Republican U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton suggested he would support cuts to federal benefits programs during a private fundraiser with Washington lobbyists last month, according to an audio recording obtained by The Texas Tribune, the fourth leaked clip from the Sept. 24 event.
In response to a question about reducing the federal deficit, Paxton said: “Making some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending — you’re gonna have to do it. Or there is no solution. That’s just the reality. We have to suck it up.”
Around three-quarters of mandatory federal spending went toward Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the most recent fiscal year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Much of the rest covered aid to lower-income families, such as food benefits and unemployment insurance, and a mix of retirement and disability benefits for federal workers and veterans.
Paxton added, “from Republican presidents to Democrats, we’ve been spending like crazy and no one seems to care. It’s gonna bankrupt us. It’s just a matter of time.” He did not specify which programs he would seek to slash, or by how much, in the audio clip obtained by the Tribune.
In a statement shared after publication, Paxton emphasized that he would protect Social Security, pointing to recent public commitments he made to doing so. He did not answer questions about which benefit programs he would target, though he cited cracking down on fraud as a “major way” to reduce the deficit.
“We have to solve the national debt while keeping the promises we made to everyone who paid into these programs,” Paxton said. “The fake news keeps spinning the same cherry-picked audio to mislead Texans and take my words out of context. I have never said I would take away entitlements from those who deserve or earned them.”
The audio clip from the fundraiser was recorded by an attendee who opposes Paxton in his Senate run against Democrat James Talarico. Two other people in attendance confirmed details of the conversation and said they did not recall Paxton detailing the cuts he would support at any other point during the event.
Portions of Paxton’s remarks have been leaked in succession to The New York Times, Politico and Axios since last week, coming in the final days before early voting. The person who recorded it declined to share the full conversation. It was unclear how many more leaks there may be.
Notably, Paxton’s comments at the meeting offer a glimpse into how he would approach the deficit and the looming benefits cliff facing Congress and the White House, with Social Security and Medicare’s reserve funds projected to run out in under a decade. He has rarely discussed his position on entitlements on the campaign trail.
The deficit, meanwhile, topped $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025.
“There’s no doubt we have to cut some of the mandatory spending,” Paxton said in the recording. “The numbers don’t add up. And then on the other side, we’ve got to create tax policy that incentivizes more spend, more production in our economy.”
After Paxton explained his two-pronged approach to reducing the deficit — tax cuts to grow the economy paired with “reasonable cuts to mandatory spending” — a lobbyist in the room, Jeanne Haggerty, chimed in that she wanted a personal tax cut, prompting laughter from the room.
“I would really like to pay my fair share of taxes, which is less than I’m paying right now,” Haggerty said in the recording.
Paxton responded, “I’m with you on that. I think tax cuts will actually generate more revenue.”
Two attendees said they recalled the remarks by Haggerty and the room’s laughter. Haggerty did not respond to a request for comment.
In his statement to the Tribune, Paxton also attacked Talarico’s economic agenda, which includes higher taxes for billionaires, saying, “Texans aren’t going to hand a Senate seat to a politician who treats their paychecks as a piggy bank for his radical agenda.”
Texas Democratic Party spokesperson Ryan Martin pushed back on Paxton’s call for tax cuts to spur economic growth, saying the Republican “has no problem adding trillions to the debt to cut taxes for billionaires, but wants cuts when it comes to protecting seniors’ retirement benefits and healthcare.”
“Paxton is literally laughing with rich D.C. lobbyists about giving them bigger tax breaks while threatening cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and programs for working Texans,” Martin said in a statement after publication.
Talarico has consistently led Paxton in public polling of the race. Democrats have not won statewide in Texas since 1994, and national Republicans have unleashed a massive outside spending blitz to push Paxton over the finish line in what has become Texas’ most competitive cycle in decades. Early voting begins Oct. 19.
Politicians from both parties have tiptoed around entitlement reforms, wary of prompting voter backlash to the perception that they are cutting benefits millions of older Americans depend on and spent years paying into. Republicans have been more open to cutting Medicaid, with President Donald Trump’s sweeping 2025 tax and spending law, which he dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing federal Medicaid spending by nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
In his statement to the Tribune, Paxton said he views Social Security as “a sacred promise that seniors paid into, and they have earned every single dollar.”
On the campaign trail, Paxton has promoted a series of proposed tax deductions for healthcare, housing and family-related expenses. In an audio recording of the same event published by Axios Wednesday, Paxton walks through those proposals in response to questions about cost-of-living concerns fueled by the war in Iran that he characterized as “dragging” on his campaign.
Last summer, after Congress passed Trump’s megabill, Paxton celebrated it on X as “HISTORIC legislation that’s going to unleash economic growth and help deport the millions of illegals aliens who have been destroying our country.”
“This is an incredible moment for our nation’s future,” he wrote. “AMERICA FIRST!”
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the law will leave 10 million more people without health insurance by 2034, while adding at least $3.4 trillion to the national deficit.
In June, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republicans had a plan to overhaul entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, saying they “have to be adjusted and fixed” to help address the debt.
Democrats seized on his comments and cast them as a promise that Republicans would slash Social Security and other benefits programs. Johnson later posted on social media that Republicans “are not talking about reducing a single benefit,” and instead would focus on “eliminating hundreds of billions in FRAUD and inefficiencies that are draining the programs and threatening their sustainability.”
The Sept. 24 meeting was hosted by Susan Hirschmann and Chris Brinson of Williams & Jensen, a Washington-based lobbying firm, on Capitol Hill. It was attended by roughly a dozen people, mostly lobbyists. An invitation for the event described it as a lunch with Paxton for which “donations are welcomed but not required for attendance.”
Hirschmann and Brinson did not respond to requests for comment.
The first audio recording leaked from the meeting was published last week by The New York Times, in which Paxton told attendees that Trump’s midterm convention hurt his campaign.
In another clip published by Politico Monday, Paxton, who positioned himself as a Washington outsider throughout his primary campaign, lamented Washington’s influence over his race, saying, “I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign … it’s all coming — you know — from DC.”
Nick Maddux, a senior adviser on Paxton’s campaign, called the Times’ story “manipulated nonsense” and told Politico that the attorney general was referring to super PACs, which campaigns are prohibited from coordinating with under federal law.
Since the start of September, super PACs aligned with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Trump have spent over $150 million on ads for Paxton, who has spent $20 million from his own campaign coffers over that span, according to media tracking firm AdImpact. Talarico, meanwhile, had spent $40 million on airtime.
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