This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec 4th Episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber.”

In the November election, Americans not only voted to retain Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives, but also gave the party control of the U.S. Senate. For all the attention given to the presidential race and Donald Trump’s victory, we must recognize that this is the outcome in Congress gigantic. Republicans in Washington now have a chance to set the national agenda in January.

While Republicans focused on issues like prices and immigration during the campaign, and the new administration says it will address those issues, there are clear developments that show what Republicans in Congress actually plan to do with their newfound power.

The election may have impacted the price of eggs, but it appears that Republican leaders are rushing to use their power to pursue policies that are unrelated to, or even contradictory to, the issue, such as the Cutting support for seniors and health care for Americans of all ages.

On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Richard McCormick said “tough decisions” need to be made on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “Hundreds of billions of dollars need to be saved. We just have to have the courage to take on these challenges,” McCormick told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network.

The reality is that cutting hundreds of billions from these programs, as McCormick has suggested, would cost the American people far more than high prices and inflation. Seniors receive an average of nearly $2,000 per month in Social Security. They have paid into the program for decades. Billions in cuts will hit them and the country’s future seniors hard.

On Wednesday, Democrats secured victory in California’s 13th district after weeks of vote counting. That means Republicans won 220 seats to Democrats’ 215, a margin of just five seats. However, this scope could shrink even further since Trump has already selected two incumbent Republicans in the House of Representatives for his Cabinet. Matt Gaetz also resigned from Congress last month after Trump picked him as attorney general. (Gaetz later withdrew from consideration and said he would not return to the House.)

It’s also worth noting that Trump won the popular vote by just over 1.5%, a narrow margin that does not indicate a sweeping mandate to dismantle the safety net. In fact, the mandate to support these programs is significant higher as support for Trump – or for other politicians like Vice President Kamala Harris.

In fact, responding to an economic election by cutting programs that help people in a difficult economy is quite a contradiction. And even some Republicans are reportedly worried about the political downside of such cuts, which could impact at least 70 million Americans.

But that’s part of the party’s plan. And what will the Republicans in Washington do with the cut billions? They would turn them from older workers into super-rich, with further tax cuts along the lines of Trump’s first term. These cuts could distort the tax code and cause working-class Americans to pay higher tax rates than billionaires.

To be clear, there are billionaires who support both parties, that is simply a fact, and the Democrats are struggling with criticism that they are not doing enough for unions and the working class. But in the last four years of the Biden-Harris administration, billionaires didn’t get big tax breaks and those safety net programs weren’t cut. So the economic contrast between the two parties is clear, even if taxes are not as important to Americans as prices.

But while Trump may be trying to mislead voters about the size of his electoral margin, House Republicans apparently see no advantage in raising expectations given such narrow control of the chamber. We should remember that Republicans began the current Congress with a slim majority. This narrow majority led to a speech war and sparked violent infighting and mutinies that continue to plague the party to this day.

In January, Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to work by a margin of just 217 to 215 since Trump removed those three House members from Congress. That margin will eventually fall back to five, but it is still one of the narrowest in the past century.

So if you remember one thing that’s going on right now, remember this: While Trump continues to hype his victory to the American people, the Republicans in Congress who emerged from the same election are not following along. During a press conference on Wednesday, Johnson made it clear that the party had “nothing left.”

“All of our members know this,” Johnson said. “We talked today, as we always do, that this is a team effort where we all have to go in the same direction.”

If anyone moves in a different direction and only two or three people defect, the Republicans will not be able to get their agenda passed.

Allison Detzel contributed.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com