House GOP leadership managed to barely eke out a win on their budget resolution Tuesday night, but the Senate is already eyeing changes that could pose challenges for the other chamber’s slim majority.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., with an assist from President Donald Trump, managed to quell concerns from both the center and right of his party to get the budget resolution adopted with only one Republican defection.
But Senate leadership is adamant the resolution’s tax instruction must allow the expiring 2017 tax cuts to be made permanent, and some rank-and-file members expect changes to soften the spending cut targets as well.
“It’s complicated. It’s hard. Nothing about this is going to be easy,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Wednesday.
The House budget would provide for a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill that would aim for $2 trillion in spending cuts, in exchange for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, over a decade.
A number of GOP senators view the spending cuts number as too high, and the tax cuts number as too low, for instance, and there are also concerns with the House’s instruction for a bill to raise the statutory debt ceiling by $4 trillion.
But both chambers need to adopt the same budget resolution to move forward with one “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill that can bypass a Senate filibuster to enact much of Trump’s agenda.
“I expect there need to be changes,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said, citing senators’ desire to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, a sentiment echoed by Trump on his social media platform Truth Social earlier Wednesday.
Other senators said they expect changes to the spending cut instructions included in the House resolution.
Top Senate Republicans weren’t exactly rushing to embrace the House’s spending cut target, which could require politically dicey cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
“Well, we’re going to find out” whether there’s enough support in the Senate for $2 trillion in cuts, Thune said. Added Barrasso: “We’re going to work with the House on all this.”
‘I don’t love that’
House and Senate leadership will have to strike a delicate balance. The House adopted its resolution despite concerns from centrist Republicans in competitive districts about cuts to safety net programs and insistence from fiscal conservatives that the spending cuts wouldn’t go far enough.
Some blue-state Republicans in the House backed the measure with the hope that the Senate would be a moderating influence over the final product. At the same time, a handful of conservative holdouts voted for the resolution because of promises from leadership and the president that Republicans would pursue more aggressive spending cuts in the future.
Senate Agriculture Chairman John Boozman, R-Ark., said “I would not be surprised” if the House’s cuts instructions get smaller in a final product. House reconciliation instructions would direct the Agriculture Committee to find at least $230 billion in cuts over 10 years. The committee oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as food stamps.
An amendment introduced by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., that would require the Senate to cut nearly $1.5 trillion in spending in its own pared-back budget resolution was soundly rejected, 24-76.
Twenty-nine Republicans voted against the amendment, which included the same $230 billion Agriculture panel instruction, along with $760 billion in cuts within the jurisdiction of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicaid.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who voted against Paul’s amendment, said he expects changes to the House’s reconciliation instructions, and would take issue with a measure that would make steep cuts to Medicaid.
“I will predict to you that that resolution in that form will not be voted on the Senate floor,” Hawley said.
The $880 billion spending cut instruction to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid in that chamber, gave Hawley pause.
“Yeah, I don’t love that,” he said.
Hawley said he’d be fine with adding work requirements to Medicaid, and making changes to the program’s structure, beneficiary formula or the cost sharing required of states.
“But anything that results in cuts to actual working beneficiaries, I’d be really skeptical,” Hawley said.
Other senators, including Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, said they’d like to see more spending cuts than the House resolution would provide for. So Thune, Barrasso and Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., have their own balancing act in their chamber.
Graham wasn’t commenting on Wednesday beyond a statement he issued on the House vote.
He said he wants to “strengthen the tax cut provisions by making them permanent in order to meet President Trump’s priorities.” Graham also reiterated the importance of getting the border enforcement funding enacted quickly.
“Stalling President Trump’s border security agenda is not only bad politics, it is dangerous,” he said.
The specter of cuts to the joint federal-state health care program for the poor also caused angst among House Republicans from competitive districts. They ultimately fell in line and voted for the resolution, in part based on the hope that the Senate would limit spending cut targets and assurances the committees could find cuts that didn’t eat into Medicaid and food stamp benefits.
House Agriculture Chairman Glenn “GT” Thompson, R-Pa., said before the budget resolution vote that the “truth will be somewhere in the middle” between the House’s $230 billion and the Senate version, which charges the Agriculture panel with just $1 billion in minimum cuts.
But Johnson faces a tall order repeating Tuesday night’s show of party unity with whatever the Senate sends back. It took weeks just to get his party on board with that plan, and he made clear Wednesday his view that the Senate ought to just adopt the House version or something very close to it.
“My admonition to the Senate is to keep it as close as possible to the House version. We demonstrated last night how delicate the balance here is,” Johnson said in comments reported by CNN. “If you change too many of the terms, it’s going to be very difficult to pass on the House side.”
Process questions
House and Senate leadership will also have to resolve questions about how best to move forward with the changes to the resolution from a process perspective.
From that standpoint, the Senate has to make at least some technical changes, because the House version doesn’t contain reconciliation instructions to Senate committees.
House and Senate GOP leaders and administration officials are discussing what path to take on melding the House and Senate budget resolutions, but no final decisions have been made.
One path under discussion is for the Senate to amend the House budget and send it back, potentially engaging in a pingpong process between the chambers. One argument for this is that it would be a more transparent process and more acceptable to House Republicans than a conference committee, which might look like backroom dealing.
The other route is through a conference committee, where House and Senate negotiators would hash out changes acceptable to both chambers.
“As a matter of process, we’ll have those conversations with our members and figure out where they want to go,” Thune said.
Both methods would limit debate to 10 hours on the Senate floor. No amendments are permitted on a conference report, but it would be subject to its own form of a “vote-a-rama” with votes on nonbinding motions to instruct conferees that Democrats could use for political ads.
A pingpong amendment between the chambers would trigger another traditional amendment vote-a-rama in the Senate, soon after the initial floor process that saw senators voting until almost 5 a.m. on Feb. 20.
The last time there was a formal budget resolution conference was a decade ago; more recently, a pingpong process was used in 2017 on the budget blueprint that set the stage for what became the 2017 tax law Republicans are trying to now make permanent.
Olivia M. Bridges contributed to this report.
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