House Republicans are divided over how to proceed on a massive piece of legislation aimed at advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda as a possible vote on the measure looms Wednesday afternoon.
Fiscal hawks are rebelling against GOP leaders over plans to pass the Senate’s version of a sweeping framework that sets the stage for a Trump policy overhaul on the border, energy, defense and taxes.
Their main concern has been the difference between the Senate and House’s required spending cuts, which conservatives want to offset the cost of the new policies and as an attempt to reduce the national deficit. The Senate’s plan calls for a minimum of $4 billion in cuts, while the House’s floor is much higher at $1.5 trillion.
‘The problem is, I think a lot of people don’t trust the Senate and what their intentions are, and that they’ll mislead the president and that we won’t get done what we need to get done,’ Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., told reporters on Tuesday. ‘I’m a ‘no’ until we figure out how to get enough votes to pass it.’
McCormick said there were as many as 40 GOP lawmakers who were undecided or opposed to the measure.
A meeting with a select group of holdouts at the White House on Tuesday appeared to budge a few people, but many conservatives signaled they were largely unmoved.
‘I wouldn’t put it on the floor,’ Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told reporters after the White House meeting. ‘I’ve got a bill in front of me, and it’s a budget, and that budget, in my opinion, will increase the deficit, and I didn’t come here to do that.’
Senate GOP leaders praised the bill as a victory for Trump’s agenda when it passed the upper chamber in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Trump urged all House Republicans to support it in a Truth Social post on Monday evening.
Meanwhile, House Republican leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., have appealed to conservatives by arguing that passing the Senate version does not in any way impede the House from moving ahead with its steeper cuts.
The House passed its framework in late February.
Congressional Republicans are working on a massive piece of legislation that Trump has dubbed ‘one big, beautiful bill’ to advance his agenda on border security, defense, energy and taxes.
Such a measure is largely only possible via the budget reconciliation process. Traditionally used when one party controls all three branches of government, reconciliation lowers the Senate’s threshold for passage of certain fiscal measures from 60 votes to 51. As a result, it has been used to pass broad policy changes in one or two massive pieces of legislation.
Passing frameworks in the House and Senate, which largely only include numbers indicating increases or decreases in funding, allows each chamber’s committees to then craft policy in line with those numbers under their specific jurisdictions.
Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus have pushed for Johnson to allow the House GOP to simply begin crafting its bill without passing the Senate version, though both chambers will need to eventually pass identical bills to send to Trump’s desk.
‘Trump wants to reduce the interest rates. Trump wants to lower the deficits. The only way to accomplish those is to reduce spending. And $4 billion is not – that’s … anemic. That is really a joke,’ Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., told reporters.
He said ‘there’s no way’ the legislation would pass the House this week.
The measure will likely go through the House Rules Committee, which acts as the final gatekeeper for most legislation getting a chamber-wide vote.
However, tentative plans for a late-afternoon House Rules Committee meeting on the framework, which would have set up a Wednesday vote, were scrapped by early evening on Tuesday.
The legislation could still get a House-wide vote late on Wednesday if the committee meets in the morning.
As for the House speaker, he was optimistic returning from the White House meeting on Tuesday afternoon.
‘Great meeting. The president was very helpful and engaged, and we had a lot of members whose questions were answered,’ Johnson told reporters. ‘I think we’ll be moving forward this week.’
Fox News’ Ryan Schmelz and Aishah Hasnie contributed to this report.