WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is eying a committee vote next week to kickstart a massive multi-trillion-dollar package to advance President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.
But first, Johnson needs to unify his small and fractious Republican majority before the House can even begin working on the bill.
Johnson is eager to project imminent success as he faces pressure to get his ducks in a row from the GOP-controlled Senate, where the chamber’s budget committee plans to move forward next week with a dueling resolution that takes a different approach.
But House Republicans are divided on the parameters of a party-line bill that seeks to address tax, border and energy policy — from how much spending to cut, which programs to slash, how much red ink to add and how to structure a tax overhaul.
“We’ve got a few more people we’ve got to talk with and a couple of boxes to check, but we are almost there. I’m very encouraged by this,” Johnson told reporters Friday. “The expectation is we’ll be marking up a budget early next week, potentially as early as Tuesday, the resolution. And that will, of course, begin the process.”
Republicans are using an arcane process called budget reconciliation to bypass the 60-vote rule in the Senate and eliminate the need for Democratic votes.
Johnson’s remarks came one day after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt laid out an aggressive tax agenda from Trump, which includes extending his 2017 tax law (before it expires at the end of this year), eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits, “adjusting” the cap for state and local deduction, slashing taxes for domestic manufacturing and closing the carried interest tax perk.
The nonpartisan Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington-based think tank, estimated that those provisions would add at least $5 trillion to the national debt — and, depending on how they’re written, as much as $11.2 trillion.
To pay for that, Republicans are eying a slew of spending cuts, although they’re not even close to keeping the bill deficit neutral.
“You’ve got $250 billion in student loan programs. You’ve got these Medicaid work requirements. Potential SNAP work requirements. Clearly, stuff that is in the Inflation Reduction Act and the [electric vehicle] mandates,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told NBC News on Friday. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars in all of that. And then there’s other issues that are a little bigger that we’ve got to go wrestle with.”
While some in the GOP want to downplay an estimated $4.6 trillion in new debt by extending the Trump tax cuts, Roy said, “we should be careful with things like that — that can get kind of gimmicky.”
Democrats are blasting the emerging package as an attempt by Republicans to give tax breaks to the wealthy, at the expense of middle-class programs that may land on the chopping block.
“There’s an ongoing internal GOP civil war around the budget,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. “They’ve been kind of busy fighting amongst themselves around how big the tax cuts will be for their billionaire buddies, and how much they’re going to cut out of Medicaid as part of their scheme to end it as we know it.”
Johnson was heading back home to Louisiana Friday afternoon and said he would be ironing out some final details and briefing Trump at the Super Bowl LIX on Sunday in New Orleans.
“I’ll be with the president in the suite and this would be one of the big topics of discussion. So we need to keep the president and his team fully apprised on the developments we have been up to this point,” Johnson continued. “There’ll be a few more developments today, so I’ll be I’ll be addressing that with him, and letting him know where we are.”
The speaker’s comments came on the same day Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., rolled out text of his own budget resolution that calls for funding for border security, the military, and energy provisions. The panel plans to vote on it Wednesday and Thursday of next week, Graham said.
But unlike the House’s emerging plan, the Senate bill does not include a renewal of Trump tax cuts. GOP senators believe that will take longer and want to leave it for another time.
“This budget resolution jumpstarts a process that will give President Trump’s team the money they need to secure the border and deport criminals and make America strong and more energy independent,” Graham said in a statement Friday.
That creates another problem for Republicans: the committees of jurisdiction cannot begin to formally draft the bill until both chambers pass an identical budget resolution.
Johnson said he’d been playing phone tag with Graham for the past 36 hours and texted the senator Friday about how “important” it is for the House to go first on reconciliation.
House Republicans want all of those same elements, as well as the Trump tax cuts, wrapped into a single reconciliation package, underscoring the split in strategy between the two chambers over how best to move forward on Trump’s 2025 agenda.
Both Johnson and House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said they are aiming for next week to debate and vote on a budget resolution in committee.
“I intend to mark it up next week. That’s the intention, but we still have to work out details,” Arrington told reporters Friday. “I’m not gonna get in the details, because we’re really close to getting it all figured out.”
The developments followed a series of closed-door GOP budget negotiations and an hourslong meeting between Republican lawmakers and Trump at the White House on Thursday.
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said he’s largely supportive of the budget outline being discussed by Johnson and Arrington. But Norman said there are still some key outstanding issues.
The hang-ups are “how much spending cuts, what we’re gonna put for growth rate, how we’re gonna handle the limit on spending and all of that,” Norman said. “But we’re coming together with it.”
