The Senate Budget Committee released a blueprint to unlock President Donald Trump’s agenda on Wednesday that sidesteps the biggest question facing congressional Republicans: how to pay for it.
The blueprint, to receive a Senate vote later this week, largely aligns the party on strategy. It sweeps Trump’s priorities on tax reform, the border, and energy into “one, big beautiful bill,” as the House had requested.
HOUSE REPUBLICANS SCOFF AT SENATE FOR ‘UNSERIOUS’ SPENDING CUT TARGET
Two months earlier, Senate Republicans approved a budget blueprint that excluded the tax portion but reversed course after House Republicans managed to stay united on an all-encompassing framework.
The Senate resolution also links Trump’s agenda to a hike in the federal debt ceiling, a key demand of the House Freedom Caucus. The increase would be as high as $5 trillion in the Senate instructions and $4 trillion for the House as leadership fears the possibility of a debt crisis before the midterm elections.
The blueprint punts on one of the most contentious aspects of the House proposal, however. It lacks firm spending cut targets for the Senate committees in charge of drafting the final bill.
In the House, leadership agreed to $2 trillion in offsets, with $1.5 trillion set as a floor. The Senate proposal, meanwhile, only instructs committees to find a minimum of $4 billion in savings — a possible gap of more than $1 trillion with the House.
The $4 billion figure, essentially a placeholder for later cuts, is designed to give the Senate flexibility to navigate the filibuster-skirting rules of reconciliation. Once the Senate approves its framework, committees will get to work on finding what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the Budget Committee chairman, insists will be substantial offsets.
The discrepancy has nonetheless created heartburn in the House, where fiscal hawks have threatened to tank the resolution in a chamber Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) controls by a handful of votes.
Johnson aims to advance the blueprint, which allows each chamber to set different spending cut targets, just in time for lawmakers to depart Washington for the Easter recess next week.
The Senate blueprint will give tax writers $1.5 trillion in leeway to craft their portion of the bill, a figure that allows Republicans to incorporate “no tax on tips” and other tax breaks Trump promised on the campaign trail.
The expiring provisions of Trump’s 2017 tax law, meanwhile, would be extended using a novel accounting tactic, known as a current policy baseline, that treats them as cost-free.
Republicans had been looking for guidance from the Senate parliamentarian on whether the approach, criticized by Senate Democrats as “magic math,” adheres to the rules of reconciliation, the budget process they will use to pass Trump’s agenda.
The baseline is viewed as make-or-break for Trump’s agenda since it gives Republicans budgetary breathing room and, almost as importantly, allows them to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent.
The budget resolution also permits tens of billions of dollars in new defense spending and money for Trump’s immigration crackdown. Provisions on energy reform round out the remainder of his legislative agenda.
Release of the framework marks the first step in a dayslong process that will end in a vote-a-rama, which allows any senator to offer amendments to the measure on the Senate floor.
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In February, when Senate Republicans approved the blueprint without tax reform, Democrats forced 26 votes across more than 10 hours. None were adopted, but the standoff allowed the party a chance to highlight proposed cuts to Medicaid in the House proposal.
Those cuts have been met with bipartisan reservations in the Senate, but Republicans have indicated openness to imposing work requirements on recipients and other changes that could shrink the size of the program.
Read the full, 70-page budget resolution here:
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