Republicans brace for a messy slog on Capitol Hill

DORAL, Florida — House Republicans came here to President Donald Trump’s resort to map out what’s ahead for their legislative agenda. The big takeaway: It’s looking treacherous.

Despite progress on the stated goal of the three-day retreat — coalescing around a fiscal blueprint for their vast party-line agenda — what they saw wasn’t pretty: Key strategic disputes continued to fester inside the GOP ranks, and the uproar from Trump’s federal spending freeze gave vulnerable members a taste of the backlash that could result if they follow through on promised cuts to key programs.

Together it portends a difficult job ahead for Speaker Mike Johnson as he assembles the votes needed to enact Trump’s policy agenda. Johnson and Trump’s message for the GOP rank-and-file isn’t exactly calibrated to settle their anxieties: stay united, or else.

“We're working together to make sure this package makes good on our campaign promises,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday — two days after Trump urged members to “make life easy” and follow his lead.

The good news for the speaker is that his conference is largely united on the big picture: assembling a sweeping package of border security upgrades, energy measures and tax cuts and passing it on party lines using the budget reconciliation process.

That stands in contrast to the start of Trump’s prior term, when congressional leaders embarked on an internally divisive push to overhaul the Affordable Care Act — an effort that ultimately unraveled amid a public uproar over potential rollbacks to Americans’ healthcare coverage.

The bad news is that the Republican majority in the House is much thinner this time, and Johnson has to worry about balancing the demands of an ideologically motivated faction of hard-line conservatives who want deep spending cuts with the concerns of swing-district members who could face a political reckoning in next year’s midterms if those cuts happen.

Those anxieties were on full display on Tuesday and Wednesday, as members took stock of the flood of phone calls they received from constituents worried about the scope of the White House spending freeze.

Among those raising alarms was Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of three House Republicans representing a district Trump lost in November. He said the warnings Tuesday from himself and others in the GOP helped influence the Trump administration to "narrow what they were doing in a way." (The White House rescinded the order hours later.)

Yet much of the discussion behind closed doors at the Trump National Doral resort concerned efforts to finance the GOP’s ambitious policy plans by targeting cuts to federal programs. Members discussed imposing new and expanded work requirements for Medicaid, food aid benefits and other aid to low-income families that could provoke public backlash. Democrats are already trying to contrast those cuts with the GOP’s plans to deliver tax cuts for wealthy Americans as they look to unseat vulnerable Republicans in 2026.

Johnson showed no sign of flinching, calling it a “good thing” that Trump had taken aim at such a wide swath of federal spending: “We promised to reduce the size and scope of government,” he said. “We're disrupting.”

House Republicans left the retreat with mixed feelings about how much clarity they received about the road ahead.

In the final meeting of the retreat, House committee chairs laid out their budgetary targets for the legislation, setting updated “floors” for potential cuts that are set to be embedded in the blueprint that the House Budget Committee is set to take up next week to kick off the reconciliation process.

Johnson, however, didn’t provide members with a top-line number for the overall package, and many members complained they didn’t get a better picture of the path forward, according to three people with direct knowledge of the closed meeting who were granted anonymity to discuss it.

House GOP hard-liners are growing more furious, meanwhile, that Johnson isn’t committing to higher spending cuts in the budget plan. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a key rebel and House Freedom Caucus member, didn’t attend the retreat but posted his criticism of Johnson and GOP leaders’ decisions from afar.

While Johnson is pushing a one-bill plan, the Freedom Caucus is still adamant on imposing its own plan to split the agenda in two.

“I think it's disappointing,” Freedom Caucus member Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said leaving the final retreat meeting Wednesday. “They want flexibility, but the problem is you have a lack of trust from fiscal conservatives like myself, that there will ever be an appetite to cut spending, and they're promising to do more.” “I'm from Missouri, you have to show me,” Burlison added. “The truth is: I've never seen this town cut spending, so I don't know that I believe it.”

Soon after, the larger Freedom Caucus quickly dashed off a post on X as the GOP meeting closed, criticizing Johnson and GOP leaders direction and asking, sarcastically: “Are you a Republican Member of Congress leaving Miami today feeling rudderless when it comes to reconciliation?” The post pushed the group’s competing two-track plan as the better option.

Johnson earlier in the morning told reporters he wants House Republicans “to come out with a number that shows the serious nature of what we're facing and … the high level of cuts that are necessary to get fiscal sanity, responsibility restored to the federal government, but not to put everything in there.”

Leaving the retreat, Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) acknowledged the tough work ahead of nailing down enough spending cuts to pay for the package — including Trump’s demands to eliminate income tax on tips, overtime earnings and Social Security benefits.

"We got work to do,” he said. “That means we've got to cut more to be able to afford those things.”

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