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President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda is a mess right now.
Senate Republicans are on the cusp of advancing a budget that would tee up national security legislation, hoping to spend quickly on border security and defense while postponing action on the thorny topic of tax cuts. Yet Trump hasn’t signed off on senators’ plan.
The president largely favors the approach in the House, where the GOP is trying to kick off votes next week on a budget setting up both massive tax cuts that still need to be negotiated and national security spending. House Republican leaders can’t afford to lose more than a single vote on their budget, and plenty of their members are balking.
That’s left Senate Republicans both skeptical that the House can pass its plan and worried that the other chamber’s budget framework falls short of Trump’s vision. In addition to whacking at Medicaid, senators suspect the House approach will fall short of permanently extending Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts.
To make matters worse, the House and Senate have bickered about the right strategy for well over a month and are way behind the pace that both parties set the last time that each controlled Congress and the White House, in 2017 and 2021. Several GOP sources said this week they fear the party’s agenda will remain rudderless unless Trump gets more intimately involved after weeks of deference to the squabbling House and Senate.
“I have no clarity,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told Semafor about the path forward. “Let’s stop playing the game of chicken. Let’s get on one page here. It’s clear we need to sit down and have really substantive negotiations.”
Hawley is raising alarm at the prospect of big Medicaid cuts called for by the House’s template, harmonizing with some moderates whose leeriness of safety net cuts could derail the chamber’s budget. At the same time, some Senate Republicans are antsy about their own leaders’ decisions, given that Trump swiped at their strategy on Wednesday.
And it’s increasingly likely that even if the House succeeds in passing a budget next week, it won’t survive the Senate unscathed. In addition to unease about Medicaid cuts, Republican senators don’t like the House’s trigger that lowers the ceiling for tax cuts if Congress can’t come up with massive spending cuts.
Senate Finance Committee Republicans say they won’t support anything that doesn’t make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, a bar they see the House resolution as failing to meet.
“There’s a lot of stuff in it that makes it really, really complicated over here,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who signed onto a letter to Trump about the tax concern.
Vice President JD Vance told Senate Republicans on Wednesday that Trump is OK with the Senate’s approach, despite the president’s endorsement of the House approach.
But on Thursday, Vance told the CPAC conference that Trump deemed it “very rare” to pass two party-line bills in the same Congress (notably, the Democrats did it in 2021 and 2022).
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During the GOP’s last period of full Washington control in 2017, Medicaid politics dominated the party’s attempt to repeal Obamacare. Many conservative states rely heavily on the program, which provides health care to lower-income Americans.
Trump has sent mixed signals on Medicaid cuts, both saying he won’t touch the program and also supporting a House budget that almost certainly will cut it. Hawley’s been the loudest warning about Medicaid, telling Semafor: “I don’t want a whole bunch of Medicaid cuts.”
A large swath of Senate Republicans are likely to heavily scrutinize any changes to Medicaid, even as House Republicans hunt for spending cuts.
“I’m from a state that is heavily reliant on Medicaid. And, you know, I always look at it with a more focused eye,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. She said if the House passes its budget and sends it to the Senate, then “I think we’ll change it.”
Despite their vast differences on strategy and policy, Republican leaders in both chambers are trying not to publicly alienate each other. In the end, each chamber will have to adopt the same budget blueprint in order to unlock the power to evade Democratic filibusters of their party-line bills.
Which is why Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is keeping close tabs on House Speaker Mike Johnson. The two spoke on Wednesday, Graham told Semafor.
Though Graham said the House budget resolution’s “tax provisions would have a hard time right now” in the Senate, he’s trying to stay publicly upbeat and encouraging the House to try its way first.
Burgess’s view
After claiming their disagreements were merely tactical, Republicans are now more openly disagreeing on policy, too.
The two chambers of Congress are led by Thune and Johnson, who share affable approaches and are both relatively new to their jobs — which leaves room for Trump to play the heavy to get his agenda done.
It’s just not clear he has any interest in doing so.
Room for Disagreement
Even as rifts open on multiple fronts and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul opposes the Senate GOP’s plan, some Republicans argued that everything would come together.
“We’re completely united on where we want to get to. We want to prevent this huge $4 trillion tax increase. We want to secure the border. We want to have American peace through strength, and we want to unleash American energy,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said on Thursday.
Dave Weigel contributed.
Notable
- Trump’s own aides were blindsided when he supported the House budget’s Medicaid cuts, per Politico.
- First-term Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa., is writing publicly to his constituents in defense of Medicaid.