WASHINGTON ― House Republicans adopted a budget resolution on Thursday after conservatives received symbolic assurances from party leaders that they would support deeper spending cuts.
About a dozen far-right House members had balked at the Senate-approved resolution on Wednesday evening, forcing House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to put off a planned vote.
But then Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) appeared side by side Thursday morning to announce they’d reached an informal agreement to appease the holdouts.
“Our first big, beautiful reconciliation package here involves a number of commitments, and one of those is that we are committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people while also preserving our essential programs,” Johnson said.
The House previously adopted a budget calling for $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, only for the Senate to ignore it and send over a budget with only $4 billion in cuts.
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Notably, Thune did not unequivocally state Senate Republicans were committed to the $1.5 trillion figure.
“Our ambition in the Senate is we are aligned in the House in terms of what their budget resolution outlined, in terms of savings,” Thune said. “The speaker’s talked about $1.5 trillion. We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum, and we’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter.”
In fact, several GOP senators have said they would not support the House budget-cutting framework. Thune never let it get a vote in the Senate after the House adopted it in February, after all.
But Thune’s words on Thursday were good enough for most of the House holdouts, whose support for the bill will coincidentally spare them Trump’s wrath and also allow the House to go on a two-week Easter recess as planned.
“Has anyone seen a commitment like that before?” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said in response to a question about whether Thune’s words were assurance enough.
House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) claimed Thune essentially said, “We’re agreed to the House numbers. We’re agreed to the House framework.”
Minutes later, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) told HuffPost they would not necessarily support the $1.5 trillion spending reduction outlined in the House budget, which called for as much as $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, about 11% of the program’s estimated future outlays.
“I’m not gonna vote for Medicaid benefit cuts,” Hawley said. “So if they want my vote here, then it won’t contain Medicaid benefit cuts.”
“I have made very clear that that I will not support cuts in Medicaid that harm people with disabilities, our low-income families, our seniors, our rural hospitals and other health care providers,” Collins said, adding that she would be open to a narrowly crafted limit on Medicaid benefits for unemployed adults.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said it would ultimately come down to President Donald Trump bending both the House and Senate to his will.
“We’ll inevitably have to go to the White House and sit down with Treasury Secretary [Scott] Bessent and the president and others and decide what’s in and what’s out, and what’s in, what’s out, and then the president is going to have to put the full force of his authority behind it,” Kennedy said.
The measure adopted Thursday would use a budget gimmick to wave away the $4 trillion cost of extending the tax cuts President Donald Trump signed into law during his first term, with little promise of spending cuts to offset additional tax breaks Trump pitched during his campaign for president last year. Hard-line House Republicans have howled about the gimmickry, which goes against everything they’ve ever said about fiscal responsibility.
The budget isn’t designed to become law but rather instructs congressional committees to draft legislation meeting specific cost targets. Both the House and Senate would later need to vote on that legislation; Democrats would not be able to filibuster the bill thanks to the special two-step budget process Republicans are using.
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The proposed Medicaid cut has been politically damaging for Republicans already, with voters yelling about it at town halls.
“The struggles Republicans have faced so far are only a glimmer of what’s to come,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “If they had it hard on the budget resolution, imagine how hard it’s going to be on reconciliation with all their contradictory promises.”
