According to a recent study, Republicans are divided on how to further the president’s policy goals, and Trump’s tax plan may increase the national debt by at least $5 trillion.
Washington — In an effort to further President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, is anticipating a committee vote next week to begin a major package worth many trillions of dollars.
But before the House can even start working on the plan, Johnson must first consolidate his small and divided Republican majority.
The GOP-controlled Senate is putting pressure on Johnson to get his act together, and the chamber’s budget committee intends to proceed next week with a rival resolution that adopts a different strategy. Johnson is keen to portray imminence of triumph.
The contours of a party-line package that aims to handle tax, border, and energy policies, however, are dividing House Republicans. These include how much spending should be reduced, which programs should be slashed, how much red ink should be added, and how to organize a tax overhaul.
We still need to speak with a few more individuals and check off a few boxes, but we are almost there. This gives me a lot of hope,” Johnson told reporters on Friday. It is anticipated that a budget will be marked up early next week, maybe as early as Tuesday, the resolution states. And naturally, that will start the process.
Republicans are circumventing the Senate’s 60-vote limit and doing away with the necessity for Democratic votes by employing a convoluted procedure known as budget reconciliation.
Johnson’s comments followed White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s presentation of Trump’s aggressive tax agenda, which includes extending his 2017 tax law (before it expires this year), removing taxes on tips, overtime compensation, and Social Security benefits, “adjusting” the cap for state and local deductions, cutting taxes for domestic manufacturing, and closing the carried interest tax perk.
According to estimates from the nonpartisan Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank located in Washington, those proposals would increase the national debt by at least $5 trillion and, depending on how they are drafted, by up to $11.2 trillion.
Republicans are considering a number of expenditure cuts to cover that, but they won’t even come close to keeping the package deficit neutral.
You have programs for student loans totaling $250 billion. These Medicaid work requirements apply to you. Possible employment requirements for SNAP. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told NBC News on Friday, “Obviously, things that are in the Inflation Reduction Act and the [electric vehicle] mandates.” All of stuff is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition, we have to deal with other, rather more significant problems.
Roy stated that “we should be careful with things like that — that can get kind of gimmicky,” despite the fact that some Republicans want to minimize an estimated $4.6 trillion in new debt by continuing the Trump tax cuts.
Republicans’ plan to provide tax incentives to the wealthiest at the price of middle-class programs that may be cut is being criticized by Democrats in the next package.
“The budget is at the center of an ongoing internal GOP civil war,” stated House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. “As part of their plan to abolish Medicaid as we know it, they have been arguing among themselves about how much they will cut out of the program and how much the tax cuts for their billionaire friends will be.”
Johnson stated he would be finalizing certain things and briefing Trump during the Super Bowl LIX on Sunday in New Orleans as he was returning home to Louisiana on Friday afternoon.
“This will be one of the main subjects of conversation when I’m in the suite with the president. Therefore, it is imperative that we keep the president and his staff completely informed about our progress thus far,” Johnson added. “I’ll be discussing that with him and updating him on our current situation because there will be some additional developments today.”
The speaker’s remarks coincided with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., releasing the text of his own budget resolution, which includes measures for energy, the military, and border security. According to Graham, the panel will vote on it on Wednesday and Thursday of next week.
But unlike the House’s emerging plan, the Senate bill does not include a renewal of Trump tax cuts. GOP senators believe that will take longer and want to leave it for another time.
“This budget resolution jumpstarts a process that will give President Trump’s team the money they need to secure the border and deport criminals and make America strong and more energy independent,” Graham said in a statement Friday.
Republicans then have an additional challenge: unless both houses approve the same budget resolution, the committees of jurisdiction cannot start formally drafting the measure.
Johnson claimed to have been texting Graham on Friday about how “important” it is for the House to take the lead on reconciliation after they had been playing phone tag for the previous 36 hours.
The two chambers’ divergent approaches to advancing Trump’s 2025 agenda are highlighted by the fact that House Republicans want all of those identical components—along with the Trump tax cuts—bundled into a single reconciliation measure.
Johnson and Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas who chairs the House Budget Committee, stated that they want to discuss and vote on a budget resolution in committee next week.
Next week, I plan to mark it up. We still need to iron out the specifics, but that’s the goal,” Arrington told reporters on Friday. Because we’re so close to solving everything, I won’t get into the specifics.
The events came after Trump and Republican legislators met for hours at the White House on Thursday for a series of private GOP budget talks.
A member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., stated that he generally agrees with the budget proposal that Johnson and Arrington are discussing. However, according to Norman, there are still a few significant problems.
“How much spending cuts, what we’re going to put for growth rate, how we’re going to handle the limit on spending and all of that” are the remaining issues, Norman stated. “But with it, we’re coming together.”
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