House conservatives are facing additional pressure to pass a Senate-amended budget blueprint laying the groundwork to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda, with a critical vote expected to occur as early as Wednesday.
Twenty-two Republican governors endorsed the blueprint in a Tuesday letter to Trump, citing the need for the House to move with urgency in enacting the president’s agenda. The governors’ decision to wade into the Capitol Hill budget reconciliation fight comes as House conservatives are threatening to tank the Trump-endorsed budget blueprint.
“We are on your side in supporting the Senate amendment to the House budget resolution because we know that failure cannot be an option,” the GOP governors wrote to Trump. “We believe this budget resolution sets a strong foundation on which to build. It provides congressional Republicans with the tools they need to enact the entire Trump agenda.”
House GOP leadership aims to pass the budget blueprint before the chamber departs Washington for a two-week recess expected to begin Thursday. Failure to do so would be a considerable blow to passing the president’s tax and spending priorities by Speaker Mike Johnson’s floated deadline of Memorial Day. Leadership is currently working to persuade holdouts to support the budget plan.
Congressional Republicans are seeking to enact Trump’s legislative priorities through a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows Senate Republicans to bypass the filibuster and advance legislation by a simple majority vote.
The first step in the budget reconciliation process is passing a budget resolution, which is currently under consideration in the House. Senate Republicans passed an amended House budget resolution Saturday to allow for a permanent extension of the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts and additional deficit increases to execute the president’s other tax priorities.
Deficit-focused House conservatives, including Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, the House Freedom Caucus chairman, have suggested they will oppose the budget resolution if House GOP leadership moves forward with a vote on the Trump-endorsed budget plan.
“He’s [Trump is] just not going to change my mind,” Harris told reporters Tuesday, citing concerns that the budget blueprint lacks enforceable spending cuts.
“The Senate is making very clear it has little intent to reduce spending,” Roy wrote on X Monday.
Senate Republicans have argued that the floated spending cuts in the budget resolution are just a starting point to finding consensus on spending reduction in a forthcoming tax and spending bill that could be finalized as early as May. Moreover, the Senate has to allow for maximum flexibility regarding such cuts to ensure compliance with procedural rules, according to Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
“On the subject of maximizing savings, I just want to be very clear – the House and the Senate are united in aiming to do all we can on this,” Thune said on the Senate floor on March 31. “In the Senate, if we fail to meet a single savings instruction – even by a dollar – we lose our ability to consider the legislation under reconciliation rules and the simple majority threshold. And so, we have to be careful not to miss the mark on this and to provide flexibility as we chart our bicameral course. But that won’t stop us from maximizing savings.”
Trump said the Senate’s budget resolution has his “complete and total endorsement” in a Truth Social post Monday evening.
“All of the elements we need to secure the Border, enact Historic Spending Cuts, and make Tax Cuts PERMANENT, and much more, are strongly covered and represented in the Bill,” Trump wrote. “There is no better time than now to get this Deal DONE!”
“We need to pass it IMMEDIATELY!” the president wrote on April 2.
An anticipated bill is expected to include more than $100 billion in border security funding, new defense spending, reforms to federal energy policy and a statutory debt limit increase to avoid a debt default. White House border czar Tom Homan told Semafor Tuesday that Congress is “taking too long” to pass the budget plan.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that the House GOP leadership will succeed in passing a budget blueprint on the floor this week.
“Don’t underestimate us,” Emmer told Bartiromo in a Tuesday interview. “Don’t underestimate us. We did this with the budget resolution. We did this with the continuing resolution, which took care of the budget until September. You had a lot of people out there with election certificates complaining they didn’t like this, they didn’t like that, they weren’t going to do this, they were never going to do that — people have to work it out. It’s an emotional process. As we go through it, failure is not an option. We’ll get it done this week.”
House GOP holdouts are scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House to discuss their concerns with the budget plan Tuesday afternoon.
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