On Sunday, May 4th, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson met with Republican supporters at the Lodge at Leathem Smith in Sturgeon Bay. He addressed several key issues but focused heavily on the budget and government spending issues.

"First of all, it's always enjoyable to come up and talk to Wisconsinites and folks up here in Door County, its a beautiful county," said Johnson, "but my primary focus is spending - the size of the federal government and how it's completely out of control in an unprecedented fashion and that has to be our focus."

Throughout the evening, he discussed the importance of going through each line of the budget to find where spending has been wasteful. 

Johnson said that in 2019 and part of the pandemic, the federal government spent $4.4 trillion, and this year, it is projected to spend more than $7 trillion. 

"That's a 60% increase as our population grows at less than 3%," he said. It's completely unprecedented, completely unjustified, and Elon Musk and his DOGE group are showing example after example of grotesque levels of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government."

Johnson also answered attendees' pressing questions and said that while President Donald Trump has been signaling he wants one big bill, he prefers a multi-step process that includes providing border and defense funding and eliminating an automatic tax increase for 2026.

"Then we can start to argue, debate, and discuss the one big beautiful bill which is going to be really complex with a lot of moving parts and have a lot of constituencies in that," he said, "it's going to be very difficult to achieve."

Republican Party of Door County chair Stephanie Soucek said having Johnson come and speak gave clear insight into what lies ahead. 

"It was great to have all the Republicans together to talk about the issues and challenges that we're facing and the ways we need to unite and fight for the things we believe in," she said, "we heard some hard truths, but these things are important to talk about, so it was great to have Senator Johnson there."

In addition to Senator Johnson, attendees also heard from Joel Kitchens, Brian Schimming, and André Jacque.