Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) makes a statement to reporters after the House passed a budget resolution at the U.S. Capitol, February 25, 2025.
After sending members home for the night, House Republicans called them back on Tuesday and secured passage of an expansive budget resolution that includes virtually the entire Trump agenda. The final vote was 217-215, with all but one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), voting for the budget resolution, which sets a path for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, partially offset by at least $2 trillion in spending cuts.
That tiniest of margins carried out what is the easy part of the budget reconciliation package, and it isn’t even done. In fact, the House budget resolution is thought to be dead on arrival in the Senate.
Passage of the resolution represents a victory for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), especially as it looked bleak earlier on Tuesday. Johnson was able to flip several conservative House members to advance the measure, and he needed everyone after several House Democrats who had missed votes earlier in the day showed up for the evening. (Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado showed up three weeks after giving birth.)
Johnson was able to corral the votes mainly because a budget resolution is so indistinct. The resolution sets topline numbers to instruct the various committees, which will then come back with the specifics. Throughout the day, House Republicans insisted that the proposed cuts didn’t mean what they clearly meant, because they were just instructions for committees that could be carried out in any manner.
In reality, when the Agriculture Committee is told to find $230 billion in cuts, there’s really only one thing that could mean: a rollback of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed poor people. Unless the Ag Committee decides randomly to wipe out the lion’s share of U.S. agricultural assistance, they’re going to go after food stamps, as was laid out in the menu of budget options earlier this year. Likewise, the Energy and Commerce Committee was instructed to make $880 billion in cuts, and there is really no way to do that without massive cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program for over 70 million poor Americans.
Being able to deny reality in the budget resolution is why every frontline Republican in a swing seat quickly agreed to the package, which would also spend about $200 billion over a decade on border security and mass deportations, while boosting the military budget by about $100 billion. When the Medicaid and food stamp cuts are specific and the impact clear, they will have a harder time pretending that the changes won’t harm their constituents.
Meanwhile, the holdouts were all conservatives who wanted more cuts. Massie correctly pointed out that the budget bill would increase deficits. Republicans have claimed that increased economic growth will fill the deficit gap; that’s what they said in 2017 with the first Trump tax cut bill, and it was wildly untrue.
House Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) had already sought to placate conservatives in his committee by creating incentives for additional budget cuts. If $2.5 trillion in cuts is found, for example, the tax cuts can go up to $5 trillion. However, if Republicans only reach $1.5 trillion in cuts, the tax cuts would have to fall to $4 trillion.
Already, House Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO) has said that a net $4.5 trillion in tax cuts is insufficient to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent while also adding all the tax promises he made on the campaign trail last year.
In fact, this will be the big sticking point with the Senate, whose budget resolution passed last week is completely different. The Senate preferred a two-bill strategy that included just the immigration and defense spending, offset mostly by energy measures, while saving the tax cuts for a second bill. The House bitterly opposed that, believing they will never have the ability to get two reconciliation votes through in one legislative session.
Passing a budget resolution gives the House the upper hand in the one-bill vs. two-bill debate. But permanent passage of the 2017 tax cuts is a deal-breaker for the Senate, and Budget Committee chair Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) clearly teed up his skinny budget resolution to tuck in larger military spending. The Senate will change the budget resolution significantly—a “major overhaul,” Graham told The Wall Street Journal—and send it back to the House. Both chambers must pass the same budget resolution to continue work.
If that finally happens—and the success of the House on Tuesday suggests it may eventually, if only because Republicans in the rank and file will agree to advance the process forward—then every single detail of a massive bill, the kind of thing that takes an entire legislative session to work out, would have to be hammered out. That includes how to contour Medicaid and food stamp cuts to appease moderates, where to find other available cuts, what level to bring in military spending at, and how to cram in all the tax questions, including expensive changes to the state and local tax deduction cap favored by Republicans in high-tax states, a graduated corporate income tax that favors domestic manufacturing, as well as the no tax on tips, overtime, and other policies supported by President Trump.
Meanwhile, almost none of this is going to be worked on over the next three weeks, because there’s a March 14 deadline to extend government funding. Republicans have little chance of passing that on their own, as their hard right wants tangible cuts as a down payment on the future budget. Democrats have shown no inclination to cooperate with votes that would be needed—not while Elon Musk is unilaterally canceling funding on his own whim. They want ironclad guarantees that anything they agree to will actually be spent for the rest of the fiscal year, something that is almost impossible for someone as mendacious as Trump to give them.
A government shutdown would complicate the budget debate. With Trump taking on the entirety of the state, he’ll be unable to escape blame for something that, combined with already fading economic fortunes, will further chip away at his economic approval. It also gives more time for Democrats to hammer away at the painful cuts that make some Republicans uncomfortable, especially those in areas with large numbers of working poor.
The expectation should be that Republicans iron out their differences, as the House did on the budget resolution. But there’s a very long way to go to get there, and so far nothing meaningful has actually passed. If it takes driving the length of the field to get to the president’s signature, right now Republicans are still back at their own 15-yard line after barely eking out a first down.
