Congress
‘A ton of tradeoffs’: Thune acts fast to cut deals and move Trump’s megabill
John Thune is wasting no time moving President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the Senate.
The Senate majority leader laid out a rat-a-tat tempo for the coming weeks in an exclusive interview with Blue Light News that he hopes will culminate in final passage of the party-line megabill by Republicans’ July 4 deadline.
Senate committees will fully release revised text of the bill by the end of next week, Thune said. Panel markups where that text might be debated and potentially amended will be highly optional. And he is already in close consultation with Trump about targeting key senators who will need to be persuaded to back the sprawling legislation.
“He’s been very engaged,” the South Dakota Republican said. “I think he would do that whether we asked [or not], but we tried to give him some direction, yeah.”
Thune laid out the detailed timeline after Blue Light News first reported Monday that some Senate panels will start releasing their tweaks this week — starting with the Armed Services Committee Tuesday night.
Next week, panels writing the trickiest and most substantial parts — including the Senate Finance Committee — will release text. Trump will meet with other Republican members of the tax-writing panel at the White House Wednesday and “lay out kind of what he wants to see,” Thune said.
Now five months into his longtime dream job, Thune is tasked with shepherding his party’s biggest legislative priority to fruition with little margin for error. Republicans need to figure out how to corral nearly all their members while bridging internal divides on thorny issues such as the size of spending cuts, the future of social safety net programs and the architecture of major tax policies.
“It’s striking the right balance,” Thune said. “Without getting into the particulars, there are a ton of tradeoffs you have to make.”
He compared trying to lock down the bill to playing a game of Whac-A-Mole but added that he believes he has “a handle on what the dials are and how they can be turned and what the various options are to try to get to 51.”
Thune has at least one guaranteed “no” vote in Sen. Rand Paul, with the Kentucky Republican vowing to oppose the bill as long as an increase in the debt ceiling is included. Thune noted that he’s spoken extensively with Sen. Ron Johnson, a deficit hawk whom leadership views as their second-most-likely opponent. Meeting the Wisconsin Republican’s public demands of trillions of dollars in additional spending cuts will be a tall order, Thune acknowledged.
“I never give up,” Thune said, and leaders are “doing everything we can to move the bill in a direction that he would be more predisposed to be for. But, you know, he’s made some fairly strong statements out there.”
“At the end of the day, everybody’s going to have to make a decision about whether or not this is better than the status quo, and, do I really want to take this down?” he added.
Trump has already started calling some senators who will be Thune’s toughest votes to lock down, with Thune calling him “the closer.” It’s not just conservative hard-liners who need attention: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters on Tuesday that she has spoken with administration officials about her concerns about the potential impact on rural hospitals. Trump also called Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has raised concern about the House’s changes to Medicaid. Thune and Hawley have met to discuss his position.
Thune is also trying to coordinate with Speaker Mike Johnson, who has urged the Senate to make as few changes as possible to the House bill. But Thune said that was an unrealistic expectation — particularly on the state-and-local-tax deduction, an especially tough issue in the House.
“It would be very, very hard to get the Senate to vote for what the House did” on SALT, Thune said. “We’ve just got some people that feel really strongly on this.”
Other areas that could see changes include SNAP, the nutrition program formerly known as food stamps. Thune acknowledged “a concern among some of our members” about the House’s plan to require states to carry some of the program’s cost.
Thune met with Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) Tuesday, and leadership has given the panel a list of potential savings options that would not require shifting costs to the states.
The process of tweaking the bill will largely happen behind closed doors in the coming weeks. Thune said it will be up to each Senate committee to decide whether to hold votes on their piece of the bill. While he said he believes some will, no panel has yet announced it will do so.
After the Finance panel — which has jurisdiction over both the tax and Medicare provisions — releases its text sometime next week, Senate Republicans will “fine tune” the bill, Thune said, during the third week of the month to ensure it can get 51 votes — possibly including a tie-breaker from Vice President JD Vance.
“Probably in the last two weeks of [June], we really start homing in on, you know, getting ready to get it to the floor the last week,” he said.
The chair of the House Agriculture Committee said he’s not willing to “accept bad results” as a tradeoff for the benefits of advancements in artificial intelligence — a direct rebuttal to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“As someone who practiced health care for 28 years, I’m never willing to accept bad results. I think we just need to do our best,” Rep. G.T. Thompson, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters Monday.
