Senate Republicans are staring down a major fight to overhaul the House’s budget resolution as lawmakers eye big changes.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), with the help of President Trump’s muscle, was able to get the House’s plan to enact Trump’s sweeping legislative agenda past a key hurdle Tuesday.
But even as Senate Republicans say they’re relieved the House was able to advance the measure, they’re also crying foul that it wouldn’t make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent and fretting about the deep cuts to Medicaid that would be required to finance it.
Now, the effort to advance Trump’s priorities enters a new stage with both sides attempting something they’ve been unable to do since late last year: get on the same page.
“It’s complicated. It’s hard. Nothing about this is going to be easy,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said. “There are some things that we need to work with the House package to expand upon.”
Republicans are aiming to pass large swaths of Trump’s agenda using a process called budget reconciliation, which bypasses the Senate filibuster. A budget resolution unlocks that process and serves sets parameters lawmakers must follow when they craft a final bill.
Earlier this month, the Senate, fed up with the House’s lack of action on its plan to advance Trump’s single “big, beautiful bill,” moved its own budget resolution for the first part of a two-pronged approach.
The House’s vote Tuesday, however, has put the onus back on Senate Republicans, leaving them trying to insert some of their top priorities into one gargantuan package.
Headlining that list is making the Trump tax cuts permanent, which Thune and other top Republicans have laid out as their red line in negotiations. The House’s budget resolution would extend the cuts, but caps them at $4.5 trillion, which isn’t enough to make them permanent.
Buoying Thune and company’s hopes is that they seemingly got the president on board with their plan, as he posted his support for it early Wednesday.
“Now, the work starts over here,” Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) told reporters, pointing to significant changes the Senate is looking to make to the House bill.
“I haven’t developed a top line [for taxes] yet. We’re going to start working on what we need to do,” Crapo said. “Now that we know the House numbers on the cuts that they’ve put in their instructions, and now that we know where they are … on the baseline, we’ll start working on our adjustments.”
One avenue Senate Republicans have sought to help grease the skids for making cuts is a budget maneuver that would essentially treat the cuts as a continuation of current policy that wouldn’t need to be offset. That could open up more room for Republicans to cut taxes without finding matching spending cuts.
Johnson, for his part, said he hoped Congress could employ the meanuver.
“We’re not introducing new law, we’re extending the existing law, and by definition that’s what current policy means,” he said.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters prior to Tuesday’s vote across the Capitol that the upper chamber will have to embark on a “major overhaul” of the House’s proposal, citing the permanency and baseline issues.
Cuts to Medicaid have also emerged as a key sticking point for many senators. The House’s plan directs the Energy and Commerce Committee to find $880 billion in savings, a figure even some Republicans acknowledge is impossible to reach without Medicaid reductions.
More than 40 states have expanded the program since the Affordable Care Act was enacted 15 years ago, leading a number of Republicans to insist they will not be party to slashing those benefits.
“I’m not going to vote for Medicaid cuts,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said, noting that more than one-fifth of Missourians are on either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. “It’ll need to be changed. I know there’s a lot of people on our side who want a bunch of changes.”
Those concerns also appear to have resonated with Trump, who told reporters that the burgeoning package would not harm any of Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security during Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting.
“We’re not going to touch it,” he said, adding that he would look for “fraud” going on with the program.
Senate Republicans also discussed the path forward during Wednesday’s luncheon, which White House chief of staff Susie Wiles attended. According to Hawley, Thune told members that he doesn’t believe the House’s plan “gets the job done.”
The two chambers will eventually need to pass identical budget resolutions in order to officially unlock the reconciliation process, which they moved quickly Wednesday afternoon.
Thune, Johnson, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Kevin Hassett, the White House National Economic Council director, met with Trump at the White House to plot the path forward, which members hope to move quickly on.
Another question remains about whether an increase in the debt limit will end up in the final reconciliation plan. House GOP leaders included one in their budget resolution, while the Senate has not gone that far.
“Don’t know,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a Budget Committee member, saying he was in favor of its inclusion as it will be one of the more “gnarly” issues they will have to deal with otherwise.
The House vote did, however, help crystallize the plan for now as Senate Republicans have thrown their lot in with the one-bill approach after months of warnings from the lower chamber that Johnson might only be able to usher through a single massive package.
There still remains some skepticism that the one-bill plan will work. But after Tuesday’s down-to-the-wire effort, senators are wary of relying on the House more than they have to.
“It’s not perfect, and I know there’s some differences of opinion,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “But to me, that’s a good place to start.”
“If we’re depending on the House to pass multiple bills, we’re going to be on the knife’s edge each time to see whether they have the votes or not,” Cornyn said. “I don’t know how many times the Speaker can pull a rabbit out of the hat.”
