Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) believes working Americans should keep more of the money they earn and is introducing a bill to codify President Donald Trump’s pledge for no tax on tips, Breitbart News can exclusively reveal.
Perry’s legislation to deliver on the key Trump campaign promise comes as Congress labors through the budget reconciliation process to enact Trump’s tax priorities, as well as border, energy, and defense spending.
“You should keep absolutely as much money as you can that you earn,” Perry told Breitbart News on Wednesday before the House advanced a budget resolution to unlock Trump’s legislative agenda. “And so anytime there’s an opportunity to let people do that, yeah, I want to be part of that, and I’m going to be championing that.”
Trump vowed at a Las Vegas rally in June 2024 to make permanent his 2017 tax cuts, currently set to expire at the end of 2025. He also pledged during that rally to eliminate taxes on tips – a pledge so effective his opponent Kamala Harris copied it in August.
FLASHBACK: Kamala Directly Copies Trump’s No Tax on Tips Plan
During a return trip to Las Vegas January 25, now-President Trump reiterated those pledges and promised to work with Congress to get it done. “Near the top of the agenda for our historic Republican majorities in Congress is to pass a massive tax cut for American workers and families,” Trump told the crowd.
Trump also wants to address soaring debt and deficits, Perry said, requiring Congressional commitment to cut spending.
“If we’re going to take in less revenue, then you’re going to have to spend less money, so there’s two sides of this coin,” Perry told Breitbart News, adding “the federal government spends too much.”
“If you watched [Trump’s] press conference at this cabinet meeting, he essentially said that he got a mandate to balance budgets,” Perry said, “and so balancing equal means what you’re taking in a revenue equals what you’re spending. And I couldn’t agree more.”
While Congress works with the Trump administration on budget reconciliation and government spending reforms, Trump and Elon Musk have been slashing waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the federal government with their Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The speed of their efforts has opened the eyes of many Americans.
“They get to see firsthand the waste and the excess and they don’t want to pay for it anymore,” Perry said. “They know that their costs are high at home because of all the money that Washington just keeps spending and creating and, and they know that it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Perry has proposed other avenues to achieve massive savings, including eliminating selling or ending leases on excess federal government office space.
“The federal government is the largest holder of real estate. We’ve got over a quarter million of buildings in the portfolio,” he said. “The unused portion that we pay a couple billion dollars a year for is greater than half of Disney World of space in office buildings. That’s what’s lying dormant out there.”
We need to sell unused federal space - period.
— Rep. Scott Perry (@RepScottPerry) February 26, 2025
Let’s @DOGE it!
It's outrageous that Taxpayers fork over hard-earned money to fund vacant offices in Washington. https://t.co/DGjqmGoH5s
He said Congress has shown an appetite in the recent past for addressing the problem.
“We were able to, in a bipartisan fashion, move a bill to address that in the last session, and with the majority of leases – 80% of them coming up in the next five years – it’s time to determine what’s the right size for the federal government and its employment force,” Perry said.
With the Trump administration requiring employees to begin reporting to the office, the administration and Congress can better understand how much can be achieved in savings.
“If they’re able to [work effectively] from their home office, I think that’s great. But here’s what we’re not willing to do; we’re not willing to pay for them to be at their home office, and also to pay for an empty office building anywhere in the country that just sits there and takes resources with no people in it. If you’re not going to go to the office, we need to sell that that portfolio and return it to the private sector for use.”
The amount of office space sitting unused is staggering.
“The General Services Agency, who’s generally the agency that works on all the leases for all the other agencies, their occupancy rate is at 9%, so 91% of their space is unoccupied,” he revealed.
Perry also champions moving more government jobs out of the Beltway bubble – some of the most expensive real estate in the country – closer to the regions and people most impacted by their work, an initiative Trump has proposed as well.
“Pennsylvania’s biggest businesses is agriculture, and you look at the DC political culture, you’ve got somebody that’s probably never stepped foot on a farm, telling farmers how to run their lives,” he said. “And these people that are telling farmers – who actually work the soil every day and get up before the sun comes up to get out on their tractors and follow the rules and all that stuff that these people that are telling them what to do – have no clue about what they’re talking about. So it would be great to have something like the Department of Agriculture move to the state of Pennsylvania, which is a huge agriculture state, and employ people that actually are familiar with cows and chickens and seed crops.”
The effort would have the added benefit of extricating the bureaucracy from the leftwing enclaves of Washington.
“There are a lot of opportunities to move the bureaucracy out of Washington DC, which is politically homogenized towards the left, and get to some real, commonsense practices that can be done at a fraction of the cost,” Perry said.
Congress will continue tackling spending and waste throughout Trump’s term. And Perry, who serves on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, is certain to be a part of exposing more government malfeasance and pushing Congress to advance Trump’s legislative agenda.
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye
