House GOP leaders punted on trying to adopt the Senate-revised budget blueprint Wednesday after a long day of negotiations didn’t bear enough fruit to overcome the objections of more than enough spending hawks to sink the measure in the closely divided chamber.

Conservative holdouts met separately with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and his leadership team on Wednesday night and later with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his top lieutenants. After holding a vote on unrelated legislation open for over an hour so they could hole up in a room off the floor, Johnson emerged saying a vote would take place Thursday morning at the earliest.

“We are working through some good ideas and solutions to get everybody there. It may not happen tonight, but probably by tomorrow morning,” Johnson said.

The main stumbling block has been the Senate’s revisions to the House budget plan, which gave committees in that chamber low targets for spending cuts. Senators said that was designed to give them maximum flexibility under Senate budget rules to preserve a reconciliation bill’s filibuster-proof privileges. But House conservatives said that was a license to wriggle out from tough fiscal medicine.

What’s being discussed now is either adopting the plan as-is and requesting a formal conference with the Senate to hammer out a final budget resolution, or amending the resolution again and sending it back to the Senate with agreed-upon changes, Johnson said.

“We’re going to talk about maybe going to conference with the Senate or adding an amendment, but we’re going to make that decision,” he said. “We are going to continue to move forward. This is all positive.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said changes could involve a similar sliding-scale component as in the House budget instructions: A requirement that Senate committees hit certain spending cut targets or have to dial back the amount of allowed tax cuts.

Key House GOP holdouts including Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris of Maryland and caucus members Chip Roy of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, as well as Tennessee’s Tim Burchett — who’s not a Freedom Caucus member — earlier huddled with Thune in his office. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Senate Finance Chairman Michael D. Crapo, R-Idaho, were also in attendance.

Crapo’s panel has jurisdiction over Medicaid and tax cuts, two key areas of contention. The House budget instructions contain less room for tax cuts while demanding at least $1.5 trillion in 10-year spending cuts. If $2 trillion in cuts are achieved, the tax-cut package can grow. Either way, centrists fear such big numbers could gut Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program for lower-income households.

“We all agree and we’re all on the same page that we need to make significant cuts in spending,” Barrasso said after the meeting, though he said the group hadn’t settled on a specific dollar figure.

Thune and his team entered the conversation to try to break a logjam that threatened to stall President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda until after the two-week April recess.

House GOP leaders struggled all day Wednesday with a votes deficit as they faced an uphill climb to adopt the Senate’s changes that numerous GOP holdouts argued could end up increasing the fiscal deficit by trillions of dollars.

“We’re still working out some of the differences, but at the end of the day math is math,” Roy said after the meeting with Senate leaders. “We’ll figure out what we’re going to do on the budget tonight.”

Harris wouldn’t comment on a private meeting, though he allowed, “I’m feeling better.”

Trump and his team have been pushing hard, and Wednesday’s arm-twisting continued right up until the scheduled vote on the revised budget resolution during a roughly 6 p.m. vote series.

After the Senate meeting concluded, GOP leaders held open a separate vote in the 6 p.m. series while Johnson and his leadership team holed up in a room off the floor with more than a dozen holdouts. House Budget Chairman Jodey C. Arrington, R-Texas, who has concerns with the Senate changes but has been willing to move the process towards the eventual reconciliation bill, was also in the meeting.

Rep. Lloyd K. Smucker, R-Pa., who helped negotiate the sliding-scale provision that got House conservatives on board with that chamber’s original budget blueprint, said it was “plausible” the House can adopt the budget on Thursday. He said an amendment being discussed would add a similar provision tying the Senate’s tax package to the size of its spending cuts.

“We need enforceable cuts similar to what we have in the House,” Smucker said. “We’re just looking for any mechanism that would ensure that the final reconciliation bill is going to have the spending cuts in it. So there are several ways to do that that are being discussed.”

In a key initial test of support, the rule for floor debate was adopted after Rules Committee members Roy and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman said they would vote for it to move the process forward.

Still, Republican leaders saw the maximum three defections they could afford on the rule, which was adopted on a 216-215 squeaker. GOP Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Michael R. Turner of Ohio voted “no.”

Massie and Spartz have previously made their concerns known with the underlying budget. But Turner’s vote was in protest over the inclusion of a provision in the rule blocking lawmakers from offering a measure that would overturn Trump’s sweeping tariffs announced April 2. He said he’ll support the budget resolution itself.

But the budget resolution — key to passage of a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill to enact much of Trump’s agenda — remained on shaky ground.

“I will not support this on the floor,” Norman said at the Rules meeting Wednesday morning. “It doesn’t make financial sense.”

Roy said he could not vote for a budget based on verbal assurances from senators that they intend to cut much more than their budget plan requires.

Even if Senate assurances of $1 trillion in cuts — which Trump has also promised — ring true, Roy explained to his colleagues on Rules that the math still leads to trillions of dollars in deficits. He said the tax package was shaping up to cost over $5 trillion, so taking the Senate’s theoretical higher cuts number would still add more than $4 trillion to the debt.

“Get an eraser and a pencil, and put it out on paper and come show me — and that message from me goes to the White House, to my Senate Republican colleagues and to the leadership on this side of the aisle,” Roy said. “Come show me the math.”

Asked on his way into Thune’s office what could get him on board, Burchett replied: “A lot of cuts.”

Trump has been waging a public offensive to push the budget across the finish line, pleading with conservative rebels to reconsider. “Republicans, it is more important now, than ever, that we pass THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” he posted on Truth Social on Wednesday morning.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender met with members of the Republican Study Committee for lunch on Wednesday, where he made an “emphatic pitch” for support on the budget, Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., said after the meeting.

Trump administration officials and GOP leaders have been using the recent tariff-driven market turmoil as an argument for adopting the budget, saying households need certainty that the 2017 tax cuts won’t expire as scheduled at the end of the year.

But after Trump announced a 90-day pause in his worldwide “reciprocal” tariffs, markets rebounded — and Roy was happy to point out that the “political pressure … has lessened” as a result.

“There is time to get a much more beautiful deal done in line with what our voters expect!” Roy posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Johnson projected confidence about delivering on the budget resolution, telling reporters early Wednesday, “we’ll have the votes today at some point.” But it was clear that he had more work to do in the coming hours to persuade the holdouts.

Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., said opposition was “significant” and enough to tank the measure on the floor. He wants to see a written plan from the Senate on spending cuts they will agree to.

“I trust the president, I do not trust the Senate,” Ogles said. “I’ve seen this movie, I know how it ends.”

Biggs said earlier on X, formerly Twitter, that the Senate’s budget instructions amount to “an unserious attempt to right our economic ship. Promising to fight ‘next time’ is futile when ‘next time’ never arrives.”

Even Arrington bashed the Senate plan at the Rules hearing Wednesday, while urging support for the budget as a preliminary step.

He said the Senate’s plan to extend tax cuts without paying for them would set “a dangerous precedent” that the House should work to oppose in the follow-on reconciliation bill. “Otherwise, we risk adding trillions of dollars to the debt,” he told the committee.

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(Roll Call's Nina Heller and Paul M. Krawzak contributed to this report.)

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