House OKs budget blueprint after GOP leaders' cuts pledge

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday adopted the resolution Republicans needed to get moving on their sweeping budget bill to enact many of their top legislative priorities, after several days of negotiations with conservative holdouts.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said his chamber would adhere to the House’s much-higher floor for spending cuts in the eventual budget reconciliation package, an emphatic public statement that enough House conservatives needed to hear before voting for the budget blueprint.

The measure was adopted on a narrow 216-214 vote. No Democrats supported it and Republicans Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana voted “no.”

Thune, R-S.D., and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., appeared in a rare joint news conference Thursday morning to make the public commitment. The leaders said their agreement will ensure Republicans achieve $1.5 trillion in 10-year savings while preserving essential programs.

“And I can tell you that many of us are going to aim much higher,” Johnson said. Added Thune: “We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum. We’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter.”

After the vote Thursday, Johnson told reporters that 11 House committees “will begin the markup process” post-recess for the reconciliation bill, which would be drafted in close consultation with Senate panels.

“We have bills drafted. Most of them have been scored already,” Johnson said. “And now we go through the process of marking it up and finding the equilibrium points with everybody so that all those interests are met.”

Last-minute negotiations

Some read Thune’s comments as not quite a strong commitment for $1.5 trillion minimum, which caused some last-minute consternation. And holdouts generally wanted something stronger than a verbal pledge.

Talks were ongoing throughout the morning after the joint news conference. Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., spoke with Rep. Lloyd K. Smucker, R-Pa., in the speaker’s office, where they were joined by Budget Chairman Jodey C. Arrington, R-Texas. Arrington has been critical of the Senate plan too but willing to advance the process.

The group then went into a room off the House floor where other conservatives joined the meeting.

Meanwhile the floor vote had already started, and GOP leaders held it open longer than the allotted 15 minutes to accommodate Freedom Caucus and other holdouts still negotiating on and off the floor.

In accommodating the right flank of his party, Johnson also had to tend to the needs of more centrist members. He was seen huddling on the floor with New York Republicans Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota, who have sought to ensure cuts don’t hit the most vulnerable in their districts and want a higher state and local tax deduction cap in the final tax bill.

In all, nearly 50 Republicans still hadn’t voted after the initial time limit was up.

But enough conservatives, and moderates, eventually decided what was on the table was good enough to unlock the reconciliation process. And they can always withhold their votes later when it comes time to vote on the actual implementing legislation.

“We have commitments that this will not increase the budget deficit,” House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., said after meeting with leadership.

The key sticking point for members of the House Freedom Caucus and other conservatives has been the budget plan’s “instructions” to committees in both chambers.

While the version the House initially adopted requires a minimum $1.5 trillion in 10-year savings, the Senate’s amendments tell their committees that just $4 billion would be needed for compliance with the chamber’s “Byrd rule” that governs what can remain in a reconciliation bill.

Senators wrote a statement into their amendment setting a target of as much as $2 trillion in cuts, but it’s nonbinding. To GOP spending hawks, this was akin to “Lucy and the football,” as Ogles put it on Wednesday. “She pulls it away every time.”

After the vote Thursday, Ogles said he was pleased with the commitments made by Thune.

“A big part of it was he was willing to go on record that he’s going to work with the House to hit our numbers, and that’s what we needed to hear,” he said.

Numbers game

The reconciliation bill is critical to many top priorities for Republicans and President Donald Trump. They want to use it to pass a tax package that could cost more than $5 trillion over a decade, including extensions of the 2017 tax cuts expiring at the end of this year.

It would inject as much as $200 billion into border security and immigration enforcement funds that Trump administration officials say are running out, plus up to $150 billion more in military spending defense hawks say was shortchanged in the recent fiscal 2025 appropriations package. It would open up more public lands to fossil fuel exploration and development.

And it would raise the $36 trillion statutory debt limit, which analysts say is needed by summer, by as much as $5 trillion, enough to last beyond next year’s midterm elections.

