The GOP’s reconciliation package is suddenly headed for the back burner.
At least, for now.
House and Senate Republicans remain at odds on the reconciliation package. Government funding negotiations are cannibalizing legislative time as the deadline to avoid a shutdown approaches. And there’s no immediate timeline on how to move a reconciliation bill forward — even as Senate Republicans indicated last week they intend to pick up the House-approved bill, change it, then send it back.
When NOTUS asked Sen. Thom Tillis about timing for moving the reconciliation bill, and noted that the chambers appear to be at a “standstill,” Tillis responded with a chuckle: “You have a great read on the subject. Any other questions?”
“If it’s been said well, don’t say it again,” he added.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who’s well-connected with House and Senate GOP leadership, said members need to get through government funding first, “and then we’ll talk on the time frame of that one. Sooner the better.”
And GOP Rep. Ralph Norman opined that the Senate is “on their own timetable.”
“I doubt they even take it up,” Norman said of his Senate counterparts. “We’ve got ours, we’ve passed ours on time. They’ve delayed it. That’s their prerogative.”
The calendar is looking rough. Government funding negotiations are likely to eat up the next two weeks. There’s a one-week recess after that for both chambers, which is the Senate’s first break this year. Many senators are running on fumes, and in April, there’s another two-week recess for both chambers, meaning the reconciliation bill is unlikely to get done before May at the earliest. (It’s hardly a custom in Congress to cancel recess for the sake of unfinished work.)
While President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts don’t expire until December, Senate GOP Leader John Thune — who’s been gunning for a two-bill approach — had hoped for a bill to be done within Trump’s first 30 days in office. That deadline has already come and gone. The Senate adopted its own budget resolution, but the House has declined to take it up.
Speaker Mike Johnson — who favors “one big, beautiful bill,” as Trump has deemed it — wanted to be done with reconciliation within Trump’s first 100 days, which hits on April 30. In terms of legislative weeks, that leaves hardly any time for Republicans to hit that goal — and that’s under the best of circumstances. The reality is, with so many issues yet to be settled, Republicans will be hard-pressed to get a bill done at all, let alone under such a tight timeline.
It’s all led to some consternation in the House.
“I know the Senate moves slowly, but I’m not sure what they’re waiting on here,” one senior House GOP aide said. “Anyone can see they have the votes to pass the House written budget and unlock our ability to implement all the things Republicans ran on, not just some money for border security.”
GOP Rep. Byron Donalds was similarly impatient. “We got to pick up the pace,” he said.
“You can’t slow down,” he added. “We got to pick it up. So whatever we need to do to get the president the money he needs, we need to do that.”
Senate Republicans maintain the differences between the chambers’ bills are substantive. Last week, several Republicans said the Senate would need to change tax provisions in the House-approved bill. The Senate wants the tax cuts to be made permanent, a difficult task under the rules of reconciliation and the spending runway that Republicans have established.
Meanwhile, Trump has remained largely impartial toward the differing approaches, though he said last month that he was reading both and would announce his favorite soon.
Republican senators are also hesitant about certain cuts to Medicaid that the House has practically promised in its budget. (Republicans are counting on huge entitlement reductions to pay for tax cuts, and Social Security is protected from reconciliation bills.)
But sending a changed budget resolution back to the House could complicate passage even more. The House’s current budget resolution was barely adopted; it took Trump twisting the arms of Republican holdouts to get it over the line.
“There’s clearly a need right now — money for the border, money for defense and the unleashing of American energy components of that,” Senate GOP Whip John Barrasso told NOTUS. “So if the House can get everything together, we can work with them on that in a timely manner.”
“If they’re having trouble getting it all done quickly,” he added, “I would expect that the administration may say, ‘We need the money for the border, we need the money for the defense of the country and we need the energy unleashed — now.’”
To be sure, work on advancing the resolution continues at the member and staff level behind the scenes, and Senate Republicans discussed timing for advancing reconciliation at their closed-door lunch on Tuesday. It was their first opportunity to meet as a group since the House adopted its budget last week, and Sen. Chuck Grassley’s readout was that “there’s no conclusions that I can give you whatsoever.”
“We have a long way to go,” Sen. James Lankford said. “I haven’t heard a date even floated, what that would actually be other than ‘it’s not soon.’”
Of course, the only real deadline for a reconciliation bill is the end of the year, when individual tax rates expire. Republicans have wiggle room, and at least some lawmakers think the House and Senate dragging their feet is intentional.
“Republicans have every incentive to drag this out so members can fundraise off it and K Street can get paid to lobby on it. Meanwhile, we’re denying President Trump a win,” one House Republican told NOTUS.
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Ursula Perano and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.