House Republicans spent weeks in painstaking negotiations before delivering a budget blueprint for “one big, beautiful bill.” Now Senate Republicans are preparing to tear it apart.
Despite a razor-thin 217-215 House vote Tuesday, GOP senators indicated Wednesday they would not accept Speaker Mike Johnson’s fiscal framework as-is — heralding a rough road for President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda on Capitol Hill.
That’s not to say they want to start from scratch: Most Senate Republicans said Wednesday that they were prepared to switch to the House’s one-bill approach after spending more than two months pushing a competing two-bill plan. But they want major, contentious changes to policy choices embedded in the House plan.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune called the House-approved product “a first step in what will be a long process, and certainly not an easy one.”
Senate Republicans are expected to discuss next steps during an already scheduled closed-door lunch with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Wednesday. Then Thune, Johnson and the heads of Congress’s tax writing committees will head to the White House to discuss Trump’s tax agenda.
At a lunch earlier this week, Senate Republicans agreed there is still a lot of negotiating to do with their House counterparts on the Trump domestic policy agenda, which touches defense, energy, border security and an overhaul of the tax code. That includes further changes to the budget resolution, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
“It doesn’t fit the president’s plan in its current form, so we would have to make some changes,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.).
Senate Republicans, who approved their own budget plan earlier this month, haven’t yet decided if they will ask for a formal conference committee with their House colleagues or do an informal negotiation between the two chambers and the Trump administration, to try and come up with a compromise. Thune, in a brief interview, said that he was keeping “all the options available to us.”
Immediately after the House approved its plan Tuesday, Thune called for any Republican tax bill to include a permanent extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That was an implicit criticism of the House budget blueprint, which allows for $4.5 trillion in net tax cuts — which tax writers in both chambers say won’t be enough to allow for TCJA permanency along with Trump’s other tax priorities
“I know my Senate colleagues are committed to, as is the president, permanence in the tax situation. And we don’t have yet in the House bill so we’re going to work together in a cooperative way,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the No. 2 Senate Republican.
Montana Sen. Steve Daines, who led a Feb. 13 letter calling on Trump to make the tax cuts permanent, noted that he and Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) met with Trump on Monday to urge him to make the expiring tax cuts permanent.
“We had Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent on the phone strongly supporting permanence; Kevin Hassett strongly supports permanence,” Daines said, referring respectively to the Commerce secretary, Treasury secretary and National Economic Council director. “The Senate’s behind permanence. I think many in the House leadership will support permanence, as well.”
It’s not just the tax extensions that get scrutiny from Senate Republicans. The House framework also includes a provision calling for a minimum of $880 billion in cuts from the committee overseeing some health care programs. Critics argue that it paves the way for deep cuts into Medicaid and other social programs — something some GOP senators strongly oppose.
“There might be a lot of things” we change.“There are going to be a lot of concerns over the Medicaid cuts,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “I realize it’s just a broad instruction to that committee, but I think there will be concerns about that and what that may lead to.”
Some GOP senators last week helped reject a budget amendment from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would have included a floor of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts — same as the House budget — hinting at the looming fight ahead between the two chambers.
Hawley said he expected Republicans to support work requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries but reject any cuts that would hit working Americans. Hawley added it was still to be determined how Senate Republicans address those concerns, but he suggested guardrails could be written into the final budget plan guaranteeing that spending cuts would be “not to include the following.”
Others, however, want even deeper cuts to spending. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said the reductions set out in the House budget are “just not adequate.” He said he wants to bring federal spending levels down to where it was before the 2020 Covid pandemic.
Senate Republicans also aren’t committing to keeping the House’s planned $4 trillion debt ceiling hike. Some Senate conservatives have warned they won’t support a budget resolution that includes a debt-limit hike, though most of the House’s hard-liners ultimately accepted it.
“Acquiescing to a $4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling is for me a non-starter,” said Paul, who voted against the Senate GOP budget adopted earlier this month. “It basically acknowledges that this year the government’s going to be $2 trillion short.”
Instead, Senate GOP leaders are still discussing instead tying a debt ceiling increase to the government funding talks now underway — which would require Democrats to help support it. Raising the debt ceiling outside of reconciliation would also allow Congress to temporarily suspend the borrowing limit rather than engaging in the politically risky act of voting on a specific number.
Ben Leonard contributed to this report.
