effectively pressured Senate Democrats to advance during the cloture vote, averting a partial government shutdown. Senate Republicans also successfully repealed the Biden Environmental Protection Agency’s natural gas tax, which Trump signed into law Monday.
“Promises made, promises kept,” Republican Alabama Sen. Katie Britt told the DCNF. “Every day we continue to chip away at the things that we promised the American people.”
Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno told the DCNF he would give Senate Republicans a grade of A+ for a “historic first two months” during which GOP senators took action on border security and inflation, which Moreno said were the top two issues of the 2024 electoral cycle.
Just hours after the president’s inauguration on Jan. 20, GOP senators passed the Laken Riley Act, requiring illegal migrants to be detained for committing an array of criminal offenses, with just 12 Senate Democrats voting in favor.
Moreno also credited the Senate GOP for taking action to reduce inflation, including repealing Biden-era regulations that contributed to higher energy prices through the Congressional Review Act. The rate of inflation slowed in February to 2.8%, according to the Consumer Price Index, which measures the price of everyday goods.
“Democrats are a complete, abject disaster right now, so we’re kicking their ass,” Moreno added.
Senate Democrats’ approval rating is nearing record lows and the government funding fight exposed a jarring split between Senate Democratic leadership and the conference over whether to vote for the GOP spending bill or potentially suffer the blame for causing a government shutdown. GOP senators have since been taunting their colleagues with the popular refrain “Democrats in disarray.”
Moreover, the Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation to permanently classify fentanyl analogues as Schedule 1 drugs in addition to approving the GOP spending measure on Friday.
Curtailing the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. was a day-one priority for Trump on his return to the White House, as he repeatedly emphasized that fentanyl alone has killed “tens of thousands of Americans each year.”
“The HALT Fentanyl Act will help equip law enforcement with the resources needed to crack down on traffickers and keep these deadly substances off the streets once and for all,” Republican West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito wrote in a statement following the vote.
Senate Democrats, however, managed to filibuster GOP senators’ attempts to pass legislation to bar transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, sanction International Criminal Court officials and protect babies born-alive from botched abortions during the first ten weeks of session. Nearly all Democratic senators have previously voted to abolish the Senate procedural rule requiring most legislation to win the support of 60 senators to clear a cloture vote, and many have campaigned on the issue.
Former Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat turned independent, torched her former colleagues for their flip-flop on the filibuster in a series of social media posts on Saturday and Sunday, writing, “the hypocrisy is the point,” in a post on X.
“The party that mere months ago, literally, was gleefully making plans to destroy the filibuster is now using the filibuster left and right,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on the Senate floor on March 10.
Once GOP senators return to Washington from the recess break on Monday, the conference will be looking to undergo the next stage of the budget reconciliation process, which is passing an identical budget resolution with the House to unlock a future bill that will constitute the president’s tax and spending priorities.
The negotiations between both chambers could be a months-long process, and a reconciliation bill might not be finished until the summer.
“You can sum up the first ten weeks of the Republican-led Senate in three words: Fast, forceful, and effective,” Barrasso said on the Senate floor on March 11. “We aren’t wasting time. We are just getting started.”
Andi Shae Napier contributed to this report.
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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.
