After months of delays, the Senate is finally on track to adopt its latest budget resolution.
Senators are set to begin voting on amendments to the budget, which will serve as the blueprint for reconciliation, later Friday night into Saturday morning, as long as Republicans decline to use much — if any — of their allotted debate time. (Up to 50 hours of debate is split up between the parties, with the clock starting Thursday night.)
It’s critical movement after the House rejected the Senate’s first attempt at a budget resolution earlier this year. The House has adopted its own resolution as well, but its steep spending cuts and varying provisions caused holdups with a number of Republican senators.
This newly revamped budget resolution from the Senate GOP is meant to serve as a compromise.
Both the House and Senate must agree on a matching budget resolution to unlock the budget reconciliation process. Reconciliation — which allows budget-related legislation to bypass the filibuster in the Senate — is President Donald Trump’s best shot at passing partisan policy into law this term.
Trump on Truth Social this week said the Senate plan “has my Complete and Total Support.”
“We are going to cut Spending, and right-size the Budget back to where it should be… Every Republican, House and Senate, must UNIFY,” he said.
But unifying might not be so easy. A number of House conservatives have already balked at the bill, with concerns that the Senate will be reluctant to enact the degree of spending cuts the House favors.
Sen. Josh Hawley said he only voted to advance the budget resolution after a direct conversation with Trump, in which the president committed to not signing a bill that cuts Medicaid benefits. That position directly contradicts the one staked out by a number of House Freedom Caucus members, who only voted for the House blueprint once it set up more than a trillion dollars in cuts, with most of those earmarked for Medicaid.
Senators believe, however, that the House will have to largely get on board with their version of the budget. In wrapping up the Senate resolution this weekend, Senate Majority Leader John Thune is effectively jamming the House, which has a week left of session before a two-week Easter recess that has become an informal but important deadline for Republicans.
Speaker Mike Johnson has said he wants to finish reconciliation by Memorial Day. The House left town on Tuesday after a rule vote failed on the floor — an embarrassing ordeal for House GOP leadership. The Senate GOP’s latest resolution text came out Wednesday, meaning many House lawmakers were gone when the Senate proposal was released.
Still, three House Freedom Caucus members have already told NOTUS they’re disappointed with the Senate proposal.
“Since it’s baseball season, I’ll just say, ‘Swing and a miss,’” Rep. Ben Cline said.
Another Freedom Caucus member told NOTUS the Senate’s budget was “very disappointing.” While yet another Freedom Caucus Republican said they didn’t “trust the Senate to do anything.”
“Much less fund anything close to spending reductions necessary for deficit neutrality,” this member continued.
Thune, in a statement after the new text was released, said it’s “time for the Senate to move forward with this budget resolution in order to further advance our shared Republican agenda in Congress.”
The Senate’s budget would rely on some clever accounting to claim that an extension of current tax rates — projected to cost around $4 trillion over the next decade — would actually cost nothing. Some House Republicans, most notably Rep. Chip Roy, have suggested they won’t go along with that sort of accounting; they want real spending cuts to offset the cost of tax cuts.
Republicans do have to survive a vote-a-rama before advancing their budget. During a vote-a-rama, any senator can get a vote on a germane amendment, and there are a number of potential pitfalls for Republicans to avoid.
For one, with Trump implementing steep tariffs this week, Democrats may try to force votes bringing back some congressional oversight to a levy that is constitutionally supposed to be Congress’ responsibility. For another, Democrats may try to rein in some of Trump and Elon Musk’s unpopular agency cuts.
On both accounts, there are some Republicans who are sympathetic to those proposals and want some oversight. But Republicans also know that adding provisions addressing those issues could quickly become poison pills — both for House Republicans and Trump.
No matter what budget the Senate ultimately adopts, House Republicans insist they’ll have changes themselves.
Speaker Johnson told NOTUS this week that, after the Senate adopts the budget, lawmakers on his side of the Capitol will work on “merging the two products together and moving it forward” in the House.
Regardless, Senate Republicans are confident their blueprint will work for their House counterparts.
“I think we’re in good shape,” Sen. Mike Rounds said.
Others predicted that Trump will need to weigh in to get lawmakers in line. Margins in the House are even tighter than in the Senate, meaning just one or two lawmakers defecting out of hundreds can make a monumental difference for Republicans.
Sen. John Kennedy said Trump would need to “be the final arbiter of what’s in and what’s out.”
“He’s going to have to put his full weight behind the measure, and then I think it’ll pass,” Kennedy said.
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Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Reese Gorman, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.