House Republicans may have passed their massive reconciliation bill, but in an interview with NOTUS on Friday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise suggested GOP lawmakers have plenty more on their to-do list.
Most notably, Republicans want to address government spending — both by codifying cuts and by working through the appropriations process.
As Congress returns for a two-week work period — and the Senate takes up the reconciliation bill to put its legislative thumbprint on the measure — House Republicans are planning to stay busy with a rescission package, appropriations bills and legislation that would reinforce some of President Donald Trump’s executive orders and overturn Biden-era federal regulations through the Congressional Review Act.
First up is locking in some of the cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency.
The White House said it plans to send over a $9.4 billion package this week, codifying DOGE cuts to NPR, PBS and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to talking points the White House sent to House Republicans on Friday, as well as reductions to the United States African Development Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
In his interview with NOTUS, Scalise suggested the final package could be a bit less. “I’m hearing a little over $8 billion right now,” Scalise said. But he added that “whatever that number is, it’s a good start.”
While DOGE cuts have polled unpopularly, Republican leaders don’t anticipate this rescission package to be much of a problem, three sources told NOTUS. In fact, Scalise said he hadn’t heard of any resistance to the rescission package “formally,” though he noted that once the bill is actually filed, they’d be “gauging member support.”
“The first one is a sign that the Trump administration is serious about not only addressing the spending problem on the mandatory side, which we’re doing in reconciliation, but also on the discretionary side, which we’re doing with the rescissions package and then ultimately in the appropriations process,” Scalise said.
Republicans may want to talk about their cost-cutting actions, but so do Democrats. While the actual savings from DOGE have been well short of the $2 trillion savings target that Trump and Elon Musk initially set, Musk still cut programs in a chaotic and destructive manner for a number of agencies and offices, almost entirely dismantling USAID and most government offices focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Democrats are sure to make the rescission package this week a proxy vote for DOGE’s actions.
Musk claims that DOGE has cut $175 billion to date, but the real number is almost certainly much less, with some research indicating DOGE could actually cost taxpayers money. And not a single dollar from the DOGE cuts has been returned to the Treasury.
The rescission legislation this week would attempt to change that.
Scalise predicted this was just the first rescission package of more to come. And while he suggested Republicans were proud to lock in those cuts, he also said the House would be turning its attention to the other side of government spending: appropriations bills.
“Now that we’ve moved [the reconciliation bill] over to the Senate, we’re going to start working on the appropriations process,” Scalise said. “We want to move all 12 appropriations bills.”
Congress hasn’t passed all 12 individual appropriations bills since 1997, and accomplishing that feat this year would be extremely difficult. Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on top-line spending numbers, let alone individual line items, and even if House Republicans can pass individual bills, Senate Republicans still need 60 votes in their chamber to pass them.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said he would like to pass individual appropriations bills, but on top of only having 53 votes, Senate Republicans will largely be focused on the reconciliation package in the coming weeks, trying to complete the legislation by a Fourth of July recess.
House GOP leaders have been clear that it would be difficult to pass the reconciliation bill again if the Senate made major changes. Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News this week he’s confident he’ll be able to get the legislation across the finish line, touting a “one team” approach.
But Scalise, for his part, told NOTUS that the House had “strong targets” for spending cuts — and he suggested the Senate needed to take heed of those numbers. “We said we needed to get at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the taxpayers in this bill; we exceeded that with $1.9 trillion, and we don’t want to see that get watered down in the Senate,” he said.
Scalise also brought up the importance of keeping the tax provisions in the bill, saying all the components were “critical.”
A House-Senate standoff on reconciliation seems inevitable at this point, particularly on Medicaid cuts that conservatives demanded. But until the Senate produces a bill, the House plans to fill its time with a number of bills to codify Trump’s executive orders.
“We’re going to continue to bring bills that the committees process to lock in those good reforms so that a future administration can’t just change them through executive action,” Scalise said.
He also mentioned that Republicans had “a few weeks left” to address some Biden-era regulations through the Congressional Review Act.
“We’ve gotten most of them that you can address through CRAs, and a number of them are on President Trump’s desk already, but we still got a few more,” Scalise said.
—
Reese Gorman and Daniella Diaz are reporters at NOTUS.