Speaker Mike Johnson wants to adopt the Senate’s budget this week so lawmakers can get started on a reconciliation bill for President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.
He doesn’t have the votes — yet.
This week marks the second time Johnson has tried to rally his conference behind a budget resolution. Senate Republicans adopted the latest iteration along party lines over the weekend. But the upper chamber’s measure contains key differences with the resolution Johnson narrowly ushered through the House in February.
The House and Senate are trying to have identical budgets before Republican lawmakers begin writing the text for their sweeping budget reconciliation package. But as a dozen or so House Republicans are blasting the Senate’s floor for spending cuts and its proposed $5 trillion debt ceiling hike, the House swallowing the Senate’s resolution without amendments is becoming an increasingly dubious prospect.
The pending budget resolution vote presents not only the latest high-stake challenge for Johnson’s speakership, but also tests the House GOP’s loyalty to Trump, as the economy careens toward a recession amid his administration’s unpopular tariff policy.
“The Budget Plan just passed by the United States Senate has my Complete and Total Endorsement and Support,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Monday. “Thank you to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and House Speaker Mike Johnson for their hard work and attention to detail. There is no better time than now to get this Deal DONE!”
Given Johnson can only afford to lose three votes when the resolution hits the floor Wednesday — assuming full attendance — any opposition presents a challenge for his already strained whip operation. Rank-and-file Republicans are feeling fatigued with the repeated pressure campaigns, after already passing a framework earlier this year with just one defection, Rep. Thomas Massie. (Massie will likely vote no again.)
For now, the arm-twisting persists with Johnson and his team engaging in tough conversations with lawmakers about the framework. They used Monday night’s vote series to try to convince conservative holdouts to get behind the measure, a person familiar with the plans told NOTUS. Johnson also met with the House Freedom Caucus on Monday evening to convince members to change their minds.
Although the plan is still to vote on the budget on Wednesday, that could be dragged later into the week if Johnson can’t get the votes. In a closed-door meeting Monday afternoon, Johnson implied that the House might not break for its two-week recess until the budget is adopted, according to a source familiar with his comments.
“I’m delivering the message that speed really matters, and time is not on our side,“ Johnson told reporters Monday.
He added that if the House just waited on the Senate, lawmakers would “miss some really important deadlines.”
It’s true that the House is racing toward a two-week recess and the GOP’s self-imposed deadline of Memorial Day to pass a reconciliation bill.
Still, for the budget resolution’s opponents in the House, urgency does not appear to be as important as selectivity.
Rep. Ralph Norman, who’s a member of HFC and sits on the powerful Rules committee, estimated that between 15 and 20 House Republicans are against adopting this version of the budget framework to tank it, and lawmakers have been warned there could be weekend work.
When asked if he’d vote against Trump’s wishes, Norman was definitive. “Oh yeah, absolutely,” he said. “A lot of us are. Unless we hear something I haven’t heard.”
The South Carolina Republicans added that his GOP colleagues respect Trump and want to be with him. “He’s right on everything, the tariffs, he’s right on deportations — all of that,” Norman said. But Norman was emphatic that the Senate budget was “not our version.”
Holdouts are collecting around two ideological camps: fiscal hawks like Rep. David Schweikert — who has centered his congressional tenure around deficit reduction — and conservative Freedom Caucus members, like Reps. Chip Roy and Andy Ogles. Both camps are seeking more aggressive spending cuts, the likes of which have made the Senate and House moderates queasy.
But even more members are undecided. Deficit hawk Rep. Rich McCormick told reporters on Monday he does not want to “draw any red lines” but was skeptical of the resolution and its prospects.
“Everybody knows that debt is a massive problem,” McCormick said. “The question is, will we handle it seriously now or are we going to kick the can down the road again?”
Conservative Reps. Brandon Gill and Michael Cloud also declined to say whether they plan to oppose the bill, though Cloud called the Senate’s resolution “laughable.”
“We campaigned on turning this fiscal house around,” Cloud told NOTUS. “And the Senate resolution falls woefully short of that.”
If holdouts are successful in tanking Wednesday’s budget vote, they’ll tee up a potentially lengthy game of legislative ping pong between the House and Senate, in which the House kicks some amended resolution back to the Senate and vice versa until a compromise is reached.
Conservative Rep. Andrew Clyde floated a nascent proposal to circumvent that metaphorical standoff on a Sunday conference meeting. He made a procedural case that the House does not actually need to adopt the Senate’s budget resolution in order to begin the reconciliation legislative text, according to a source on the call.
That argument is picking up steam with conservatives, including Rep. Andy Harris, the chair of the Freedom Caucus, who told reporters that he does not believe the Senate’s resolution has the votes this week and that the upper chamber should present a specific plan for their spending cuts.
“The only thing that matters to the Senate parliamentarian is the Senate language,” Rep. Scott Perry, a former Freedom Caucus chair, told NOTUS.
“Let’s get on to reconciliation and get to the instructions,” Perry continued. “Let’s see what we’re really talking about, granular details.”
Johnson isn’t biting.
While ignoring disagreements with the Senate now might create the appearance of progress, ultimately it takes two chambers to pass reconciliation legislation. Congress will have to resolve the issues at some point.
Johnson, of course, is eager to show progress on reconciliation. And to help make that case to the dozen or so holdouts, Johnson is already relying on his favorite dealmaker: Trump.
One GOP member told NOTUS that Trump’s legislative affairs team started contacting lawmakers over the weekend about the budget. And Republican leadership will have the president’s attention at the White House tomorrow ahead of a National Republican Campaign Committee fundraiser.
The margins will matter, as Democratic leadership is intent on making Johnson and Trump’s whip operation as painful as possible.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent a letter to his caucus urging full attendance during Wednesday’s vote in the hopes of tanking the measure. (Rep. Donald Norcross is currently recovering from a medical emergency and two Democratic seats are vacant.)
“House Republicans broke their promise to address the high cost of living and they lied about their intention to enact their extreme Project 2025 agenda. The harm being unleashed by Donald Trump and the GOP is staggering,” Jeffries wrote in the letter. He also announced three days of action to protest the budget framework during the upcoming two-week recess.
Meanwhile, most Senate Republicans are content to keep the budget resolution process in the rearview. One senator who has strong ties to the House — and to Trump — said it’s time for the House to get in line.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to pass because it has to pass,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin told NOTUS.
Still, moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was hardly convinced.
“The House has it this week but we will not be ‘reconciled’ between the two bodies,” she told reporters. “We’ve still got a lot of work ahead.”
—
Riley Rogerson, Daniella Diaz and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.
Helen Huiskes, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report. Ursula Perano, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.