House Republican leaders are so confident they are close to clinching an elusive agreement on a budget blueprint needed to advance President Trump’s legislative agenda that they scheduled a committee vote for Thursday.
That will put them back on schedule with the Senate, which is planning to move its own budget blueprint through committee by Thursday.
House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington declined to discuss details of the evolving plan but said scheduling a markup signals a deal is in the offing.
“That’s how confident I am that we’re going to land the plane here on it, on a really, really good and balanced decision-making framework,” the Texas Republican said.
While House Republicans moved closer to internal agreement, they were still far apart from the Senate.
The House budget resolution will set spending and revenue targets for a giant reconciliation package that will include sweeping tax and spending cuts, energy policy changes and funding for border security, immigration enforcement and the national defense.
The Senate budget resolution, released Friday, provides instructions to tee up a smaller $345 billion package focused on border, defense and energy policy. It would save the tax cuts and broader spending cuts — outside of what is needed to offset the new spending — for a second reconciliation bill to come later in the year.
Both chambers eventually need to adopt the same budget resolution to unlock reconciliation powers that will allow Republicans to avoid a likely Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
“We cannot take the Senate plan. We got to have the House plan,” Rep. Ralph Norman, a member of the Budget Committee and hardline House Freedom Caucus, said, adding that the Senate has not proposed enough spending cuts.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said Republicans would be “rolling out the details” of the budget blueprint as early as Tuesday night.
The speaker said the House is “right on the schedule that we need to be on” to pass the final reconciliation package by May, despite missing his initial goal of holding the budget markup last week.
Among the remaining holdups to finalizing the budget deal are how high of a floor to set for spending cuts, how low of a ceiling to set for the cost of the tax cuts and whether to include an instruction for the Ways and Means Committee to increase the debt limit.
Mr. Arrington said no decision had been made as of Tuesday morning on the debt limit, but Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, Missouri Republican, signaled he would prefer to leave it out.
“I’m hearing that the Senate will not have the votes to pass a debt limit, and so I’m just looking at how to thread the needle to make sure we pass the resolution,” he said.
Mr. Trump told a group of House Republicans who met with him at the White House last week, including Mr. Smith, Mr. Arrington and Mr. Johnson, that he would prefer the debt limit addressed in the party-line reconciliation package so that the Democrats can’t use it as leverage.
“Any deal that you cut with Democrats is a bad deal. We’re just on two different universes,” Mr. Norman said in agreement with the president.
But key to getting conservatives to support a debt limit increase is the level of accompanying spending cuts, said Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who has never voted to lift the debt limit.
He and other debt hawks have said the floor for spending cuts should be $2 trillion to $3 trillion, with the preferences ranging from person to person.
Mr. Johnson has floated a $1.5 trillion floor. Some see that as good progress, while others want even deeper cuts.
“We have to have real deficit reduction, period,” House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, Maryland Republican, said.
Part of the issue is the overall spending cut floor has to be divided among committees of jurisdiction.
The instruction for the Ways and Means Committee is especially difficult to write because the panel may contribute some savings but more of its responsibility will be drafting the tax cuts, which will add trillions to the deficit.
Republicans have discussed providing an overall ceiling to allow Ways and Means to add to the deficit, in the range of $4.7 trillion to $5.5 trillion.
Mr. Smith said permanently extending the tax cuts from Mr. Trump’s first term that are set to expire at the end of the year would cost over $4.7 trillion, which is why he and other Republicans want to use a current policy baseline to count that cost as baked into law.
Mr. Trump’s other proposals, including exempting tips, overtime and Social Security benefits from taxable income, would add trillions more to the cost that Ways and Means will have to juggle within whatever instruction it is given.
Mr. Harris said if the ceiling for tax cuts is set around $5.5 trillion, “you probably need $3 trillion in spending reduction because you’re going to assume about $2.5 trillion coming from GDP growth.”
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.