The House is set to play a leading role in reupping and expanding the Trump tax cuts this year, a shift from when the tax legislation was first implemented and the Senate was the crucial chamber.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, known as the TCJA or the Trump tax cuts, was the signature legislative achievement of President Donald Trump’s first term. Now, with a big portion of that legislation expiring, Republicans in the House and Senate will work hard to deliver another win in 2025, but the power dynamics have shifted in the past eight years.
Republicans passed the TCJA and will pass this year’s legislation through reconciliation, a process that allows for bills to bypass the filibuster and pass with only a simple majority in the Senate. That means both chambers only need a simple majority of the party in agreement with the legislation.
In 2017, Republicans had only a 51-49 majority in the Senate, meaning just a few members could threaten to withhold their votes to exact major concessions on the reconciliation legislation. At the time, the House had a much more comfortable majority, meaning that the party could afford to lose several votes and still have wiggle room, making the Senate the chamber to watch.
In 2025, that dynamic has flipped, and the House will be the chamber where much of the sausage is made. Senate Republicans have 53 votes this time around, while House Republicans can essentially not afford to lose a single vote.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) was one of the lawmakers around in 2017 when the first tax reconciliation bill was built from the ground up, a process that took nearly a year of negotiations between Republicans.
Daines pointed out to the Washington Examiner on Thursday that while there are a number of senators who were around and are veterans of the 2017 negotiations, in the House, the number is smaller.
Three-fifths of current representatives were not even in office in 2017 when the tax bill was written, Daines said.
“So there’s going to be more of a learning curve, I think, on the House side,” Daines said on Capitol Hill. “The bottom line: This is a numbers game — it’s 218 in the House, 51 in the Senate — and they’ve got better margins.”
Alex Conant, a GOP strategist and partner at Firehouse Strategies, said House leadership has much less room to maneuver this year as negotiations begin in earnest.
“Eight years ago, the Senate was the needle that Trump needed to thread,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Now the House is going to be the tight squeeze.”
Small factions of representatives could exert outsize influence in shaping reconciliation this time around.
Trump won the 2024 election by a greater margin than most analysts had anticipated, which some members see as evidence that the party should fall in line behind him as much as possible. But some members could end up outweighing absolute fealty to Trump with the legislation.
“Republicans are trying to pass an extraordinarily ambitious tax cuts bill with a razor-thin congressional majority, even smaller than they had in 2017,” Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Examiner, noting that House Republicans might not even be able to lose more than a single vote.
Some members have already thrown their weight around in the House. Republicans from high-tax states such as New York and California have seized on the opportunity and are hoping to use it to exact major concessions on the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions imposed by the 2017 law.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) recently reintroduced his SALT Fairness and Marriage Penalty Elimination Act, which would dramatically hike the SALT deduction cap from $10,000 to $100,000 for single filers and would eliminate the so-called “marriage penalty,” allowing married couples filing jointly to deduct up to $200,000.
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Such a big proposed increase might show that the SALT lawmakers are set on raising the cap well beyond $10,000 and could threaten to tank the legislation over the matter.
Like some House members are plotting now, in 2017, then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) successfully used the thin margins in the Senate to exact concessions and force lawmakers to include a bigger child tax credit. He threatened to withhold his vote on the tax plan unless the credit was boosted.