Congressional Republicans left Washington riding high after their big victory on government spending. Now they’re returning to face a brutal reality check: Their legislative agenda is going nowhere fast.
Now months into the process, House and Senate Republicans are still trading barbs and accusing each side of slowing down progress on President Donald Trump’s top legislative priority — a sweeping bill linking a tax overhaul to energy, defense and border policies.
When GOP lawmakers return to Washington Monday, they will be under fierce pressure to show meaningful progress toward delivering on that agenda in the narrow, three-week window they have before leaving town again. Speaker Mike Johnson has set an ambitious goal of finalizing a budget blueprint with the Senate and getting it passed in the House by the week of April 7.
Yet nearly every key decision remains unsettled. They include how deep to cut into social safety-net spending, how to placate swing-seat lawmakers over a key tax break, how to account for the cost of extending existing tax cuts and how many more breaks they can pile on top.
"How can we be moving quickly when some of those foundational questions haven't been settled?” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said about the rising pressure from the House GOP.
To help break the deadlock, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is set to huddle again this week with GOP leaders and tax writers as they try to reconcile the two chambers’ diverging plans. On several fronts, the Senate is looking for cues on how to proceed from the House and vice versa, creating a chicken-and-egg situation that has resulted in a quiet standoff between the two chambers.
That has many Republicans viewing Johnson’s budget goal — already a retreat from his prior ambition of getting a final bill through the House before Easter — as deeply aspirational. While Senate Republicans also want to have something to show for all their private deliberations before they leave again in April, their leadership has been careful not to offer any particular deadlines or assurances.
“I’d like to have done it yesterday but really I just don’t find it helpful to set timelines,” said Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who is tasked with negotiating the tax portion of the package.
Driving the caution on the Senate side is widespread skepticism among GOP senators that the House can deliver on a bill that meets the budget it adopted last month — particularly its goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts. While House Republicans are prodding their Senate counterparts to just adopt what they sent over, senators have made clear they will make changes.
They are also wary of going through another marathon voting slog — especially on a framework that will likely require politically perilous Medicaid cuts — without proof that it can result in a passable bill, according to three Republicans involved in the talks who were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
But there’s a Catch-22: House Republicans, including Johnson’s tax writers on the Ways and Means Committee, don’t intend to draft a bill before the Senate agrees on a fiscal outline.
“How can we do that without knowing the Senate number?” said one House GOP lawmaker granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“That’s not how this works,” a senior House GOP aide concurred.
Meanwhile, the two top leaders are working through unique headaches. Johnson is facing off with conservative hard-liners who not only want the Senate to swallow the House budget whole but are now pushing for a doomed and messy impeachment fight with judges who have ruled against Trump.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, meanwhile, needs to hammer out complex tax disputes among his own members. Republicans are checking in with the nonpartisan parliamentarian — the Capitol Hill official who referees budget policy — on whether they can use a controversial accounting tactic that would allow them to effectively zero out the roughly $4 trillion cost of extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts. That’s not to mention the widespread heartburn Thune is dealing with inside his conference over the impact of potential Medicaid cuts.
Thune and Johnson are in frequent contact, with Johnson publicly floating holding a “little conference” to hammer out the differences between the two chambers. Thune is meeting with small groups of senators to take their temperature, including with members of the tax-writing Finance Committee.
But frustrations are rising amid what’s likely to be several more months of complex tax discussions.
“Talk, talk, talk, talk,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said upon returning to the Capitol from a March 13 White House meeting with Trump and Senate Finance Republicans. “Just like the last 10 weeks.”
While many Republicans insist they will eventually get on the same page, there’s no clear plan for how or when that will happen — and plenty of finger-pointing over who is ultimately responsible for doing so.
Adding to the complications is the fact that many rank-and-file House Republicans want senators to rein in their own chamber’s budget plan, despite the calls from their leadership for the Senate to do the opposite.
Vulnerable House members said they received assurances from GOP leaders that the level of Medicaid cuts required under the House budget framework wouldn’t make it through the Senate. They made similar assurances regarding the $230 billion in potential cuts to the country’s largest anti-hunger program.
House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie, whose panel has been tasked with making $880 billion of cuts, said he’s waiting to see what the Senate will do before proposing specific cuts to Medicaid or other programs under his jurisdiction.
“We have to have instructions before we can do anything,” he said. “That’s just the system.”
Trump green-lit changes to Medicaid during a meeting with Senate Finance Committee members earlier this month, including mandating work requirements and going after “waste,” according to Republican senators who attended the meeting. But any perceived cuts to benefits stands to spark backlash inside the GOP, and the size of the Energy and Commerce instruction — calibrated to placate House hard-liners — has many doubting those cuts are avoidable.
On the revenue side, many House tax writers privately acknowledge they need the Senate to modify the House budget blueprint to allow for more priorities that the president continues to push, including income tax exemptions for tips, overtime and Social Security benefits.
GOP members of the House Ways and Means Committee met for two days of meetings to discuss those and a slew of other potential tax provisions before leaving for recess. The group worked through various proposals, using red, yellow and green cards to express their opinions on each one, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss the private meetings.
Among the longest-running and thorniest issues yet to be resolved: how to placate key blue-state Republicans who want an expansion of the income tax deduction for state and local taxes.
The array of unsettled disputes has contributed to a sense of bemused frustration among many lawmakers, many of whom are waiting on their leaders — and Trump — to get more aggressive about resolving them.
“Probably what we are going to do is talk to each other to death, stare at each other and then eventually, you know, confuse the issue so much that it takes two months to unravel what we agree to,” said GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Ben Leonard contributed to this report.
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