Prominent members of the House Freedom Caucus, an influential group of conservative lawmakers, are headed for the exits. How the group evolves after they depart will be closely watched in Washington as an early-stage contest for the Republican party's ideological future.
The group was formalized more than a decade ago, as more and more Tea Party-aligned conservatives were elected to Congress, with a goal of pushing the party to the right on social and fiscal policies. In the years since, the group's legislative priorities, including a focus on the federal budget deficit, have shifted with the rest of the Republican party's, but their influence has persisted.
Over the past decade, President Trump has elevated a number of the group's members to the most senior roles in his administration. Two of the group's founders, Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows, have served as White House chiefs of staff. John Fleming, another founder, was Deputy Chief of Staff.
But now, at least 10 of the group's more than two dozen members from this Congress will not return next term and more may lose their seats in November.
"After the 2018 elections, after the 2020 elections, people said, 'Oh, the group doesn't matter, or they've lost their members,'" said Matthew Green, professor at Catholic University who wrote Legislative Hardball about the group. "It was always, 'this group is destined for the dustbin' and yet they find a way to maintain themselves."
One central tenet has remained consistent: that rank-and-file lawmakers, particularly members of the Freedom Caucus, should play a central role in the policy-making process. That has consistently frustrated Republican leadership.
Fleming, who now serves as Louisiana's state treasurer, told NPR that executive branch accountability was also a priority in the group's early days, when he felt that then-Speaker of the House John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, was working too closely with the Democratic administration.
Now, he suggested, the need for that aspect of their work has waned.
"Remember that when we started this, Barack Obama was President of the United States," Fleming said. "Today we have a Republican president who really is kind of a breakthrough president when it comes to reforms, new ideas," he said.
The Freedom Caucus "aligns itself with President Trump because the beliefs are very similar," Fleming said. And there have been select occasions this term that group members have stood up to the White House, including on a warrantless federal surveillance authority, known as FISA 702, and during negotiations over the president's deficit-expanding One Big Beautiful Bill Act, though most members ultimately supported the legislation.
"The Freedom Caucus, I would say, was really the predecessor to President Trump. In fact, I've often said that we were really MAGA before MAGA was cool," Fleming said.
Many of the group's alumni, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have become prominent party figures in their own right — and the group's combative, tear-it-down style has come to define Republican politics.
This election cycle, three of the group's members are running for governor with President Trump's backing — Andy Biggs in Arizona, Byron Donalds in Florida and Thomas Tiffany in Wisconsin.
Goals evolve as power shifts
"They can't tell you what they're for. They can tell you everything they're against," Boehner, the former Speaker, said about the Freedom Caucus in an interview with POLITICO in 2017. "They're anarchists. They want total chaos."
Fleming and other members describe the group's goals differently.
"What traditionally happens is when someone is elected to Congress, they're told by the leadership that, 'Look, you can advance here. You can get good committee assignments. You could be chairman of the committee one day. You just need to raise money for the party and you need to turn over your voting cards to leadership and everything will be fine,'" Fleming said. "That's really in opposition to the way a republic, a representative democracy, is designed to work."
"There were several things we were really frustrated about" under Speaker Boehner, Matt Salmon, another founder, told NPR. "There was no regular order. We hadn't really passed the appropriations bills."
Salmon served in Congress twice, first leaving in 2001 after six years in office. He said that at the time, bills were drafted through a committee process and the government was funded through 12 carefully deliberated annual spending bills. Congress passed three straight years of balanced budgets.
By the time he returned to office in 2013, though, he felt things had broken down.
"Everything was really being done by a really small group of folks, mostly leadership, and then jammed down the members' throats," he said. "After being slapped around a lot by the folks who were trying to control everything, I remember [Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio] came up to me on the floor and said, 'Hey, man, we're really tired of this process where, you know, just a few people kind of make all the decisions and we'd really like, you know, consider forming a group to try to make a difference.'"
And so, for more than a decade, members of the House Freedom Caucus have leveraged parliamentary maneuvers to disrupt the flow of legislation through the chamber in an effort to force policy or procedural concessions from Republican leadership.
"At the end of the day," Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a departing member, told NPR, members of the group are "bound together by wanting to do what we said we would do. We get a lot of speeches about all this stuff, but then, you know, you got to deliver."
An active voice in the future of the GOP
Still, the group's ideological ground in the party is contested territory among the group's alumni — between institutionalists who see the group's obstructionist tendencies as a means to force a return to a more traditional style of governing by empowered members and rabble rousers in the mold of President Trump intent on fundamentally remaking how politics is done.
"I think that the Freedom Caucus originally started out with very, very noble motives, but it's just become a political adjunct to the Trump administration," Salmon said. "They're not the people that used to stand up and go against the tide." Now, he said, they acquiesce.
"They morphed from being the entity that really was about getting back to regular order and protecting Article 1" — the section of the Constitution that lays out congressional powers — "to becoming the chief cheering squad for Trump," Salmon said. "And I couldn't be more disappointed."
"There can be a tension between wanting to maintain power and influence and the pursuit of certain institutional or policy goals," Green said. "Now that caused some members to leave because they believed that. Fear of centralized executive power was the most important thing regardless of party."
Inside of Congress, the group's track record is mixed. Leadership remains in near-total control of the legislative process and Jim Jordan, who Green describes as the group's most successful member, has thrived in large part by being a reliable ally of House Republican leaders.
Green says that tension has been central in remaking the Freedom Caucus.
"Do you want to quit a group that has influence because you're concerned about some principle of presidential power? Or do you want to take advantage of having a Republican president?" he said. "The latter is very tempting, understandably, for members of the caucus — and most members of Congress for that matter."
Turnover is inevitable in Congress as members seek higher office or simply retire, and this cycle has seen a record number of departures. That means a new era for the caucus.
Some of its most vocal and prominent members are among those departing — including Roy and Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, both prominent advocates on civil liberties issues and press stalwarts who regularly make the case for the caucus' views.
"It's going to be better because we're at a point now where the Freedom Caucus adds value," Norman told NPR, "by questioning and putting the budget front and center stage, we're going to add value."
He was upbeat about the changeover. "We're losing a lot of seniority, but we're also picking up a lot of people," Norman said.
Fleming, one of the founders, also left room for the idea that the Republican party and the Freedom Caucus itself could move in a different direction in the future — if not in the new Congress, then beginning with the next presidential election.
"Most likely the successor to President Trump, whether it's Republican or Democrat, is likely to begin to move back to the status quo, more of the norm," Fleming said. "And that's where I think the Freedom Caucus, again, will likely come in."
Roy agreed. "Some of us, we're not going to go far. We can have a voice, and we can have an influence from outside, maybe every bit as much so as inside," he said. "So there's going to be a lot more to do."
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