J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) talks to reporters after a meeting with fellow Republicans to find agreement on a spending bill, at the Capitol in Washington, February 11, 2025.
On Wednesday, the House Budget Committee released a skeletal budget resolution that would move forward on a bill to extend the Trump tax cuts and offset it with trillions in cuts. It was immediately derided as unworkable, unmanageable, and not the final deal. And it’s not clear that it even has the votes to pass the Budget Committee tomorrow.
To put it succinctly: One side of Washington has shock and awe, and the other side has gloom and stasis.
When we last left our story, Republicans in the House and Senate had not come to a decision on even how to pass their agenda through the process of budget reconciliation (which avoids the filibuster and is the only avenue for major legislative success). The House favored one bill that would include the tax cuts, border and military spending, and budget cuts. The Senate preferred a two-bill approach, with a border and military bill first, and the tax cuts later.
Today, two weeks later, not only has there been no consensus, but the two chambers are moving on separate tracks. The Senate is doing its first-round Budget Committee markup today, with its skinny budget resolution set for around $500 billion in border and military spending with some spending offsets. The House version reduces border and military spending to $300 billion, while giving $4.5 trillion to the tax cut extension and targeting $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. There’s a separate “policy statement” vowing to cut $2 trillion in mandatory spending, which is primarily going to come from Medicaid.
The House and Senate must agree on a budget resolution in order to pass anything. They also must agree down the road on the specifics of that resolution, not just the topline numbers. But so far, they have decided not to decide. House leadership has said it will not bring up the Senate’s skinny budget resolution. The Senate clearly is not interested in waiting around for the House; as Budget Committee chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wrote last Friday, “I hope the House will move forward soon, but we cannot allow this moment to pass, and we cannot let President Trump’s America First Agenda stall.”
The initial House measure had more trivial budget cuts attached, but hard-liners in the House demanded more. The resolution telegraphs where it will look to cut spending by the committees where it allocates the cuts. The Agriculture Committee is responsible for $230 billion; that signals cuts to the food stamp program of at least 20 percent. The Education and Workforce Committee’s $330 billion in cuts is intended for slashes to student loan programs, increasing the cost of college for millions. The Energy and Commerce Committee’s reduction of $880 billion is presumably also about Medicaid, even though that seems to overlap with the aspirational mandatory spending cuts. The Oversight and Transportation Committees also have other trivial obligations for cuts, totaling about $60 billion. (All of these numbers are over a decade.)
All of this is pretty unpopular, including the student loan cuts. And that’s before you get to the mandatory spending cuts to earned benefit programs. The specific details are almost certain to send Republican and Trump approval ratings plummeting. This is not a hard sell for Democrats to make: Republicans want to take food and medicine away from poor people and give that money to billionaires instead.
But that’s only if Republicans can overcome the dissension in their own ranks. House tax writers need much more than $4.5 trillion in offsetting cuts if they’re going to pass the full Trump tax cut extension, plus the Trump promises to eliminate taxes on tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime. Already they have resigned themselves to a shorter-term tax cut extension, maybe for five years. But even with that, House Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO) has said $4.5 trillion isn’t enough. What Ways and Means would have to do is cut other programs under their jurisdiction to make room for tax cuts—things like welfare and disability benefits.
The House leadership has flirted with some financial alchemy by using a “current policy” baseline to claim that extending the tax cuts doesn’t cost any money. The head of the Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ), however, called that tactic an “intellectual fraud.”
Meanwhile, the $200 billion gulf between the chambers on border and military spending is significant. Graham clearly wants his two-bill approach so he can funnel cash to weapons contractors, rather than see that sum whittled down and perhaps scratched out when folded into a bigger tax cut bill.
Along with the Ways and Means chair not agreeing with the Budget chair, and the House not agreeing with the Senate, the House Freedom Caucus, which has been the source of the primary holdups on previous budget resolutions, doesn’t agree with its own leadership on this one. It supports the two-bill approach and is now writing its own bill on tax priorities.
On top of that, the House budget resolution would increase the debt limit by $4 trillion, which is necessary for the holes Republicans want to blow in the budget. But they don’t have the votes to pass any kind of debt limit increase; too many Republican members have vowed to never increase the nation’s borrowing limit. As if that weren’t enough, the government will shut down next month, by March 14, if Congress doesn’t take action.
President Trump has largely stayed out of these disputes, preferring to project activity rather than get caught up with congressional dysfunction. But his tax preferences simply cost far more than what Congress is willing to grant him, and compromise isn’t a Republican strong suit.
Eventually, though, congressional inaction comes for us all, even Trump. There is just no common ground between or even within chambers, which is to say, among Republicans, and no expectation that it will be found. Meanwhile, everything that congressional Republicans are circling around is extremely politically unpopular, and will weigh down the president, too. Trump and his co-conspirator Elon Musk don’t think they need Congress to get what they want. That’s not completely viable; at some point, you need to write laws. Republicans have shown no aptitude for that task.
