The House returned from recess and spent its week on socialism resolutions, mining permits, whales, the Supreme Court, and a bill punishing colleges for boycotting Israel. Nobody voted on the premiums that just went up 58%. Here is every Republican with a report card who voted yes.
H.Res. 1490 passed 220-192. It changes no law and spends no money. Its one concrete demand is the SAVE America Act, a proof-of-citizenship rule of the kind Kansas tried — where 31,089 people could not register, against 39 confirmed noncitizens the state found in the previous 14 years. 189 members with a page on this site voted yes.
The House voted September 2 on a constitutional amendment freezing the Supreme Court at nine justices. The Constitution never set that number — Congress did, and has changed it five times. Here is every Republican with a report card who voted yes.
Food, rent, electricity, healthcare - in America we should be able to afford these basic necessities of life without going bankrupt.
Ron Estes has supported the current administration's tariffs and other policies which have led to:
Half of all Americans struggling to afford groceries
47% struggling to afford their utility bills
47% struggling to afford healthcare
48% struggling to afford housing
1 in 4 Americans saying they have skipped a medical checkup due to affordability
23% skipping a prescription dose
Gas prices skyrocketing
In 2024, U.S. farmers sold more than $12 billion worth of soybeans to China. By late October 2025, total 2025 sales to China stood at zero — and Moody's had put the Kansas economy in a recession, due in large part to falling agriculture exports.
Twice in March 2025, and again on Sept. 16, Estes voted for what a Kansas commentary called "a legislative sleight of hand" — one sentence tucked into a procedural motion that stops the House from even considering legislation to repeal Trump's tariffs. The last time Trump ran this play, Kansas farmers lost $1 billion in foregone exports and farm bankruptcies doubled.
We are feeling this directly in our wallets. What is Ron Estes doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.
We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.
Ron Estes disagrees:
He voted to cut more than $1 trillion in federal health care and food assistance as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"
He voted to let ACA tax credits expire, increasing health costs for millions of Americans, driving many of them to switch to cheaper plans or abandon health insurance coverage altogether. And the less people there are with coverage, the higher the rest of our premiums will be.
He wants to repeal the ACA, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and add work requirements to Medicaid.
When Republicans had their chance to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Estes's complaint was that they hadn't cut deep enough. Campaigning in 2017, he said the House GOP's American Health Care Act "didn't go far enough" to uproot and replace the 2010 health care law. What he offered instead was coverage "that's not necessarily tied to their insurance, that's not mandated, that's not taxed" — without saying how he would get there.
We need healthcare to live. Literally. What is Ron Estes doing to help us? Making things worse. We deserve better.
Wants to Gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security aren't handouts. They're earned benefits that we pay into out of every single paycheck, our entire working lives, so that we can see a doctor, take care of our parents, and retire with dignity instead of going bankrupt when we get old or sick.
For years, Ron Estes and his party have been quietly laying the groundwork to gut these programs. Now they've said the quiet part out loud.
They admitted the plan. Speaker Mike Johnson told the "Moon Griffon Show" that "entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security ... have to be adjusted and fixed," and that "We have a plan to do that next year ... desperate times call for desperate measures."
We know what the plan looks like. The Republican Study Committee — a caucus of more than 170 House Republicans that includes Speaker Johnson and his top three deputies in leadership — released a budget calling for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and converting Medicare into a privatized "premium support" model that would hand seniors over to for-profit insurance companies.
They already started. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Ron Estes supported cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the richest 1 percent.
Even Republicans admit what "reform" means. Sen. Josh Hawley, on the push to "address" and "reform" these programs: "That's usually code for 'cut.' I'm not in favor of that."
It's a broken promise. Donald Trump pledged in 2024, "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare." Ron Estes and his party are now preparing to do exactly that.
Ron Estes is the one who is supposed to be stopping this. Since January 2025 he has chaired the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security — making him the lawmaker Congress chose to protect the retirement security of the 71 million Americans who collect Social Security every month. Two months into the job, with DOGE tearing through the Social Security Administration, he went on Newsmax and said his priority was "efficiency" and rooting out "waste, fraud, and abuse." In its write-up of the interview, Newsmax summed up his position this way: Estes "looks forward to any discoveries the Department of Government Efficiency uncovers in aiding that effort."
