As the GOP prepares to take back the House, its right flank is raring to gut spending, upend the federal safety net and make Trump-era tax cuts permanent — ambitions that threaten to give leadership a two-year headache.

Regaining the House majority in two weeks would undoubtedly lend Republicans more leverage in next year’s biggest budget and spending battles, including an already messy fight with Democrats over lifting the debt ceiling. Some conservatives are already hellbent on using the debt limit and government funding to extract major concessions from Democrats, such as restoring federal spending caps or overhauling Social Security and Medicare.

But tight Senate margins and a Democratic president would make it impossible for GOP leaders to deliver on the party’s most hardline fiscal wishes, at least with President Joe Biden still in office. The disappointment would surely prompt blowback from right-leaning Republicans already known as the sharpest thorns in the party’s side.

“Spare me if you’re a Republican who puts on your frigging campaign website, ‘Trust me, I will vote for a balanced budget amendment, and I believe we should balance the budget like every family in America.’ No shit,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the pro-Trump Freedom Caucus, said in an interview.

“You have two simple leverage points: when government funding comes up and when the debt ceiling is debated,” Roy reminded his fellow Republicans. “And the only question that matters is, will leadership use that leverage?”

Roy is also a member of the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of House GOP lawmakers. It released a budget plan in June that proposes making Trump-era individual tax cuts permanent and gradually raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, among other major changes.

Jim Jordan has said he wants to use spending bills to curtail what he sees as the politicization of the Justice Department and the FBI.