As Republican lawmakers wrapped another week on Capitol Hill, they left town without a clear path forward on the biggest sticking points plaguing President Donald Trump’s “one, big beautiful bill.”
But GOP leaders are signaling that before next week, finally, they will make some decisions.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Ways and Means Committee are both expected to mark up their portions of the bill in marathon sessions starting next Tuesday, a signal that leaders at least think they’re close to a consensus on some of the trickiest decisions in the bill, namely, how and how much to cut Medicaid and to what level Republicans will increase the the state and local tax deduction.
Battleground Republicans have been meeting regularly with leadership — including one important meeting on Thursday afternoon between blue-state Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson — to draw out their red lines for supporting the bill.
“I think we’re going to get there,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a SALT caucus member, said Thursday. She added that the Ways and Means Committee was already close to a deal on raising the SALT caps, but didn’t share details.
“We’ll come up with something that we think would be reasonable and not fully satisfy either side, but won’t upset fully either side either,” she said.
But none of these developments mean Republicans are actually closer to passing their reconciliation bill. In fact, as of Thursday afternoon, it didn’t seem as if Republicans actually had a deal on the most contentious elements of their legislation.
Centrist Republicans who met with Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on Tuesday to discuss potential Medicaid funding cuts left the meeting without any agreement. All along, Johnson has had to toe the line between protecting more moderate Republicans from an anticipated backlash for cutting Medicaid and a backlash from conservatives if leaders only make superficial spending cuts.
The balancing act was on full display earlier this week when Johnson said Republicans wouldn’t adjust the percentage by which the federal government pays for Medicaid. (Under the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act, the federal government paid for 90% of the costs of new enrollees, with states picking up the rest of the tab.)
That decision immediately angered conservatives, many of whom come from the 10 red states that chose not to expand Medicaid.
And while Johnson seemed to think he couldn’t pass the reconciliation bill by reconfiguring the federal medical assistance percentage, plenty of Republicans — including some in the Senate — suggested he couldn’t muscle the bill through without those adjustments.
Changing the FMAP breakdown is the clearest way to get to the $880 billion in savings that Republicans outlined for programs under the jurisdiction of the Energy and Commerce Committee. But making FMAP reductions would also result in about 5 million people losing health insurance, with about half of those people ultimately choosing to forego coverage entirely, according to a letter issued Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office.
Throughout the reconciliation process, Johnson has avoided firm declarations about the direction of the bill. And lawmakers suggested the speaker still appears to be talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Two people described Tuesday’s meeting as unproductive and thought Johnson told everyone what they wanted to hear. One person pointed to how the centrist Republicans leave meetings with Johnson feeling that he agrees with them on restraining the spending cuts, only to hear later that fiscal hardliners believe Johnson agrees with them.
With the committee markups next week, there will be little ambiguity left. In addition to Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means, the Agriculture Committee will also hold a meeting to draft its part of the legislation on Tuesday. That markup will also be a key moment, as Republicans continue to debate how much they will reduce food benefits to partially pay for extending current tax rates. (Simply renewing current individual rates will cost the government about $4.5 trillion over the next decade.)
Thus far, the fights have mostly been theoretical. Once Republicans have legislative text, they become real — and lawmakers finally expect to see text starting next week.
“I think we probably will see a bill — I imagine sometime next week,” Malliotakis said.
The group to watch will be members of the fiscally conservative House Freedom Caucus, who have railed against any measures that don’t lead to at least $1.5 trillion cuts to the spending deficit. But Freedom Caucus members have also been cagey about their bottom line.
When one fiscal hawk was asked if he could support the reconciliation bill without major Medicaid cuts, Rep. Tim Burchett’s answer was “possibly not.”
Even one of the most outspoken Republicans urging Medicaid cuts, Rep. Chip Roy, has left himself and Freedom Caucus members some wiggle room, though he has also indicated that he expects the final bill to hew closely to the guidelines GOP leaders agreed to in the budget.
“I think it would be highly unlikely that if you take all of the packages that have come out of all of the committees, including ones that have already passed, that you can move them all through without some changes,” Roy said Thursday morning.
But all sorts of factions have their issues, and Republicans can only afford to lose a small handful of GOP lawmakers if they’re going to pass the bill out of the House.
As Rep. Nick LaLota said, speaking as one of the more vulnerable Republicans who hails from a New York district that’s greatly affected by the state and local tax deduction, “There’s no bill if we don’t raise it enough.”
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Daniella Diaz is a reporter at NOTUS. Reese Gorman, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report. Helen Huiskes and Katherine Swartz, who are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, also contributed to this report.