House Republicans are rushing to get started on a multitrillion-dollar bill to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda, with their own leader’s self-imposed deadline less than a month away.
Lawmakers on five different committees are huddling within their panels this week to debate and advance specific aspects of what will become one massive piece of legislation
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said he wants to get a bill on Trump’s desk by Memorial Day – a goal he’s still optimistic about, despite a host of challenges that Republicans will need to get through before the finish line.
Meanwhile, the Senate and House appear to still be far apart on their expected timelines and how much money they’re aiming to spend.
‘This is not just a preference we have, this is a necessity,’ Johnson told Fox News Digital about the Memorial Day deadline in an interview on Friday.
‘We have the debt limit X-date approaching, and as everybody knows, border security resources dwindling, we’ve got markets in flux, we’ve got, of course, the living threat of the largest tax increase on working families in history.’
Republicans are seeking to fit Trump’s priorities on energy, defense, border security and taxes into the bill, as well as raise the debt ceiling – another item the president specifically asked GOP lawmakers to deal with.
Johnson pointed out that the U.S. is fast approaching its deadline to act on the debt ceiling or risk a national credit default – which would send financial markets into a tailspin. The federal government is expected to hit that deadline sometime this spring or summer, according to differing projections.
‘I’ve got to work on the assumption that it’ll be sooner, it may be as early as June,’ Johnson said. ‘I can’t control what happens in the Senate, but I think they have the same sense of urgency, so I think that we’re on target to get it by Memorial Day or shortly thereafter.’
A Senate GOP leadership aide appeared less optimistic, however.
They told Fox News Digital that Republicans in the upper chamber shared the goal of moving as quickly as possible but acknowledged ‘the reality’ of differing procedures in the House and Senate.
The House’s framework for the legislation passed first and called for at least $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending cuts to offset a portion of the $4.5 trillion allocated toward Trump’s tax agenda.
The Senate later passed an amended version that called for a minimum of $4 billion in spending cuts.
House Republicans narrowly swallowed that framework to align with the Senate – a key step before the relevant committees noted in the framework can begin crafting policies within their jurisdictions, to later be filled into the final bill.
A revolt against that bill by an unlikely faction of well-known GOP rebels and leaders on the House Budget Committee prompted Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to publicly pledge to have the Senate aim for $1.5 trillion in spending cuts.
But on paper, they’re still far apart, and there’s a significant contingent in the House and Senate who are wary of cutting funding for critical programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
‘The fight is between the House, that wants to add $2.8 trillion on the debt, and the Senate, that wants to add $5.8 trillion on the debt,’ said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). ‘So I’m not optimistic that we’re going to reduce the debt. I am somewhat optimistic that we’re going to get closer to what the House wants, which would be much better.’
But a significant amount – about $880 billion – of spending cuts outlined in the House GOP framework come from the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare and Medicaid.
Estimates have shown that the committee will not be able to complete those cuts without cutting into those programs, but Republican leaders have insisted they’re only looking to root out ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’
Republicans are looking to pass their legislation via the budget reconciliation process. The mechanism allows the party in power to pass massive policy overhauls while entirely sidelining the opposing party by dropping the Senate’s threshold for passage from 60 votes to 51.
The House already operates on a simple majority threshold.
The House committees set to meet this week to mark up their reconciliation bills are the Homeland Security, Oversight, Education & Workforce, and Financial Services.
Issues that are expected to be more divisive – like portions from the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax policy – will be visited next week.