House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington announces retirement

WASHINGTON — Republican Rep. Jodey C. Arrington announced Tuesday that he won’t seek reelection next year, closing out a tumultuous run as House Budget chairman as he prepares to vacate his deep-red seat in rural West Texas.

In a video he posted on Veterans Day, Arrington ticked off a list of accomplishments for his constituents during his decade on Capitol Hill, culminating in the enactment of what Republicans have dubbed the “one big, beautiful” reconciliation package this year.

“It has been the most profound privilege and the honor of a lifetime to be your voice and champion in our nation’s capital,” Arrington said. “As much good as we’ve done together, there’s a time and season for everything, and this season is coming to a close. That’s why today I am announcing I will not be seeking reelection.”

Arrington, 53, who is currently in his fifth term, cut his teeth in Texas and national politics early in his career as an aide to then-Gov. George W. Bush and followed him to the White House in 2001. He held several roles in the Bush administration before spending a decade in the private sector, running a health care company and serving as vice chancellor of the Texas Tech University System. In 2016, he won election to the House, succeeding Republican Randy Neugebauer.

This past summer, Arrington — who at one point in his five-minute retirement video is seen wearing a Texas Tech windbreaker — was reportedly in the running to go back to Texas Tech as chancellor. Ultimately that role went instead to Brandon Creighton, a Republican state senator.

Arrington, who has three young children, didn’t say in the video what’s next for him.

“I will be looking for the next challenge. I will be spending quality time with my family, and I will be passing the torch to the next West Texan,” he said.

That next West Texan almost certainly will be a Republican in Arrington’s largely rural 19th District, which is home to Lubbock. Donald Trump carried the district by 52 points last year, according to calculations by Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, while Arrington faced no Democratic opposition in his two most recent reelection races.

Fiscal battles

Arrington won the Budget Committee chairmanship after the 2022 midterms saw Republicans take back the House, with then-Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., moving instead to take the powerful Ways and Means Committee gavel.

The GOP steering committee under then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., selected Arrington for the role over two rivals, Reps. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, R-Ga., and Lloyd K. Smucker, R-Pa. Carter is now running for Senate, leaving Smucker, currently Arrington’s vice chair and a key architect of the GOP budget reconciliation deal, as a likely heir apparent, though it’s still early.

Early in the 118th Congress, GOP leaders were locked in a standoff with President Joe Biden over raising the statutory debt ceiling. Arrington sponsored the initial version of a bill to couple a debt limit suspension with tight caps on discretionary spending, cuts to safety net programs, including food stamps and Medicaid, and elimination of clean-energy tax credits enacted the year before under Biden.

That bill narrowly passed the House, but ultimately McCarthy sidelined Arrington in favor of a close-knit group of negotiators, including then-Reps. Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., and Garret Graves, R-La. The final, bipartisan deal with Biden that became law had McHenry’s name on it, not Arrington’s, and the spending cuts weren’t nearly as deep.

But conservatives dissatisfied with the outcome were already laying the groundwork to sack McCarthy, which they ultimately did in October 2023. That elevated Mike Johnson, R-La., to the speaker’s role, and with his chairmanship secure, Arrington went back to work.

There wasn’t much he could do as Budget chairman while Biden was in office. But Trump’s victory in the 2024 race, coupled with GOP control of both chambers, gave Arrington a golden opportunity for the type of fiscal package conservatives had always dreamed of.

Arrington was a big proponent of the one-bill approach to a reconciliation package favored by Trump and House GOP leaders, which eventually won out over the Senate’s two-step plan.

After it became clear Republicans would take up one massive reconciliation package, Arrington began soliciting ideas for major spending cuts and a potential tax code overhaul to help pay for a permanent extension of the tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term.

Arrington suffered an early setback after the potential menu of cuts on the table in the reconciliation talks leaked, with questions surfacing about his management of the process. And some of his public comments were viewed as off-message at times.

But with help from Smucker and GOP leaders, Arrington was able to negotiate a deal with Freedom Caucus members to get the budget resolution needed to unlock the filibuster-proof reconciliation process through his committee, and eventually through the House.

To get the measure through the Senate, however, Republican senators had to lower the amount of required spending cuts, which Arrington blasted as “unserious and disappointing.” With Trump’s blessing, conservative critics gritted their teeth in exchange for commitments to deeper cuts when the actual reconciliation bill was written.

The result was what Arrington in his video posted Tuesday called “the most consequential piece of legislation in modern history, to make the America First agenda a reality.”

“The single largest tax cut for middle class families and small businesses. The biggest investment in national defense and border security,” Arrington said of the reconciliation law. “The single biggest commitment to deploying and utilizing America’s energy assets. The largest spending cut in our nation’s history to make America safer and more prosperous.”

Since then, there’s been talk of a “reconciliation 2.0” package to cut spending by even more than the roughly $1.5 trillion in cuts over 10 years, which hit programs such as Medicaid and food stamps that GOP moderates from purple districts are already having trouble defending.

But there seems to be little appetite among leadership and the White House for such a package. “We don’t need to pass any more bills,” Trump told a gathering of GOP senators at the White House last month. “We got everything in that bill.”

‘Three big goals’

Arrington may have spent his years as chairman talking up the need to rein in federal spending, but he wasn’t shy about advocating on behalf of his district and the needs of West Texas.

In his retirement video, for example, he touted his work to obtain funds for rural health care clinics and hospitals, and to secure billions of dollars in the reconciliation law to reimburse Texas for border security costs.

He also emphasized his work on restoring commodity price supports for cotton producers in the 2018 farm bill; advocating the selection of Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene as the home of the next generation B-21 bomber; and establishing the Texas and New Mexico portions of the Ports-to-Plains Corridor running from Mexico to Canada as a four-lane federal highway.

“I had three big goals for a better and stronger West Texas when I took office in 2016 — get cotton back in the farm bill, secure the B-21 bomber at Dyess, and establish a federal highway for West Texas,” Arrington said in a statement after Biden signed the highway legislation into law in 2022.

At the end of his retirement announcement, Arrington invoked the Founding Fathers’ intention for service in Washington to be temporary, rather than a career.

“And it’s time to do what George Washington did, and to ride off into that big beautiful West Texas sunset and to live under the laws that I passed,” Arrington said. “Together, we did big things for West Texas and for the entire country, and not just for years to come but for generations to come.”

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—Paul M. Krawzak, Aidan Quigley and Andrew Menezes contributed to this report.