Americans' Social Security data on a thumb drive. A whistleblower complaint filed with the agency's inspector general in January 2026 alleges that a former DOGE engineer told co-workers he had two of the agency's most tightly restricted databases — one of them on a thumb drive. Those files hold Social Security numbers, dates and places of birth and parents' names for more than 500 million living and dead Americans. The inspector general is investigating and has notified four congressional committees. The engineer's lawyer denies any wrongdoing, and the agency says the claim is false. Overseeing exactly this is the job of the subcommittee Ron Estes chairs.
That one is disputed. This one is admitted. In August 2025, the agency's own chief data officer, Charles Borges, disclosed to Congress that DOGE staff had placed a live copy of the Social Security data of more than 300 million Americans in a vulnerable cloud environment that got around the agency's normal oversight. SSA said the data was "walled off from the internet." Days later Borges resigned, writing that the agency's actions against him made his duties "impossible to perform legally and ethically."
Then the government confirmed it in court. On January 20, 2026, the Justice Department acknowledged in a court filing that a DOGE staffer had shared Social Security data through Cloudflare — a service "not approved for storing SSA data" — without agency officials knowing. Because the server sits outside SSA, the agency says it cannot determine what was sent or whether the data is still there. The same filing revealed that in March 2025 a political advocacy group asked two DOGE members at the agency to analyze state voter rolls "to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States," and that one of them signed a "Voter Data Agreement" in his SSA capacity on March 24, 2025 with no agency review. SSA found out in November and made two Hatch Act referrals in December. Ron Estes chairs the subcommittee that oversees all of it.
These programs are a promise: work hard, pay in your whole life, and your country will be there for you when you need it. Ron Estes wants to break that promise so he can keep cutting taxes for billionaires. We deserve better.
This is the man in charge of protecting your Social Security.
Cut Taxes for the Rich, While the Rest of Us Pay For It
We all need to pay our fair share to the government so it can provide the services that benefit all of us.
But billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses. That's not fair.
The wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
23 of the largest and most profitable companies in the US paid no federal corporate income taxes from 2018-2022. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of those years.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Ron Estes supported will reduce taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade, while raising taxes for the poorest Americans.
Ron Estes is on the side of the billionaires and big business. We deserve better.
We all deserve clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet to live on.
Ron Estes has supported the repealing and rolling back of environmental protections and climate change regulations, all so that billionaires and big business can plunder natural resources and destroy our environment in the name of profit.
Is Intentionally Wrecking Our Public Schools and Our Kids' Futures
Nine out of ten American children — 49.6 million of them — go to a public school. It's where they learn to read, where they eat breakfast and lunch, where kids with disabilities are guaranteed an education by law, and where a kid from any family, rich or poor, religious or not, gets a fair shot.
Ron Estes and his party are taking that apart on purpose: draining public school money into private and religious schools, pushing one religion into everybody else's classrooms, and shutting down the federal department that is supposed to look out for our kids.
He voted to create the first national private school voucher in American history. It is hidden inside the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." You give up to $1,700 a year to a charity that hands out private school scholarships, and the government gives you back every penny you gave on your taxes. It costs you nothing — no other tax break in the country works that way. Each person is capped at $1,700, but any number of people can do it, so there is no limit on what it drains from the Treasury. It starts January 1, 2027. Congress's own scorekeepers say $26 billion over ten years; one tax research group says as much as $51 billion every year — more than the government spends on Title I ($18.4 billion) for poor schools and IDEA ($14.6 billion) for kids with disabilities combined. And "low-income" means a family earning three times what a normal family in their area earns still qualifies — in some places, $500,000 a year.
They are giving away our tax dollars to families who are already wealthy and were never in public school to begin with. Every state that has tried it gets the same result — the money goes to people already paying private tuition: 95% of Arkansas voucher users never attended a public school. In Florida's first year of universal vouchers, 69% of new recipients were already in private school and only 13% had ever set foot in a public one. In Iowa, two-thirds were already in private school. We aren't rescuing kids from bad schools — we're cutting checks to families who never needed them, with the money coming out of the schools 90% of our kids actually attend.
