House Republicans on Thursday narrowly adopted a budget framework needed to advance their plan to cut taxes and government spending, delivering a win for President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson.
“It’s a good day in the House. I told you not to doubt us,” Johnson told reporters after the vote, which he called “a big victory.”
The 216-214 vote, largely along party lines, came after the speaker and other GOP leaders worked to assuage the concerns of conservative holdouts who had pressed to ensure that the final legislation will include steep spending cuts to go along with trillions of dollars in tax cuts. Those hardliners had forced a planned vote Wednesday evening to be postponed.
The budget outline, a compromise plan that was adopted by the Senate early Saturday, includes different sets of instructions for House and Senate committees. The House side set a target of $2 trillion in spending cuts to be paired with $4.5 trillion in new tax cuts and $300 billion in additional spending. The Senate side set a much lower floor for tax cuts — just $4 billion — and allowed $1.5 trillion in new tax cuts while also zeroing out the official cost of about $4 trillion in renewed tax cuts.
Some House conservatives initially refused to back that plan, saying they did not trust their colleagues in the Senate to deliver steep spending cuts.
Commitments on spending cuts: Johnson made a point of telling reporters that Trump “didn't have to call a single member to wrangle anybody on this thing.” Trump had publicly pressed for the holdouts to fall in line, but it took more than that to secure the necessary votes.
Johnson reportedly told his fiscal hawks Wednesday night that they could remove him from the speakership if he fails to keep his promises. Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune then publicly stated at a joint appearance Thursday morning that they are aligned on the goal of at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years. “We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum, and we’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter,” Thune said.
Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the holdouts who expressed concerns about the budget blueprint, said in a statement that he “reluctantly” voted for it based on three specific commitments. Roy said the president had committed to “a minimum of $1 trillion in real reductions in mandatory spending,” including Medicaid reforms targeting waste, fraud and abuse as well as a rollback of clean energy tax credits. He added that Johnson had committed to linking the level of tax cuts to the level of spending cuts in the final bill and that Thune had committed to a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending reductions.
Those assurances were enough to win over most of the holdouts. In the end, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana were the only Republicans to oppose the resolution.
The House Freedom Caucus said in a statement that its members and other fiscal conservatives had succeeded in putting Congress on a path to pass a fiscally responsible bill. “Today’s vote will allow us to proceed with that framework — and given these new commitments, anything that falls short will face serious problems in the House,” the group said.
Just the first step: Having the House and Senate adopt the same budget resolution is just the first step in the reconciliation process Republicans are using to enact a massive package that will include more money for defense and border security in addition to the tax and spending cuts. The resolution was the easy part. Thursday’s House vote now sets up weeks or months of additional negotiations on the final legislation, and those talks are likely to be complicated by more Republican infighting.
Democrats don’t have the votes to derail the GOP package, but they have criticized it vehemently, arguing that Republicans will hurt working families, slash Medicaid and cut food stamps all so they can deliver more tax breaks for the wealthy. Some Republican senators have also expressed concern about potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid.
Making changes to Medicaid: Johnson insisted to reporters that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be spared. “The president has made clear: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid will not take a hit, so you can count on that and you can watch it develop as we go,” he told reporters.
But he made clear that Republicans were considering some changes to Medicaid. “No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed,” he said. “What we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled. They’re draining resources from people who are actually due that. So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.”
Johnson said House and Senate committees would be working collaboratively, going over “big menus of options” for spending cuts and targeting waste, fraud and abuse. “We need to return to fiscal sanity,” he said, “and that’s what the Republican Party represents.”
The fiscal outlook: Budget hawks warned that the resolution falls far short of being fiscally responsible and would add to the national debt, even if lawmakers follow the approach taken by the House. And a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office finds that the Republican plans to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent and add another $1.5 trillion in tax cuts on top of that would increase the deficit by about $6 trillion over 10 years. Debt held by the public would climb to 220% of GDP in 2055, 63 percentage points higher than CBO’s baseline projections. And economic growth, though faster for several years, would be slower over the longer term.