House Republicans are setting their sights on achieving tech magnate Elon Musk’s goal of slashing nearly $1 trillion in federal spending as they face delays in ironing out a budget resolution.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) confirmed this week that lawmakers are closing in on a plan to meet the “roughly” $1 trillion reduction target over a 10-year period but warned that no cuts have been finalized.
“I think when you look at where we are, we’re close to a trillion and still working,” Scalise told reporters Tuesday, per Fox News.
Republicans are pursuing a sweeping legislative package that would encompass President Trump’s agenda on the border, energy, defense, taxes, and spending.
This week, GOP lawmakers were supposed to kickstart that endeavor by crafting a budget resolution bill, which is needed to start the reconciliation process in the Senate and bypass the 60-vote legislative filibuster.
However, the planned markup session by the House Budget Committee was canceled following backlash from fiscal hawks in the GOP conference.
On the other side of the Capitol, Republican senators have discussed moving ahead with their own bill rather than waiting for the House to get its act together.
“Senate will not take the lead,” Scalise insisted Tuesday. “We’re going to, and we’re right on schedule.”
Republican senators have also butted heads with their House counterparts over leadership’s plan to stuff Trump’s agenda into “one big beautiful bill,” rather than the separate measures preferred by senators.
House GOP leadership told reporters last week that they’d have a budget resolution ready this week and predicted that it would pass the lower chamber by the end of the month.
Currently, Republicans have a 218-215 majority in the House, meaning they can only afford one defection before partisan legislation is defeated. The math has given hardliners, like members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, more power with which to extract concessions.
Talks are complicated by the expected hefty price tag of the Trump agenda.
For example, Republicans plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts, which the Tax Foundation estimates would add $3.5 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, even accounting for economic growth, if there are no offsets.
But Republicans plan to go further by raising the cap on the state and local tax deduction; fulfilling Trump’s pledge of no tax on tips, overtime or Social Security; beefing up border security; and ramping up defense spending. The costs for all of that could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade.
“There are a lot of numbers floating around. I mean, you know, CBO’s [Congressional Budget Office] got their numbers, and we’ve had real issues with them, because CBO has been wrong so many times,” Scalise added, per Fox.
In addition to the mad dash to draft Trump’s agenda, Congress has to grapple with a March 14 deadline to avert a government shutdown as Democrats plan to use the standoff to extract concessions from House leadership.