And the kids who do switch end up doing worse. Four careful studies found the same thing. In Washington, DC, voucher kids fell behind in math. In Louisiana, a student who started in the middle of the class dropped to the bottom third in math after three years. Indiana and Ohio found the same. Kids with disabilities lost the most.
The money goes to religious schools that can turn our kids away. Ohio now spends nearly $1 billion a year on vouchers, the vast majority going to Catholic and evangelical schools — schools that, unlike public schools, can reject your child over their religion, their disability, or who their parents are, or for ANY REASON AT ALL with almost no accountability for the public money they take. Many have simply raised tuition to capture the vouchers instead of enrolling more students.
Kansas already runs its own private school tax-credit program, and lawmakers spent 2026 forcing it bigger over the governor's objection. The state program hit its $10 million annual cap in 2025, and Republicans want to push it to $15–$20 million. When Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the expansion in April 2026, she pointed out that Kansas still doesn't fully fund special education in its public schools and asked lawmakers to put the $50.6 million there instead. The Kansas NEA warned against any plan that has the "effect of financing private education with public funds." That veto survived — but three days later lawmakers overrode a second Kelly veto, of Senate Bill 361, to force Kansas into the separate federal voucher anyway.
Kansas has passed a law barring the state from setting any rules on the new federal voucher beyond the federal minimum.
Our public schools took generations to build, and they are the one institution that has to take every single child who walks in the door. Ron Estes is helping tear them down and hand the pieces to private interests. Our kids will pay for it for the rest of their lives. We deserve better.
A good job where we can make a living to support our families, own a home, and have a good life. That's the American Dream.
Ron Estes supports policies and an administration that are turning the American Dream into a nightmare.
There were 20.8 million layoffs in the U.S. in 2025
55% of employed Americans say they're concerned about losing their jobs
The unemployment rate is 4.2%
In 2025 the U.S. economy averaged just 15,000 jobs added per month, a dramatic decrease from the monthly average of 125,000 the year before Trump took office.
Overall employment for workers without college degrees fell by 361,000 jobs from January to September 2025.
58,000 net manufacturing jobs have been lost from April, when the administration announced "Liberation Day" tariffs, to September 2025.
Works for Billionaires, Big Business & Special Interests and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
Ron Estes works for big business and corporate interests, not for Kansans. Look at who some of his top funders are:
The National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors ($40,000) and the American Bankers Association ($37,500) — the finance lobby before the Ways and Means Committee he sits on
The American Institute of CPAs — $35,000, another Ways and Means interest
Wichita's aerospace industry: Textron ($37,500), Boeing ($36,500) and Spirit AeroSystems ($35,000)
Koch, Inc.'s corporate PAC — $35,000 from the Koch brothers' political network, headquartered in his district
The American Society of Anesthesiologists — $35,500
UBS ($35,000)
The real estate lobby: the National Association of Realtors ($33,000), the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts ($33,000) and the National Association of Home Builders ($32,500)
CNH Industrial ($35,000) and the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association ($34,000)
AT&T — $33,000
Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC — $78,939
Ron Estes is funded by billionaires, big business and special interests. No wonder he's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.
Let Elon Musk and DOGE Cut More Than $163 MILLION from Kansas
We all want a government that works for us as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately our government doesn't always work that way, so reform is badly needed. Given how big and complicated the government is, it's a tough problem that needs well-thought out solutions, so that we don't make things worse.
That's not what we got.
Ron Estes stood idly by while billionaire and ketamine-addled chaos monkey Elon Musk and his DOGE goons chainsawed their way through the U.S. government, promising to save the government at least $2 trillion annually in waste, fraud and abuse. Because they had no idea what they were doing and no one to stop them, in the end our government suffered, people suffered, Kansas suffered, government spending actually went UP and Elon Musk became even richer.
Elon Musk and DOGE:
Had access to and exfiltrated (stole) all our sensitive personal information.
Kneecapped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had returned over $26 billion to the American people since 2011.
Attempted to cut $4 billion in funding for medical research.
Will cost the federal government an estimated $500 billion in lost tax revenue (that could pay for programs for us), due to cuts at the IRS.
Laid waste to the employees at several government departments, removing their top experts and most skilled practitioners, and making their services less effective for all of us. This badly affected veterans, who make up 30% of the federal workforce.
