Senate Republicans adopted a budget resolution this weekend that lawmakers think can largely be the blueprint for reconciliation. But before lawmakers can celebrate taking a major step toward enacting President Donald Trump’s agenda, they’ll have to resolve an intra-party stand-off with their colleagues across Capitol Hill.
House Republicans are voicing profound doubts that they can pass the Senate’s budget, citing frustrations with the other chamber’s comparatively limp deficit reduction targets and the upper chamber’s use of an accounting tactic that some in the House GOP are denouncing as “intellectually fraudulent.”
Given both chambers need to adopt identical budget resolutions before they can draft the text of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” any resistance from the House GOP could incite significant delays toward extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and enacting other conservative priorities.
The question now facing Speaker Mike Johnson is whether he can persuade his conference to swallow the Senate’s adjustments to the House’s approved framework — or whether Republicans will tinker with yet another budget resolution and send it back to the Senate.
House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, for one, expressed deep concern about the Senate’s resolution in a weekend statement.
“The Senate response was unserious and disappointing, creating $5.8 trillion in new costs and a mere $4 billion in enforceable cuts, less than one day’s worth of borrowing by the federal government,” Arrington said. “It also sets a dangerous precedent by direct scoring tax policy without including enforceable offsets.”
The Senate’s budget has two different floors: one for its chamber, where committees are only mandated to cut a few billion dollars here and there, and one for the House, where committees are charged with finding $1.5 trillion in cuts. House conservatives have balked at the discrepancy, blasting the upper chamber’s floor for cuts.
“This is offensive, and so I’m a hard no on this junk,” Rep. Andy Ogles said in a stream posted to his X account. “Look, $1.5 trillion? That was a serious offer from the House of Representatives. A $3 to $4 billion cut is offensive to the American people. It’s a joke. It should not have been presented.”
But the Senate’s floor for spending cuts is hardly the only hang-up for the House. Fiscal hawks are furious that the Senate’s resolution deploys an accounting maneuver known as “current policy baseline,” which considers an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — which would cost an estimated $4 trillion per the Congressional Budget Office — as having zero budgetary impact.
House conservatives have railed against that move. Rep. David Schweikert, for example, issued a recent Joint Economic Committee statement that called the proposed use of current policy baseline as “intellectually fraudulent, since it assumes current policies continue into the future when they’re actually expiring in U.S. law.”
Schweikert’s ire is a particularly big problem for House Republican leaders, given his reluctance to support the House’s budget resolution in February. So uneasy was Schweikert — a Ways and Means Committee member — that he handed Johnson his voting card so the speaker could vote yes on his behalf.
Losing a member like Schweikert, a hardliner on fiscal issues but otherwise a reliable Republican, would be a massive blow to the House GOP’s whip operation. Although Republicans won two special elections in Florida last week — extending their majority to 220 compared to the Democrats’ 213 with two vacancies — Johnson can now only afford to lose three Republican votes assuming full attendance.
But Schweikert is far from the only Ways and Means Committee member with concerns. Rep. Lloyd Smucker, for example, posted and pinned on X an op-ed in The Hill titled, “A ‘current policy’ budget baseline would have disastrous consequences.” Smucker attached the “100” emoji as a caption for the tweet, just hours before the Senate’s bill text dropped.
As more frustrated House members have revealed themselves, House GOP leadership’s problems have appeared more daunting. Shortly after the Senate released its budget, three House Freedom Caucus members almost immediately expressed dissatisfaction to NOTUS.
Conservative Rep. Victoria Spartz called the Senate’s resolution “pathetic” in a Saturday X post.
Even before reading the text, Rep. Ralph Norman declared the resolution “dead on arrival” to reporters, in part over his concern about the Senate attaching a $5 trillion debt ceiling hike. (The House’s resolution would increase the debt ceiling by $4 trillion.)
Still, the Senate has made no indication that it will budge.
When asked what he makes of the House’s concerns, Senate Budget Chair Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters last week that, what he would say to them is that “the best way to balance the budget is to increase revenue and to cut spending, and the best way to increase revenue is making tax cuts permanent.”
Graham’s argument — which flies in the face of just about every tax analysis — does not appear to be resonating with holdouts across the rotunda. By Monday morning, nearly a dozen House Republicans had registered public concerns.
Still, Johnson told reporters Wednesday that he plans to move the Senate’s resolution through this week, and he described the legislation as “the starting gun for the big game.” (Realizing he mixed metaphors, Johnson clarified that, “It’s the kickoff of the game to get the budget reconciliation bill done.”)
But if the Senate’s bill is the “kickoff,” it remained unclear as of Monday morning what precisely the game plan is to get the conference in formation.
In a Saturday Dear Colleague letter, Johnson and his leadership team set the stakes and doubled down on their goal to pass the “big, beautiful” bill by Memorial Day, saying “With the debt limit X-date approaching, border security resources diminishing, markets unsettled, and the largest tax increase on working families looming, time is of the essence.”
As Johnson has tried to build consensus among House Republicans around the Senate’s resolution, he’s had to maneuver around an unrelated fight over proxy voting. For the moment, it appears he’s made progress.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna led a discharge petition — alongside Reps. Mike Lawler, Brittany Pettersen and Sara Jacobs — to force a vote to allow 12 weeks of remote voting for lawmakers who are new parents.
Although the petition garnered the requisite support to force a floor vote, Johnson tried to kill the petition in a procedural vote. When Luna defeated Johnson’s effort, he adjourned the House for the remainder of the week, arguing — incorrectly — that Luna’s stubbornness had unilaterally blocked unrelated House business.
Republican leadership spent the rest of the week considering their options, including reportedly pursuing a Constitutional amendment or limiting the scope of the petition to only apply to mothers after Trump endorsed Luna’s proposal.
Most recently, Johnson and Luna struck a deal over the weekend that involves Johnson codifying “vote pairing” — a process that allows absent members to get someone on the other side to abstain from the vote — in exchange for Luna dropping her petition.
Regardless of where Trump stands on the petition, the president has shown that he is likely the only person with the clout to get the House GOP in line. He was, after all, critical in persuading Republican holdouts to preserve Johnson’s speakership in January, advance a budget resolution in February and keep the government funded in March.
“At some point, President Trump is going to have to step in and say, ‘Let me help you, folks, and share with you my ideas’ in order for us to reach a consensus between the House and Senate,” Sen. John Kennedy predicted to reporters. “That’s the nature of the beast.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS.
Ben T.N. Mause and Casey Murray, who are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.
Daniella Diaz and Reese Gorman, who are reporters at NOTUS, also contributed to this report.