April 10, 2025

Overnight Trump Administration officials and powerful members of House leadership lobbied fiscal hawks and conservatives to take the ride with them and support a House budget framework.  The vote in the House happened about 20 minutes ago.  Just two of the many House R’s who had previously signaled they could not support the measure, switched over and voted with their House majority colleagues in a close but decisive interim victory for the Speaker and President Trump.

After the vote, several of the Republicans who had said they were holdouts on the budget resolution congregated on the House steps to defend their decision to flip and ultimately support it. They said  the “game changer” was getting firmer commitments from Speaker Johnson, the White House and Senate Majority Leader John Thune that any bill that came to the floor would slash a minimum of $1.5 trillion in federal spending.  Republican budget hard-liners who feared that embracing the Senate Resolution would balloon the nation’s debt relented after vague assurances from House and Senate party leaders that they would achieve deeper spending cuts than the measure actually requires.
Approval of the plan allows House and Senate Republicans to move forward with crafting major legislation to enact a huge tax cut, financed with deep reductions in spending on federal programs, and pushing it through Congress over Democratic opposition.

Here’s more from Modern Healthcare and (below that) from Politico:

“…House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) seeks to deliver a major tax cuts bill to President Donald Trump next month. Republicans aim to extend policies from the signature accomplishment from Trump’s first term, the Tax Cut And Jobs Act of 2017, that are due to sunset at the end of the year, restore some Trump tax cuts that already expired and create new tax cuts.

Those tax cuts would reduce federal revenues by an estimated $5.3 trillion over 10 years, and the GOP wants to increase spending on defense, border security and energy by $500 billion. To partially offset the effect on the budget deficit, the Republican-led Congress is looking for significant spending reductions, including up to $880 billion in Medicaid cuts.

“Congratulations to the House on the passage of a Bill that sets the stage for one of the Greatest and Most Important Signings in the History of our Country,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, after the vote. “Among many other things, it will be the Largest Tax and Regulation Cuts ever even contemplated. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Agreeing on a budget resolution was the first step in a fast-track legislative process known as budget reconciliation that the Republican majority is using because Democrats are firmly against Trump’s tax and spending cuts agenda.

Tax and spending bills considered under budget reconciliation rules are immune to Senate filibusters, which require 60 votes to end, and can pass both chambers on simple majority votes. The GOP has a 220-213 majority in the House and a 53-47 edge over Democrats and allied independents in the Senate.

The final budget resolution attempts to ease tensions between House and Senate Republicans over the spending cuts that nearly derailed the process on Wednesday, when Johnson was forced to cancel a vote because the budget lacked the votes to pass.

Under this measure, House committees must find at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts while Senate committees have to meet a much smaller $4 billion minimum.

The budget instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid and Medicare, to slash spending by $880 billion. But the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the same programs, is not subject to that order. When lawmakers in the two chambers draft the actual reconciliation bills, Congress will have to reconcile the differences.

When it comes to healthcare, Medicaid is by far the most likely target for spending cuts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Energy and Commerce Committee only has access to just $135 billion in spending it can eliminate if Medicare and Medicaid are excluded — and Trump has ruled out Medicare cuts.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) blasted the budget resolution on Wednesday.

“Republicans are setting in motion the largest Medicaid cut in American history. That’s going to hurt people all across this country,” Jeffries said on the House floor. “Healthcare will be taken away from children, pregnant women, everyday Americans with disabilities, older Americans, people in nursing homes, people who are receiving long-term care.”

GOP strife

The budget resolution eked by in both the House and Senate, with some Republicans concerned about the consequences of healthcare cuts and others clamoring for deeper reductions in taxes and federal expenditures. The next phase, which begins when Congress returns from a two-week recess that commenced after the budget vote, will be even harder.

Johnson faces a cohort of House Republicans such as Massie and Spartz who think the tax and spending cuts don’t go far enough, which made passing the budget resolution uncertain. Their consternation may persist despite Johnson winning over enough reluctant Republicans to complete the budget Thursday.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has the opposite problem. Although Sen. Dr. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opposed the budget for the same reasons as House conservatives, three other Senate Republicans have expressed concern about big Medicaid cuts.

Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) was the only other Republican to vote against the budget on Monday, but she, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) joined a failed Democratic effort to remove the instructions that the Energy and Commerce Committee reduce federal spending by $880 billion.

