House Republicans are still far from finalizing several key details of a budget blueprint that Speaker Mike Johnson is pledging to advance in the House next week, with negotiations expected to continue through the weekend as the Senate races ahead with its own plans.
While House GOP leaders trumpeted tremendous progress coming out of a White House meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday, key holdouts on Trump’s sweeping agenda of tax cuts, border security and energy initiatives indicated Friday that they remained unconvinced about the level of spending cuts in the bill.
Separately, Republican tax writers continue to struggle with the ballooning costs of Trump’s wishlist, which includes not only an extension of his 2017 tax cut package, but also new income tax exemptions for tips, overtime earnings and Social Security benefits.
Meanwhile, Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham released a plan Friday that would get border and energy policies out the door first and save the thorny tax questions for later. That is directly at odds with House leadership plans to roll everything into a single bill.
House Republican hard-liners continued to push for deeper spending cuts. One prominent budget hawk complained that several key lawmakers were cut out of the White House meeting.
Leadership “failed to talk to us,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn).
“They go to the White House and they take all the people that are going to be for it, and there’s four of us that are pretty consistent, and we’ve let our views be known,” said Burchett, naming Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) and Thomas Massie (R-K.y.) as the other critical holdouts.
“No surprise to me, because nobody ever wants to share any time with the president,” Burchett said.
Johnson, who had previously said Republicans would release a plan Friday, will now work through the weekend with other leaders to try to finalize an agreement. Senior Republicans aren’t expecting any final details until Monday — adding another delay to the speaker’s ambitious timeline.
Leaving the Capitol on Friday, Johnson confirmed in a brief interview that he hadn’t yet spoken with Burchett or similar holdouts. “We’re gonna get everybody there,” he quickly added.
Asked about the group saying they still have concerns about the level of spending cuts, Johnson replied: “Everybody does.”
Winning over Burchett and Massie is particularly critical. Neither lawmaker has ever voted to increase the debt limit, and Massie recently decried the fact that the GOP was considering enacting tax cuts at all.
In an interview Thursday night, Massie was noncommittal about Johnson’s latest plan, saying he’d have to “see if it’s reasonable at the end of the day.”
But Johnson is now trying to wedge a debt limit hike into the massive budget package after Trump again pressed for it to be dealt with quickly during the White House meeting Thursday, according to two people who were in the room who were granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
That’s on top of the difficult tax-related issues that House Republicans have to sort through. Trump on Thursday announced new proposals to increase taxes on Wall Street money managers and sports team owners, alongside reiterating his desire for the income tax exemptions he campaigned on.
All of that adds to the pressure on the Ways and Means Committee to assemble a tax package that can remain fiscally palatable to Republicans who do not want to add to federal budget deficits. Already, leaders are looking at counting economic growth effects alongside spending cuts to keep the overall package’s costs in line.
GOP leaders had tentatively decided on Thursday they’re going to provide instructions to the House Ways and Means Committee that would allow tax writers $4.7 trillion leeway to enact Trump’s tax policies, according to a person familiar with the discussions who was granted anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.
The number has not been finalized and could change as negotiations continue.
“I think it’s getting the Ways and Means [budget] instruction just right,” said House Republican Conference Vice Chair Blake Moore (R-Utah) of the biggest obstacle to getting a plan finalized. “I think we’re all committed to finding the necessary spending reform and spending reductions.”
A longer-standing issue also hasn’t been resolved.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who has been pushing to increase the deduction for state and local taxes, commonly known as SALT, huddled with Johnson for several hours Thursday night. Blue-state Republicans have indicated that they won’t vote for a tax bill without an increase to SALT, but other members in the conference detest the deduction and say that any increase to the $10,000 cap needs to be paid for.
Lawler said on Friday that no agreement on SALT had been reached yet.
“The whole tax bill has to be paid for,” Lawler said. “It’s not just SALT. The president wants to do tax on tips and that has to be worked out.”
No matter what Congress’ official revenue scorer, the Congressional Budget Office, says about the costs on the GOP’s tax bill, Republicans have emphasized that they will be running their own economic models to determine how much growth would be stimulated by the various tax provisions. That, in turn, would lower the cost of their plan.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise indicated Friday that Republicans were close to coming to an agreement on what those growth numbers look like. Notably, head rebel Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) sounded optimistic Friday. But he added there was more work to do.
“I think we’re in the ZIP code. There’s still some variables that I’m trying to study to figure out whether I think that’s correct. The levers are what are your assumptions on growth,” Roy said. “We need enough cuts, in my opinion, to sort of go hand in hand with the taxes.”
