Republicans Return to Congress With Big Legislative Ambitions — And Big Vote Problems

Congressional Republicans have navigated a barely existent House majority, intrachamber political jockeying and President Donald Trump’s whims to clear the first challenge of reconciliation: adopting a budget.

Now they’re staring down a new challenge: the calendar.

Republicans have teed up a behemoth agenda between now and their Fourth of July recess. There’s the rescissions package to enshrine DOGE’s cuts into law. There’s next year’s spending bills that Republicans are already falling behind on. And, most crucial of all, there’s the massive reconciliation bill.

The House is looking to pass the bill by Memorial Day. The Senate is shooting for, roughly, the end of June.

“It’s going to take us weeks for us to, I think, bridge the gap and really agree on priorities,” Sen. Thom Tillis said before members left for their now-expired two-week recess.

Of course, the issue is less about time and more that Republicans don’t agree on the reconciliation bill.

The budget that both chambers adopted still punts on some of the thorniest questions, like overall savings in the bill, whether there will be substantial Medicaid cuts and the overall cost of the legislation.

While Republicans are projecting confidence that they can find agreement on all of their outstanding issues — Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Rules Committee, told reporters Thursday that the House’s Memorial Day deadline is “absolutely” realistic — there are signs that a quick agreement may elude them.

The same day that Foxx so confidently backed the Memorial Day timeline for the House, Sen. Bill Hagerty told Punchbowl News he’s heard from staff that the rapidly approaching target is “getting a bit more cumbersome.”

“It’s a lot of moving parts that we have to navigate here,” Hagerty said.

As the House and Senate return Monday, lawmakers are set to begin marking up the House legislation throughout the week — that is, House Republicans will start writing the legislation without actual agreements from the various corners of their conference.

Before the House left two weeks ago, conservatives brought the chamber to a standstill as they sought concessions for adopting the Senate’s budget. Freedom Caucus Republicans ultimately went along with the budget — Reps. Thomas Massie and Victoria Spartz did not — but they extracted promises of at least $1 trillion in cuts.

That’s nearly a full trillion dollars off from the Senate’s budget, which only cuts $4 billion in spending while planning to reduce revenue by $4.5 trillion over 10 years to renew the tax rates in the 2017 tax cut bill.

House conservatives insist they won’t go along with a bill that doesn’t make substantial cuts to Medicaid. Meanwhile, a collection of Republicans in the House and Senate say they won’t support a measure that makes those sorts of cuts to Medicaid. (Sen. Josh Hawley even extracted a promise from President Donald Trump that he would not sign a bill with individual Medicaid reductions.)

That standoff alone could take Republicans weeks or even months to resolve — if they ever do.

But perhaps more troubling for the GOP, lawmakers seem to be moving forward on their bill without coming to an agreement.

It’s a stance that a former Freedom Caucus member recently told NOTUS could prove to be a fatal error.

“Just going to the committees and having them write it without having a pre-agreement between the moderates and the conservatives is a recipe for failure that ultimately, if past is prologue, will end up with a very long, protracted, finger-pointing exercise,” this former Freedom Caucus member said.

But Speaker Mike Johnson is pressing ahead anyway. House GOP leaders have asked all committees to mark up their portions of a reconciliation bill within the first two weeks of April recess, a person familiar with the process told NOTUS last week.

Johnson also told Fox News on Wednesday that he expects committees to mark up and advance elements of the broader reconciliation package this week.

“We are pushing it very aggressively on schedule, as you said, to get it done by Memorial Day,” he said.

But with so little room to spare on the votes, crafting legislation that everyone agrees to could take much longer than a few weeks. (Given their opposition to the Senate budget, House GOP leaders are already assuming Massie and Spartz are a no on the final legislation, meaning Republicans can only lose one more vote to pass the reconciliation measure if all members vote.)

Complicating the effort is a potential rescissions package, which would codify DOGE’s generally unpopular cuts and finally return that money back to the Treasury Department. (DOGE hasn’t technically saved any money until the cash is returned.)

Many Republicans, however, believe that passing a rescissions package as lawmakers craft their reconciliation bill could complicate both efforts.

“Trump is running out of political goodwill with members, and if he tries to codify the unpopular cuts and reconciliation at the same time, he might not get either done,” a House Republican told NOTUS recently.

Making this legislative sprint even more complicated are Trump’s tariffs. His pause on tariffs is set to expire in early July, and the U.S. is projected to hit the debt ceiling at roughly the same time. Republicans are trying to address the debt ceiling with up to a $5 trillion hike in their reconciliation package.

But if the timeline slips even a few weeks, Republicans could quickly run up against a debt default deadline.

That could prove to be the impetus lawmakers need to pass the reconciliation bill. But Republicans usually don’t pass debt limit increases on their own. Instead, Democrats typically supply the lion’s share of votes and a handful of Republicans join the bipartisan effort.

The other deadline, of course, is the end of the year, when the current individual tax rates expire. Republicans think that, if all else fails, they could pass a bill extending those rates at some point. But failing to reach an agreement on this broader reconciliation bill would functionally derail Trump’s legislative agenda.

As the second Trump White House nears 100 days, the president has few policy victories to champion. In fact, this Congress — despite the GOP trifecta — has been the least legislatively productive in modern history. Part of that is due to the narrow margins in both chambers, but it’s also because Trump has shown no interest in working with Democrats. He’d rather pass his Republican priorities, in a Congress controlled by Republicans, with only Republican votes.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has a slightly wider margin to work with in the upper chamber. But even so, some Senate Republicans have expressed concerns over the reconciliation bill — specifically, the Medicaid cuts that conservatives insist must be part of the final legislation.

Sen. Kevin Cramer told NOTUS before the break that “it’s hard for House members to sort of accept that reality over here.”

“I don’t blame them for being skeptical about how much we actually would cut once we get to reconciliation, but that’s really the point,” Cramer said. “The point is pass the resolution so we can get to reconciliation.”

Reconciliation in the Senate allows legislation to pass by a simple majority, so long as proposals included are strictly tied to the federal budget. The Senate parliamentarian reviews the legislation to be sure the bill abides by those rules. It’s a rare departure from the 60-vote threshold that usually stops legislation from being passed.

Cramer, for one, emphasized this point.

“The only numbers that matter are 218 and 51,” he said before the recent recess.

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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS. Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Daniella Diaz, who is a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.