All of these costs plus the optics of raising the debt limit past $40 trillion have conservatives uneasy, to say the least, hence their push for deeper spending cuts. The $1.5 trillion floor they’re seeking has given some GOP senators pause out of concern for Medicaid, however.

The House committee with jurisdiction, Energy and Commerce, has instructions to cut a total $880 billion within its jurisdiction, though the panel’s chair, Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, says only around half of that might come from Medicaid. And members are about to go home for two weeks to get an earful from constituents.

On an earlier version of the Senate budget resolution, over half the conference — 26 Republicans — voted against an amendment to increase the Senate’s savings target to the House figure.

But conservatives say they won’t vote for a final reconciliation bill that on paper would lead to higher deficits, which was a principle that Johnson pledged they would adhere to before Thursday’s vote.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., displayed a letter from Johnson distributed to holdouts before the vote, putting on paper a commitment that “deficit increasing provisions of a final reconciliation bill are accompanied by concomitant spending cuts.”

Johnson’s letter also promises that “I am committed to maintaining linkage between provisions that result in a deficit increase” — including tax cuts — “and provisions that reduce federal spending.”

That “linkage” refers to a dial in the House’s reconciliation instructions, which adjusts the amount of deficit-increasing tax cuts based on the amount of spending reductions identified. If $1.5 trillion in cuts are found, the tax package is limited to $4 trillion; but the closer they get to $2 trillion in cuts, the closer the tax portion can get to $4.5 trillion.

It wasn’t clear if those specific targets would be adhered to by the Senate, but the deficit neutrality element could tie the hands of tax writers in that chamber, who had hoped to write a $5 trillion-plus tax bill. That includes use of a novel accounting move enabling them to avoid paying for $3.7 trillion in “current policy” extensions.

Smucker said Ways and Means is sticking to the House tax instruction, but he wasn’t certain how that would affect deliberations in the Senate. “That’s still to be worked out. We’ll see,” he said.

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., was emphatic in comments after the vote that a deficit increase means a deficit increase.

“You’re not going to increase the national debt. You’re not going to increase the structural deficit,” he said of GOP leaders’ commitment. “You’re going to pay for the taxes.”

In a prepared statement he released later, however, Biggs said leaders’ pledge was to “pay for new tax relief programs.” That could mean just the $1.5 trillion Senate allowance for new breaks that weren’t in the 2017 tax law, which would give that chamber more flexibility.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, one of the most influential Freedom Caucus holdouts, said in his own statement that he’d be on board with making the 2017 tax cuts permanent — as Senate Republicans and the White House want — as long as the $1.5 trillion cuts target is achieved.

‘Nobody talks about that’

Economic growth is another key factor in getting the numbers to add up. The initial House budget plan assumed 2.6% annual growth would generate $2.6 trillion in additional revenue, ensuring deficit neutrality over a decade. Arrington and Scalise said that calculation would play a role in the deliberations going forward, potentially getting closer to 3% growth and even more revenue.

But unquestionably the committees now have their work cut out for them to meet their deficit targets. “None of these votes are easy and the next votes will not be easy,” Scalise said Thursday after the budget was adopted.

Norman said members have discussed specific “buckets” of savings with the White House that could be included. Categories discussed included “waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid,” as well as revoking parts of the 2022 clean energy reconciliation package, such as “subsidies” and “battery rebates,” Norman said.

Scalise downplayed concerns with the Energy and Commerce instruction.

“Spectrum sales, nobody talks about that,” he said. “There’s probably $200 billion in non-health care related programs before you even start talking about more savings and reforms, things like spectrum sales,” which he said could generate “close to $100 billion” in receipts.

House GOP leaders reiterated their intention to send Trump the final package by Memorial Day. And the president needed a bit of good news for his agenda, after Wednesday’s eye-popping stock market rally fizzled out a day later.

“Great News! ‘The Big, Beautiful Bill’ is coming along really well. Republicans are working together nicely. Biggest Tax Cuts in USA History!!! Getting close,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday morning.

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(Paul M. Krawzak and Nina Heller contributed to this report.)

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