GOP scrambles to win over moderates on budget resolution

Senate passage of a budget resolution designed to execute large parts of President Trump’s policy agenda throws the ball back to the House, where GOP leaders are hoping to move swiftly on legislation encompassing an even broader swath of Trump’s first-year wishlist.

Behind Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Republicans were already advancing Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” strategy even before Senate GOP leaders chose to charge ahead with their competing — and more narrow — budget blueprint, which passed through the upper chamber in the early hours of Friday morning.

But Trump’s surprise endorsement of the House package — which came amid the Senate process and blindsided GOP leaders — has heightened the stakes for Johnson and other top Republicans, who are now under even greater pressure to unite their divided conference behind the massive spending plan in order to secure an early win for the president, who’s facing mounting criticism for rising inflation and efforts to gut the federal bureaucracy.

The GOP budget bill is poised to hit the House floor this week, but passage is no slam dunk.

House Republicans are clinging to a historically tiny majority, which leaves virtually no room for GOP defections as long as Democrats are united in opposition, as expected. And already, a handful of moderate Republicans are airing concerns about steep cuts to safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid that could tank the bill.

Those cuts are a crucial piece of the GOP’s budget plan, designed to help offset the multitrillion-dollar cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. But the centrist GOP holdouts have reservations that the cuts would hurt their most vulnerable constituents — particularly those on Medicaid, which provides coverage to more than 70 million people, most of them poor and roughly half of them children.

Under the House budget resolution, the Energy and Commerce Committee would be tasked with locating $880 billion in cuts to programs under the panel’s jurisdiction, the great bulk of which are expected to fall on Medicaid. The Agriculture Committee, which oversees food stamps, must find another $230 billion.

At least three moderate Republicans — Reps. David Valadao (Calif.), Nicole Malliotakis (N.Y.) and Don Bacon (Neb.) — told The Hill on Wednesday that they’re ready to vote against the budget bill this week unless GOP leaders can provide convincing evidence beforehand that the proposed Medicaid cuts won’t diminish direct benefits to people in their districts.

“There’s a group of us who want to see how $880B can be cut and how it will affect Medicaid,” one of the concerned moderates said Friday.

A failure of the budget plan on the House floor would strike a hard blow to the GOP’s efforts to enact Trump’s ambitious legislative agenda in the first year of his second term, just months after voters put Republicans in charge of all levers of power in Washington.

In that instance, GOP leaders could return to the drawing board in an attempt to win over the moderates by reducing the size and scope of the spending cuts. But that move would likely erode support from conservative budget hawks hoping to shrink the government and rein in deficits.

Alternatively, House leaders could shift to the Senate’s budget strategy, which splits Trump’s agenda between two bills. The first of those, featuring more spending for the military, domestic energy production and border security, is the one that passed through the upper chamber on Friday.

But that approach punted on the toughest parts of the budget debate, including the details over how to pay for those spending increases; which tax cuts should be extended or created; and what programs will be cut to help offset the resulting loss of revenues so deficits don’t explode.

For those reasons, House GOP leaders have argued from the beginning that their one-bill strategy is the better way to get Trump’s agenda over the finish line this year. It’s a message they’re amplifying heading into this week’s vote.

“The best chance for bold tax and spending reform and the entirety of Trump’s America First agenda rests on the success of the House budget resolution,” House Budget Committee Chair Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said Friday.

“If Republicans can avoid breaking this process up into two bills, our probabilities for the Trump ‘rocket ship’ economy go up exponentially.”

To advance the House approach, Trump and GOP leaders have sought to ease lingering concerns about the potentially harmful effects of the proposed cuts. Indeed, while the president has previously made promises not to erode benefits under Social Security or Medicare, he went out of his way last week to add Medicaid to that list.

“Social Security won’t be touched — other than if there’s fraud or something, we’re going to find it. It’s going to be strengthened, but won’t be touched,” Trump said Tuesday during an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.

“Medicare, Medicaid: None of that stuff is going to be touched,” he added. “We don’t have to.”

Johnson has also dismissed the idea that the GOP’s budget will gut benefits for low-income people. Medicaid, he said recently, “has never been on the chopping block.”

“Medicaid is infamous for fraud, waste and abuse,” he said. “And so we do right to go into those programs and find that and show the people what's happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.

“If you eliminate fraud, waste and abuse in Medicaid,” he added, “you've got a huge amount of money that you can spend on real priorities for the country.”

Those arguments have yet to convince the moderate GOP holdouts, however, creating plenty of uncertainty surrounding the outcome of this week’s vote.

Just hours after the Senate passed its budget bill, Trump softened his advocacy for “one big beautiful bill,” leaving open the possibility for multiple proposals. The outcome, he said, is more important than the process.

“I guess you could make the case you could do three. You could do 10,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

“As long as we get them all added up and it’s the same thing.”

Emily Brooks contributed reporting.

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