Senate Republicans say the House-drafted bill to enact President Trump’s legislative agenda has “problems” and are taking a second look at breaking it up into smaller pieces in hopes of getting the president’s less controversial priorities enacted into law before the fall.
Even if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) manages to squeak Trump’s agenda through the House, it faces major obstacles in the Senate, where moderate Republicans say they oppose proposed cuts to Medicaid and fiscal conservatives say it doesn’t go nearly far enough in cutting the deficit.
“There are still a lot of problems,” said one Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss internal discussions within the Senate GOP conference on the budget reconciliation bill.
The source said that while proposed cuts in Medicaid spending face stiff opposition in the Senate, GOP negotiators have yet to make much headway on reforms to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which conservatives are targeting for cuts.
The lawmaker said colleagues are talking about a Plan B if the bill fails to pass the House or if it hits a brick wall in the Senate.
Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” suffered a setback Friday when a group of fiscal hawks on the House Budget Committee voted against advancing it out of committee. That forced the Budget Committee to convene again at 10 p.m. Sunday in a scramble to get the legislation moving and meet a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline for winning House approval of the legislation.
The Speaker insists the bill is still on track but a group of Senate Republicans are growing increasingly doubtful about his plan.
Several Republican senators say the best way to jumpstart the stalled bill would be to break it up into two or three pieces and pass the elements of Trump’s agenda that have the most support in Congress first.
That’s the strategy that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) first proposed to his colleagues in December. But the Senate strategy was set aside after Speaker Johnson argued that Trump’s agenda would be easier to pass if all of the elements were piled into one package.
“If the bill continues to have problems over here, we could split it up,” said a second GOP senator who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “Thune was smart to say from the beginning that there should be two packages.”
The senator said GOP lawmakers are coming under increasing pressure to provide tens of billions of dollars in resources to secure the border, something that’s been delayed for months because of the protracted battle over new tax proposals, such as lifting the cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions and reforms to Medicaid and SNAP.
“We’ve heard from the border patrol chief that, ‘We need this, that and other thing and we needed it yesterday,’” the senator said.
“The debate over the tax and spending elements are likely to drag through the summer,” the senator warned.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), whose committee has primary jurisdiction over taxes and Medicaid, two of the most contentious issues in the bill, isn’t ruling out the possibility of breaking up the legislation. That would give Republicans a chance to quickly pass border security funding and perhaps a permanent extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts as well.
“The two or bill strategy? I didn’t weigh in on that [earlier this year] and I’m not weighing in on it now,” Crapo said.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been the most vocal in calling for the big, beautiful bill to be broken up into two or several pieces. Johnson said the spending cuts in the House bill are “fake.”
He has argued to colleagues that they should split up the bill to pass the less controversial elements quickly and “give us the time” to get the trickier policy questions “right.”
The Wisconsin senator said he wants GOP lawmakers to move quickly on a proposed $175 billion in funding to secure the border and $150 billion to boost the Pentagon’s budget and the extension of the expiring 2017 tax cuts.
He and other Senate Republicans believe that type of package could pass both chambers quickly and get signed by Trump before the July 4 recess.
“That’s why you do multiple steps, you figure out the things you agree on. Leave the hard stuff for last. The problem with bundling all of that is what you’re seeing right now,” he said.
Johnson said he would also like to “bank” the $880 billion in savings that House Republican negotiators have identified in Medicare and SNAP reforms, although those proposals still need buy-in from GOP colleagues who are opposed to any reduction in Medicaid benefits and worry about the fiscal health of rural hospitals.
Johnson said that he and Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) will vote against the House Republican reconciliation bill as currently drafted.
“Talk to Mike Lee and Rick Scott. It’s not going to pass the Senate. It won’t. So it would be nice if they acknowledge that fact and go, ‘Let’s regroup,’” he said.
But Johnson, one of the Senate’s leading fiscal hawks, said that Thune and the rest of the Senate GOP leadership team is reluctant to scrap the House’s package and start over again.
“When I talk about a multiple-step process, they always say, ‘That ship has sailed,’” Johnson said of his conversations with Senate GOP leaders.
“I say, well, ‘Bring it back to port,’” he added.
Fiscal conservatives in the Senate and House have more incentive to insist on deeper cuts to federal spending after Moody’s downgraded the nation’s credit rating Friday, citing the steady rise in federal deficits.
Moody’s projects that the federal deficit will reach nearly 9 percent of GDP by 2035 because of higher interest payments on the debt and increased spending on entitlement programs.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said “part of the problem” is that “this great big beautiful is very, very complicated.”
The most complicated part of the debate is figuring out how to limit its impact on the U.S. debt as lawmakers either seek to add additional tax cuts or shrink cuts to Medicaid.
Cramer said the border security and defense provisions along with the extension of the 2017 tax cuts should be done by now.
“We should have had our bill, extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, border security and defense increases done. It should be done. And we’d still be debating the same issues,” he said.
Thune said Tuesday that he still has confidence in House Republicans’ ability to pass Trump’s agenda as one package.
“We are coordinating very closely with our House counterparts at the committee level and the leadership level,” he said.
“I feel very good about where we are, where they are and where ultimately we’re going to be on that bill,” he said.
