House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington said Monday he is not expecting substantial alternations to the fiscal blueprint he muscled through his committee earlier this month as Republicans try to placate holdouts and move it across the floor this week.
GOP leaders are hoping to tee up a final vote Tuesday on the budget resolution as moderate Republicans push back against some of the spending cuts the framework prescribes and some hard-line conservatives demand even deeper slashing. Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday he was not inclined to alter the legislation to address those concerns, and Arrington told reporters much the same — that members will fall in line behind the budget plan as the only way to deliver the “big, beautiful bill” President Donald Trump is seeking.
“I don’t expect it to change much,” Arrington said during a roundtable interview Tuesday afternoon.
“Now, are there still some folks to convince to move forward? Maybe there are. But I think it won’t be that difficult,” the Texas Republican added. “Because this is just the step that unlocks the policy-making process where the committees will get into the details and specifics of meeting those targets with real policy reforms on all sides.”
Arrington and other House leaders are under pressure to deliver a budget framework that can earn the support of both fiscal conservatives and swing-district Republicans. They cannot afford more than one GOP defection on a party-line vote if all members are voting.
With potential cuts to Medicaid benefits giving swing-district members the most heartburn, Arrington argued that Republicans don’t need to deeply slash program benefits to find the savings his budget framework requires. Making changes like requiring a double-check of a person’s Medicaid eligibility can prevent fraud and improper payments, he said, yielding up to “hundreds of billions of dollars” in savings — part of what he said are “trillions of dollars in unnecessary and wasteful spending in the federal government.”
Arrington also addressed the possibility that the Senate could drastically reshape the framework if and when it emerges from the House, including by reducing the scope of spending cuts while also ballooning the cost of the tax policies by making Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent.
“What I’d hate to see happen is for a product to come back from the Senate that has all the tax cuts that any Republican Senate could desire under any circumstance, but none of the hard decisions to rein in the spending that’s driving us off the fiscal cliff,” Arrington said.
Senate Republicans adopted their own budget resolution last week as a Plan B in case House Republicans can’t rally around their own. Arrington said it’s “fine” for Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham to continue toward a bill that focuses only on energy policy, defense spending and border security investments while leaving tax cuts for later. But he continued to insist the House’s one-bill approach was the better course.
“I think there’s a lot at risk to tax provisions and the spending reforms if you don’t keep it all together,” he said.
