President Donald Trump's loyalists are already planning for a second round of reconciliation cuts and spending, as a sequel to Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" that cemented trillions in tax cuts on the rich while slashing money from Medicaid and food stamps.

But Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kimberley Strassel has no confidence that this will be anything good, writing Thursday, "All fear the growing prospect of a small, ugly sequel."

"Don’t blame the driving force in the push for a second reconciliation package: congressional conservatives," wrote Strassel. "They premised their support for the first bill on a requirement that it include real deficit reduction. That bill came nowhere near hitting those targets. Deficit hawks were cajoled into supporting it only after Republican leaders promised real spending reform in a follow-up package."

The problem, she wrote, is that what little is already taking shape of a potential second package is anything but that.

"They may well get their wish for a sequel, as Republicans as a whole grow way more interested in a Reconciliation 2.0," wrote Strassel. "Only this being today’s GOP, the motivation isn’t spending reform. All the talk instead is about new goodies, industrial policy and protecting home-state interests. The very real risk is that fiscal conservatives tee up a vehicle that becomes a grab-bag of new spending and bad policy, with little to no deficit reduction."

As an example, she noted, Trump is hoping for a permanent "security fund" to make some form of his federal occupation of Washington, D.C. permanent, as well as his proposal to require drug companies to charge no more for drugs than the cheapest rate they charge in other countries — which she argues would stifle drug research.

Meanwhile, she argued, "The stick-it-to-the-rich faction of the GOP is concocting plans to make amends for the first bill’s broad-based tax cuts. This thinking was laid out in a Henry Olsen column in National Review, which advocated using a second bill to strip 'rich' Americans of the mortgage interest deduction and the $500,000 exemption in capital gains for sales of primary residences. He also proposes denying higher-income senior citizens the Social Security and Medicare perks that everybody else gets" — all of which would just make the tax code more complicated.

"The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a solid win, in part because it dodged some terrible policy. The GOP might not be so lucky the next time around," Strassel fumed.