Trump stuns Senate GOP with House budget endorsement

Republicans on Capitol Hill have long wanted President Donald Trump to weigh in on the strategic disputes that have divided the two chambers over how to pass his legislative agenda.

But this is not what GOP senators had in mind.

Trump’s public call Wednesday for the adoption of a House-drafted budget framework — and the “one big, beautiful bill” it sketches out — left Senate Republicans flat-footed and uncertain about the path forward.

“As they say, did not see that one coming,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said after emerging from a morning huddle with his fellow GOP leaders. Trump, he confirmed, gave him no heads up that his Truth Social missive backing the House was coming.

It came less than a day after Thune moved to put the Senate’s two-bill blueprint on the floor — teeing up hours of debate and a grueling succession of votes that was expected to fill the rest of the chamber’s workweek.

Now Trump’s backing of the House plan has them rethinking their next moves. After meeting with members of his leadership team and Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham on Wednesday morning, Thune said he was “planning to proceed” but added that “we are interested in and hoping to hear with more clarity where the White House is coming from.”

And in a closed-door lunch on Wednesday afternoon, Vice President JD Vance told Senate Republicans that Trump preferred one bill but indicated that he and the president understood they needed a back-up plan in Congress. GOP senators interpreted that as a green light to continue with their two-bill strategy this week, even if it ends up getting buried in the House.

At the same time, Senate Republicans are still skeptical that their House counterparts can approve their budget, given the chamber's one-vote margin.

“President Trump needs a fallback position," Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said, arguing the Senate should stay the course. "I’m not sure [the House budget could] pass the House or that it could pass the Senate.”

Compounding the frustration is that Republican senators have stayed in Washington for the shortened Presidents Day week while the House, pursuant to a schedule set months ago, is in recess after GOP leaders muscled their budget plan through committee last week.

Responding to Trump’s demand for both chambers to pass the House plan, one Republican senator granted anonymity to speak candidly said, “I’d love to, but the House keeps taking weeks off instead of passing budgets.”

Under the plan Senate Republican leaders laid out Tuesday, they would adopt their budget resolution late Thursday or on Friday following a “vote-a-rama” on dozens of planned amendments.

"We’ve got an alternative budget resolution. We hope the House can do theirs. But if they can't, then we'll have one. So we'll do a vote-a-rama starting tomorrow,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told reporters after the lunch with Vance.

John Barrasso, the No. 2 Senate Republican, added: “The House is not here this week. If that bill had already been passed, that would be a different discussion. We're moving ahead. We want to move ahead with speed, with urgency.”

It’s hardly the first time Trump has caught Senate Republicans off guard since the November election — delivering a perennial reminder that the president, at any moment, can upend the legislative agenda with no warning.

After Thune won the majority leader race last year, one of Trump’s first acts was to drop the political bombshell of announcing his intention to nominate firebrand then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to be attorney general. It was widely seen as an assertion of dominance over the GOP-controlled legislative branch.

Gaetz later withdrew his name from consideration amid widespread skepticism from Republicans, but Trump and his allies have pushed through several other controversial nominees, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Trump has also pressured Senate Republicans to keep the door open for recess appointments, which would let him sidestep the Senate to put some of his picks in place. The idea has sparked resistance from some GOP members.

But the question of how to enact Trump’s sweeping agenda has been among the most persistent sources of tension inside the GOP. Trump has previously expressed his preference for the House’s one-big-bill approach while also blessing the Senate’s efforts to explore a two-bill alternative.

Senate Republicans have been privately vibe-checking Trump, including at a recent dinner at Mar-a-Lago and during the Super Bowl, and they believed that they had his OK to proceed. On several occasions, publicly and privately, the president said he wanted whatever could get him results.

There has also been mixed messaging coming from within the administration: Vance, White House policy chief Stephen Miller and budget chief Russ Vought are among those who have favored the Senate’s preferred two-bill approach.

GOP senators say their plan will more quickly deliver on Trump’s key campaign plank of heightening border security, and they felt even more empowered after Vought and Trump border czar Tom Homan made the case to them for more border resources at a closed-door lunch earlier this month.

“In the near term, the president has asked for resources to secure the border. We know we have to rebuild our military, and those are priorities that are addressed in the targeted bill that we put together,” Thune said Wednesday.

Many Senate Republicans, meanwhile, continue to believe that the House will not actually be able to move forward with its budget given Speaker Mike Johnson’s tight margins and the difficult policy questions they have to resolve inside their ranks.

House Republicans are planning to bring their blueprint to the floor next week but are still trying to lock down a dozen or more holdouts — a heavy lift for Johnson given his two-vote majority.

While Trump’s Truth Social post sparked immediate celebrations by some in the House GOP, he also threw them a new curveball when he said during a Fox News interview that "Medicare, Medicaid — none of that stuff is going to be touched," aside from efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. The House plan envisions cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid.

What is clear is that Trump appears to be ready to take a more active role in getting his agenda over the finish line than he has in the past months.

“My guess is, knowing him, he's doing everything he can to goose both houses,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said, “because time is short.”

Meredith Lee Hill, Jennifer Scholtes, Katherine Tully-McManus and Joe Gould contributed to this report.

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