Kansas had roughly 11,287 federal workers at the start of 2025 — DOGE fired 15% of them, devastating Kansas families and communities across the state.
Estes joined the DOGE Caucus in November 2024, then published an op-ed welcoming it: "With Trump back in the White House as of Jan. 20 and Musk and Ramaswamy heading DOGE, there's hope that Republicans in Congress will have allies in reforming our government." That is the same DOGE that gutted the Social Security agency he is supposed to be overseeing.
We'd like to thank you, Ron Estes, for doing absolutely nothing while an unelected South African big tech billionaire took a chainsaw to vital U.S. government functions and completely failed to make the government more efficient. We deserve better.
As a member of Congress, part of Ron Estes's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from Kansas have completely abdicated their responsibility. These spineless cowards are rubber stamping everything Donald Trump wants to do, no matter how crazy, dangerous or harmful. And we've seen the results. We deserve better.
We deserve to feel safe in our neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship.
In order to do that, we need to take real steps to prevent gun violence. And despite what we've been told, it is possible to support the 2nd Amendment and support common-sense gun safety laws at the same time. But Ron Estes has opposed bipartisan gun safety laws, while offering meaningless thoughts and prayers every time there's a new mass shooting.
Estes carried an A rating from the NRA's Political Victory Fund in the 2024 cycle, as he did in 2022 and 2020. When the Senate passed its bipartisan gun bill in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, Estes announced his opposition to it the same day, saying it "falls well short of protecting students while also ignoring the rights of law-abiding citizens."
A child or adolescent is killed with a gun every 2 hours and 48 minutes in the U.S.
Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the U.S. are 33 times greater than in Australia and 77 times greater than in Germany
Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and wounded
Women in the U.S. are 28 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries.
About 15.2 out of every 100,000 Kansans die from gun violence every year — about 446 people annually, a rate 18% higher than the national average.
Ron Estes is OK with our kids dying, as long as he has his guns. We deserve better.
America is the land of FREEDOM. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to start a business, freedom to choose your own career path, freedom to make your own medical decisions, freedom to raise your children according to your values, and freedom to pursue happiness. Freedom is what makes America great.
Unless you're a woman and you're making the deeply personal decision about whether to have a baby or not. A decision that will dramatically affect the rest of your life. In that case Ron Estes thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.
Voted against the Women's Health Protection Act, which would have protected abortion access nationwide — and voted against it again when it came back in 2022
Earned a 0% score for 2025 from Reproductive Freedom for All
Arkansas House of Representatives candidate (and pastor) Robb Ryerse stated it well: "Abortion should remain safe and legal. These are personal decisions best made by patients, their doctors, and their faith — not politicians. You don't have to agree with every decision someone makes to believe they should be free to make it. That's what personal liberty means." Almost 2/3 of Americans agree and believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But Ron Estes thinks he knows better, and doesn't believe that we should have the freedom to make our own decisions. We deserve better.
In America our vote represents our will. It gives us the power to make the change that we want to see in the world.
Unfortunately that's not a sentiment that Ron Estes's billionaire and big business donors can stomach. Because when we have voting power, we use it to make our lives better, and they lose power. Read about all the ways they're trying to take away our voting power on our about page, then come back here.
Ron Estes has opposed legislation to make voting easier while supporting the SAVE Act, which would force every single American citizen to prove their citizenship status in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. For the vast majority of Americans, this would mean presenting a passport or birth certificate at their local election office. This would disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizens: 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and 69 million women who have married do not have a birth certificate that matches their new legal name. Working-class and low-income Americans would also be disproportionately disenfranchised if the bill became law, as the vast majority of these groups do not possess a passport.
YOU HAVE POWER. Why else do you think Ron Estes and his bosses are working so hard to take it away? Don't let them. We deserve better.
Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in America and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that law enforcement will turn on us.
But the current administration has created a secret police force that is abusing their power against anyone who stands in their way, U.S. citizen or not. They claim to be going after "the worst of the worst", but are taking daycare workers, day laborers, grandmas and kids who are valued members of our communities. And Ron Estes, staunch defender of the Second Amendment to fight back against government tyranny, is doing nothing while the government tyrannizes us.
ProPublica:They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world's most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.
