(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump said he is open to the Senate making “fairly significant” changes to the reconciliation package that narrowly passed the House, which may complicate Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) effort to preserve what he called a “very delicate” compromise.
“I want the Senate and the senators to make the changes they want, and we’ll go back to the House and we’ll see if we can get them,” Trump told reporters on Sunday in Morristown, New Jersey. “In some cases, the changes may be something I’d agree with, to be honest.”
“I think they are going to have changes,” Trump added. “Some will be minor and some will be fairly significant.”
The House passed the bill on Thursday by a 215–214 vote along party lines. Following the passage, Johnson urged the Senate to avoid major revisions, warning that too many changes could upend the narrow margin needed to get the bill through the lower chamber again.
“We’ve got to pass it one more time to ratify their changes in the House, and I have a very delicate balance here, a very delicate equilibrium that we’ve reached over a long period of time, and it’s best not to meddle with it too much,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on May 25 on “State of the Union.”
Trump’s greenlighting of Senate changes may be encouraging to hardline fiscal conservatives who criticized the bill for not going far enough to balance the budget.
“This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said before voting “present” to allow the bill to advance for a full vote. “What we’re dealing with here is tax cuts and spending a massive front-loaded deficit increase.”
House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) also voted “present” in the House floor vote in protest. The congressman took issue with, among other things, the bill’s Medicaid overhaul that includes new work requirements that won’t take effect until 2029 and more frequent eligibility checks, calling it a “joke” that would do little to prevent fraud and abuse.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who calls for a return to pre-pandemic spending levels, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on May 25 that he believes there is enough GOP opposition in the Senate to block the reconciliation bill.
“I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” the senator said.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also said he wouldn’t support the bill without addressing its proposed $5 trillion debt ceiling hike.
“I think the cuts currently in the bill are wimpy and anemic, but I still would support the bill, even with wimpy and anemic cuts, if they weren’t going to explode the debt,” Paul said on Fox News Sunday.
“They’re going to explode the debt. The House’s [debt-limit increase] is $4 trillion. The Senate has actually been talking about exploding the debt by $5 trillion.”
For Trump, the Senate process could be an opportunity to pursue his policy goals left out of the House package.
For one, the House bill did not close what’s known as the carried-interest tax loophole, which allows private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund managers to pay a 20 percent long-term capital gains tax rate on the gains they receive from their investments that might otherwise be taxed as ordinary income at rates up to 37 percent.
Changing it could reduce the deficit by $13 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Another exclusion was Trump’s proposal to create a new top tax bracket for the nation’s highest earners. While the president wants to extend the tax cuts he signed into law in 2017, he has proposed letting the current 37 percent top marginal rate expire and revert to 39.6 percent for individuals earning more than $2.5 million, or $5 million for married couples.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has not set a timeline for the upper chamber to pass its version of the bill, although Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he is hoping that it would reach the president’s desk by July 4.
Due to the budget reconciliation process, the bill is not subject to the Senate filibuster and can pass with a simple majority.
With Republicans holding 53 seats, Thune can afford to lose three Republican votes and still pass the bill with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.
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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.