Before lawmakers left for a two-week recess last Thursday, House Republicans limped over the finish line and adopted the Senate’s budget framework. Now, the hard part begins.
Speaker Mike Johnson may have gotten his conference onboard with the Senate’s budget, but there are a number of discrepancies between the two chambers on an ultimate deal — and House conservatives only went along with the upper chamber’s text because they had assurances that lawmakers would find $1.5 trillion in cuts, not the $4 billion called for in the Senate’s language.
House GOP leaders have asked all committees to mark up their portions of a reconciliation bill within the first two weeks of lawmakers returning from recess, a person familiar with the process told NOTUS.
It may be a sign that the House intends to jam the Senate and write the reconciliation bill according to the framework that was adopted in its chamber, not the Senate’s. And it’s a sign of how quickly Johnson and his allies want to pass their “one big, beautiful bill,” as President Donald Trump has dubbed it.
But if writing the framework was hard for Republican leadership, getting the legislation written and passed by both chambers will be more difficult by an order of magnitude.
All along, leaders have deferred on the hardest choices — how much the reconciliation bill will cut, will lawmakers touch Medicaid, will the tax cuts be permanent, how much the measure will raise the debt ceiling — by asking Republicans to trust them. As the legislative details are finally filled in, there’s no more can-kicking. Some Republicans will win and some will lose.
House committees are tasked with finding billions in spending cuts, with the most controversial reductions coming from Medicaid. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is supposed to find $880 billion in savings, a number which requires lawmakers to slash Medicaid, if they are to live up to that target. The House Agriculture Committee must also find $230 billion in cuts, which will likely lead to controversial reductions to food-assistance programs.
But senators have already been clear that they won’t tolerate those kinds of cuts. Even Sen. Josh Hawley wanted assurances from Trump that Medicaid wouldn’t be touched in the final product — a promise that other senators also wanted and contradicts concessions that Freedom Caucus members extracted from House leaders.
Rep. Chip Roy, one of the Freedom Caucus Republicans at the center of negotiations, said Tuesday night during a tele-town hall that conservatives had commitments from the speaker “there would be spending cuts that are commensurate with the tax cuts.”
“In other words,” Roy said, “it can’t just be tax cuts and no spending cuts.”
That’s exactly what the Senate budget calls for, and senators have commitments that Medicaid won’t be touched — just as House conservatives have commitments that Medicaid will be cut.
Roy said Tuesday night that conservatives had a “guarantee that the White House had at least a minimum of trillion dollars in cuts that they were pushing forward, including reforms to Medicaid.”
That standoff alone could cause major problems, and GOP lawmakers genuinely don’t know who is going to end up on the wrong side of a compromise.
“I’m not concerned about what’s going to come out of the House as much as I’m concerned with what’s going to come back from the Senate,” Freedom Caucus member Rep. Eric Burlison said.
But first, House Republicans have to navigate their own chamber.
The decisions House committees have to make in the following weeks will set up the terms of the discussions and disagreements to follow, with more moderate House Republicans already staking out the position that they want the Senate’s framework for the bill — with just $4 billion in cuts — not the House’s.
On numerous occasions, these Republicans have expressed that they won’t go along with substantial Medicaid reductions, only to be assured that the Senate’s vision will win out, sources familiar with the matter have told NOTUS.
That, of course, is directly in contradiction with what Johnson has said publicly to get House conservatives onboard, though conservatives have also shown some flexibility throughout this process. As Rep. Thomas Massie put it, Freedom Caucus members have been trading “the cow for magic beans.”
“These beans are like the rest, they don’t sprout,” said Massie, who has been the only Republican to vote against the first and second budget the House adopted.
And as another senior GOP member told NOTUS that there’s a “lack of trust that they’re really gonna make cuts.”
Only time will tell, but for now, House Democrats are spending the two-week Easter recess trying to bring attention to the cuts Republicans could make to Medicaid.
“We don’t work for Donald Trump or Elon Musk, but Republicans in the House and Senate don’t seem to have gotten that constitutional memo,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on a call Tuesday with reporters. “It is my hope ... that a handful of House Republicans will break from the most extreme elements of their party and partner with Democrats.”
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Reese Gorman and Daniella Diaz are reporters at NOTUS.
Casey Murray, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.