ProPublica:Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they're showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can't access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there's a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.
New York Times:Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed "enemies" of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force. The result is an agency whose agents' first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence.
They are executing American citizens. On January 7, 2026 an ICE agent in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a mother of 3, by shooting her in the face as she tried to drive away. Then the killer walked away, and our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened. Decent politicians condemned the murder. What did Ron Estes have to say? Nothing.
They are executing American citizens: Part 2. On January 24, 2026 ICE agents in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a 37 year old ICU nurse, who was filming their activity and trying to help others. Then our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened.
And the list of the dead keeps growing. ICE agents — on duty and off — keep killing members of our communities, while Ron Estes says nothing:
On December 31, 2025, an off-duty ICE officer in Northridge, Los Angeles shot and killed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old U.S. citizen and father of two who was born and raised in Compton. Federal officials called it self-defense against an "active shooter," but Porter's family says he was peacefully returning home and never posed a threat — and witnesses reported only three shots, matching his autopsy and contradicting claims of an exchange of gunfire.
On July 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three and small-business owner who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years. Agents had been hunting a different white van. Harris County's medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, and his co-workers disputed ICE's claim that he used his vehicle as a weapon.
On July 13, 2026, an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian father who was legally authorized to work in the U.S. and supported his wife and 3-year-old daughter by delivering food and cleaning a veterinary clinic. He was not the target of ICE's warrant — agents were looking for someone else — and were not wearing body cameras. Even Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins urged DHS to halt non-urgent vehicle stops in the state.
In April 2025, at the height of the fight over Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland father the Trump administration deported to El Salvador's CECOT mega-prison without a hearing, then refused to bring back despite a 9-0 Supreme Court order — Estes flew to El Salvador with a Republican delegation and posed for the embassy photo. Asked by the Kansas Reflector whether the congressman had gone into the prison, or whether he was concerned about Abrego Garcia's welfare, his office did not respond. Axios reported that same week that his office had not responded to its request for comment either.
Estes has been backing the agency for years. In 2018, sitting on the Homeland Security Committee, he voted for a resolution supporting ICE and said: "Amidst dangerous and extreme calls to abolish ICE, I voted to show our support for ICE and our men and women in law enforcement."
If ICE can murder innocent U.S. citizens without repercussions, what could they do to you? ICE is out of control and a danger to us all - no one is safe. What's Ron Estes going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. We deserve better.
Voted for the Unnecessary and Unpopular War in Iran
War destroys human lives, families and innocent people, causes economic ruin, and triggers immense suffering. War should always be the option of last resort.
In order to distract from the Epstein Files, Donald Trump started an illegal war of choice with Iran, and now:
We are being dog-walked by Israel, who has been trying to convince presidents to attack Iran forever, and finally found one dumb enough to do so
Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Ron Estes $78,939.
The American people don't want this war with Iran. But Ron Estes supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Ron Estes work for Israel or the people of Kansas? We deserve better.
Avoids His Constituents and Refuses to Hold In-Person Town Halls
Good leaders meet with their constituents and have town halls where citizens can voice concerns, ask questions, and provide input on policies. Ron Estes doesn't want to hear what we have to say. He only wants to talk to his rich donors or people who agree with him.
In June 2025, after Estes and the rest of the Kansas delegation ignored repeated requests to hold town halls, the advocacy group Leading Kansas gave up and invited Democratic lawmakers from other states to come to Wichita instead. More than 1,500 people filled the auditorium at Wichita State. Estes was not one of them.
Rep. Maxwell Frost flew in from Orlando and asked the crowd: "My question is... where is Representative Ron Estes? Where is he? Because I'm here from Orlando. I had to take two planes to get here."
Ron Estes is avoiding us because he doesn't care what we think. We deserve better.
Hates Democracy and Tried to Steal the 2020 Election
Estes helped try to overturn the 2020 election. Here is what he did:
He was one of more than 100 House Republicans who signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to throw out the certified election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Estes said the case deserved to be heard because "we need transparency and integrity in our electoral process" — all four states had already certified their results.
Hours after the Capitol mob attacked on January 6, Estes voted to sustain the objections to both Arizona's and Pennsylvania's electoral votes — refusing to certify Biden's win. Both objections failed.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
