House Republicans are pressing ahead with efforts to mark up a budget resolution as soon as Thursday even though they have yet to finalize the details of that blueprint and their Senate counterparts have unveiled a different plan.
“We’ll be rolling out the details of that probably by tonight,” Johnson told reporters at a morning news conference. “We are right on the schedule that we need to be on.”
That House schedule includes a recess from Friday until February 24, creating some urgency for the House GOP to build momentum for a single-bill approach to enact President Donald Trump’s agenda. That House plan has been held up by intraparty fighting that has also left Republicans in the chamber playing catch-up with impatient GOP senators, who are preparing two separate reconciliation bills. The two chambers will ultimately have to agree on the budget resolution, needed to unlock the spending and tax legislation Republicans want to pass on a partisan basis.
Yet some House Republicans are reportedly “increasingly skeptical” that they’ll be able to move ahead with the resolution this week, given lingering disagreements and mounting frustrations among key lawmakers. Questions have also persisted as to whether Republicans can raise the debt ceiling on their own as part of their package, thereby depriving Democrats of a chance to use the matter as leverage.
House Republicans have struggled to balance competing priorities. Budget hawks in the House have insisted on steeper spending cuts. But spending reductions at the level that some prefer may require deeper cuts to Medicaid or other programs, which reportedly would draw objections from more centrist Republicans. On the other hand, smaller spending cuts could require Republicans to adjust their planned tax cuts, either by jettisoning some ideas favored by Trump or shortening the duration of some cuts — options that aren’t appealing to other GOP lawmakers or the administration.
House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington is reportedly preparing a resolution that would require a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, with the hope of reaching $2 trillion. Those cuts would partially offset tax cuts totaling some $4.5 trillion over a decade.
Politico reports that the House Republican draft plan would call for less than $4.7 trillion in deficit spending in instructions for the House Ways and Means Committee, which “would barely give the committee enough breathing room to extend all the 2017 Trump tax cuts that are expiring at the end of this year, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost around $4.6 trillion — let alone Trump’s other tax priorities.”
House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith is pushing for more room to include Trump’s tax cuts. “Let me just say that a ten-year extension of President Trump’s expiring provisions is over $4.7 trillion, according to CBO,” he said. “Anything less would be saying that President Trump is wrong on tax policy.”
But the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus is pressing for larger spending cuts. “We should not be negotiating with ourselves on how little to cut from Joe Biden’s insane spending levels,” the group said in a social media post on Tuesday. “The Republican budget resolution should aim for $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction with a bare minimum of $2 trillion in instructions.”
The Freedom Caucus defied House Republican leadership this week and released its own plan “to kickstart the resolution process.” The “Emergency Border Control Resolution” adopts a two-step approach like that favored by Senate GOP leaders. The first step would provide $200 billion in funding for border security and defense combined with $486.3 billion in spending cuts, including a rollback of Biden student debt cancelation and electric vehicle programs. The plan would also raise the debt limit by $4 trillion.
Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, the Freedom Caucus chair, reportedly said that the group would also release its tax plan, intended as a separate bill, this week.
“What holds everyone back is, what’s the level of deficit reduction we’re going to agree to, and is it real deficit reduction?” Harris said, according to Roll Call. “Because if you project unrealistic growth projections and assume that’s going to bring in revenue, to us that’s not true deficit reduction. Deficit reduction is when the CBO is going to score a reasonable GDP growth rate.”
The bottom line: House Republican leaders expressed optimism that they’ll be able to resolve intraparty differences and begin consideration of a budget resolution, but it’s still not clear what their plan includes or if it can get the GOP votes necessary. The Senate Budget Committee, meanwhile, is set to hold a Wednesday mark-up of its own plan — includes border security, defense and energy measures but leaves tax changes for later. Trump administration officials reportedly said Tuesday that they need $175 billion in additional border money quickly, which could help the Senate plan gain some momentum, but House leaders have said they won’t take up the Senate blueprint, with Johnson calling it a “non-starter.”