Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that if President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” were to “separate out the debt ceiling,” then he would vote in favor of it.
Republican lawmakers have been pushing to secure Trump’s agenda through a reconciliation package, but pushback from some GOP senators, including Paul, has put the current July 4 target deadline in doubt. While discussing his ongoing criticism of the bill, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked if Paul had landed on a firm position.
“I talked to the president last evening after the parade, and we’re trying to get to a better place in our conversations. I’ve let him know that I’m not an absolute no. I can be a yes,” Paul said. “I like the tax cuts. I actually agree with Art Laffer and the supply siders that a lot of times we cut rates.”
“We actually get more revenue, so I don’t have as much trouble with the tax cuts. I think there should be more spending cuts, but if they want my vote, they’ll have to negotiate because I don’t want to vote to raise the debt ceiling $5 trillion,” Paul added. “Congress is awful with money, and so you should give them a more restricted credit line, not an expansive one.”
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” narrowly passed the House on May 22 by a single vote, with Republican Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio joining Democrats in voting against it.
Since the bill’s push to the Senate, GOP lawmakers have voiced concerns over parts of the package, including provisions pertaining to increasing the debt ceiling, Medicaid reforms and green energy subsidies from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
“Yes, the debt ceiling has to go up, but what I’ve said is it ought to go up three months at a time, and then we should have a renewed debate about the debt,” Paul continued. “We shouldn’t put it up $5 trillion and wait two years, go through another election cycle and be almost towards the end of the Trump administration and say, ‘Oh, whoops, we have added a bunch of debt.’ We should have done better. I think we should keep talking about it.”
Following the bill’s passage through the House, Paul told reporters he would not support the package until the debt ceiling provision is removed, slamming how much it would raise the country’s deficit.
Welker continued to press the lawmaker on what “specifically” he would have done to the package in order to get him to a “yes” vote.
“Separate out the debt ceiling and have a separate vote on it, and I won’t be deciding vote on this. Is this what I tell my supporters? I will be. If I am the deciding vote, they’ll negotiate. If I’m not, they won’t,” Paul said.
“So far, they’ve been sending their attack dogs after me, and that’s not a great persuasion technique,” Paul added. “I will negotiate if they come to me, but they have to be willing to negotiate on the debt ceiling because I’m conservative. I’m not going to no longer be conservative just because the president wants me to vote for something.”
During an interview with Fox News’ Shannon Bream on May 25, Paul called out the GOP for using the “same playbook” as Democrats in their refusal to remove the debt ceiling. However, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson later pushed back on the network, stating that the debt ceiling is a “necessary” part of getting the package through the Senate.
While efforts to get GOP critics behind the package remain tight, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on May 22 that he believes there is a “workable path” to secure the needed votes. With the deadline quickly approaching, Thune can only afford to lose three GOP votes and still get the package to Trump’s desk.
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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.