Still, Senate GOP leaders may have an easier time than their House peers, at least with its first iteration of a budget reconciliation bill, because the budget resolution affords the upper chamber greater flexibility.

The Senate portion of the budget assumes that cutting taxes will have barely any effect on the budget deficit by departing from long-standing legislative accounting practices, which is why its committees only have to cut $4 billion in spending to the House’s $1.5 trillion. In essence, the Senate will act as though the tax cuts were never going to expire, and therefore extending them does not come at a cost.

Eventually, however, the House and Senate will need to pass the exact same budget reconciliation bill to send to the White House.

House GOP adopts budget framework, paving the way for Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’

Now Republicans will need to come together on the meat of their package of tax cuts, energy policy, border security investments and new military spending.

By Katherine Tully-McManus, Jennifer Scholtes and Meredith Lee Hill

04/10/2025 11:18 AM EDT

The House finally approved a budget Thursday, uncorking the filibuster-skirting power Republicans need to build and enact President Donald Trump’s dream bill along party lines this year.

The final vote was 216-214, with two Republicans — Reps. Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Thomas Massie of Kentucky —joining all Democrats in voting “no.”Now Republicans on both sides of the Capitol can begin the even-heavier lift of writing — and then whipping support for — the behemoth package of tax cuts, military spending, energy policy, border security investments and more. That process will pit fiscal hawks against moderate Republicans as GOP leaders try to square their conflicting demands to protect safety-net programs like Medicaid while cutting trillions of dollars from that slice of the federal budget.

In a significant win for Trump and GOP leaders in Congress — and after days of suspense — dozens of Republican holdouts ultimately agreed to vote to clear the Senate-adopted blueprint after Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune publicly promised to seek at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts to safety-net programs in the final package.

Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), who was among the House Republicans seeking assurances of spending cuts in a final package, told reporters before the vote that Trump and Thune “have been very open that they’re going to make sure that we get at least $1.5 trillion in cuts.”

“We’re getting serious about the budget and the deficit for the first time in the last couple decades,” McCormick added. “That’s a good step in the right direction.”

Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise met privately with fiscal hawks past 10 p.m. Wednesday, after the GOP leaders canceled a vote on the fiscal framework earlier in the evening. Before that, House hard-liners met privately with Thune about ensuring deeper spending cuts.

“I think at some point these guys just have to take yes for an answer,” said Thune.

And in the end, the holdouts came on board.

Yet adopting an identical budget in the House and Senate is just the first step in the arduous process of steering Trump’s “big beautiful bill” to enactment. It was far from easy. Republicans in each chamber had to vote twice on the fiscal blueprint over the course of seven weeks, in order to arrive at a final product GOP lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol could accept.

The budget framework gives Republicans a great deal of wiggle room to decide what goes into the final package. They are allowed, but not required, to boost military spending by $150 billion, along with another $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement work.

And while there are ways Republicans can skirt some of their own mandates to reduce the deficit in the final bill, they are calling for a total of at least $4 billion in savings over a decade from new policy crafted by committees that handle agriculture, nutrition and housing, along with energy, health, education and labor policy.

Because Senate Republicans plan to use a seldom-used approach to tallying the price tag of their tax policies, GOP leaders plan to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts while also enacting up to $1.5 trillion in new tax breaks — all while claiming they are only increasing the federal deficit by that $1.5 trillion. For their new tax perks, Republican leaders are considering Trump’s own ideas, including nixing taxes on tips, as well as restoring key tax breaks for businesses and expanding the Child Tax Credit.

Democrats are eager to hone their attacks on the GOP as the bill comes together.

“If they need to rack up a trillion-dollar bill on the middle-class credit card in order to finance tax cuts for their wealthy friends, they are willing to do it every single time,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in an interview. “They’re willing to break the Senate, if that’s what’s necessary, to give away tax breaks to corporations and wealthy people.”

Republicans will also now have to grapple with how to fulfill conservative demands for $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in cuts to safety-net programs — with a major focus on Medicaid. Moderates are wary of changes that could lead to benefit cuts, while conservative hardliners want to make deep cuts to the program.

There could even be division over eliminating green energy tax credits from the much-vilified 2022 climate law passed under the Biden administration. There are some within the party in both chambers who are agitating to preserve an array of these credits benefitting red districts and states.

While Republicans are broadly in favor of extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts, many other tax questions could divide lawmakers, including caps on state and local tax deductions and expanding the Child Tax Credit.

Ben Leonard and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.