He was responding to Altman’s comments to Decoded by Blue Light News that people “should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”
Pressed further on whether he agreed with Altman’s premise, Thompson replied, “No, I think we have to work harder to prevent any bad things from happening.”
Altman’s comments come in the wake of increased panic over the risks of catastrophic destruction from AI, with many industry leaders and experts arguing that guardrails are needed on the technology to prevent it from spinning out of human control.
Pressure is building on Congress to regulate the rapidly-advancing technology, but lawmakers are divided over whether the AI industry needs federal regulation or if it’s capable of governing itself.
The executives of major AI labs and tech companies gathered at the White House last week to discuss solutions with President Donald Trump, who believes overregulating AI will have national security repercussions. The group ended up signing a “morally binding” AI accord that critics say won’t do enough to prevent a worst-case scenario.
Thompson noted Monday he believes that AI will bring “tremendous solutions,” specifically in regards to finding cures for health issues like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. But he also said AI has to be led with “principle” — comparing it to how he addressed digital assets in a bill to regulate the cryptocurrency industry, which he worked on as chair of the Agriculture Committee.
“The first principle is ‘do no harm.’ So we need to protect consumers, and that means, I think, building some guardrails — some guidelines — to do that,” Thompson said. He added that the second principle is to “foster innovation.”
“I think AI has a lot to do with that,” he added. “I don’t think AI works without RI: Real Intelligence.”
LE SUEUR, Minnesota — Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday there is no “consensus” yet on advancing a bill establishing permanent daylight saving time even as President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on Republicans to pass it.
Thune addressed the matter in a Monday interview after Trump used his Truth Social account multiple times over the weekend to rail against the legislation, known as the Sunshine Protection Act — going so far as to post the personal cell phone number of one of its GOP opponents, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
“The president feels strongly on it like he does a lot of issues,” he said. “It’s something we’re having conversations about but there’s no clear path forward or consensus on it yet.”
While Trump singled out Cotton for scrutiny, Thune made clear the opposition to the permanent daylight saving time proposal — which would lead to very late winter sunrises in some parts of the country — ran deeper than one senator.
Cotton has publicly voiced opposition to the proposal for year, citing, among other things, the fact that children in his state would be going to school in the dark for part of the year.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) voiced similar objections Monday to reporters in the Capitol, saying he was mindful of “safety concerns in the more northern and rural states where children get on the school bus in very early hours.”
Thune, who spoke during a campaign swing in Minnesota with GOP Senate nominee Michele Tafoya, has himself opposed previous daylight saving bills. He said Monday that “a lot of it depends on where you are in the country” and that “your geography probably has as much to do with your position on that as anything.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has aligned himself closely with Trump, is among the lawmakers who have been pushing to get the bill through the Senate. He recently told POLITICO, “I’m going to make sure it gets passed this year.”
Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.
Democrats have pulled back some of their ads in North Carolina’s Senate race, days after the top Senate Republican super PAC paused its future spending in the state.
WinSenate, a group affiliated with the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, has removed roughly $1.1 million in North Carolina ad buys this week, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. The group still has roughly $18.8 million in future reservations through Election Day.
“Senate Majority PAC is committed to seeing this race through to victory, and will continue to make spending decisions based on how to best build a strong Senate majority,” Senate Majority PAC spokesperson Lauren French said in a statement.
The move, combined with the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund’s decision to pause future spending, are a signal that both parties are shifting resources amid an ever-expanding Senate map. Democrats are increasingly confident in their North Carolina Senate nominee, Roy Cooper, as he continues to hold a sizable lead in public polling over Republican Michael Whatley — but some privately say states like Michigan and New Hampshire need more resources.
Meanwhile, multiple Republican groups, not just SLF, have retreated from the state in recent weeks, effectively deciding that it’s no longer worth the money to boost Whatley’s campaign.
The Koch-aligned Americans for Prosperity Action left North Carolina off its $22 million list of future spending across key Senate contests, and Old North Action removed $6.5 million in ad reservations last month.
The Cooper campaign, however, is still treating the race as competitive, pointing to North Carolina’s closely divided electorate and the fact that President Donald Trump won the state in each of the past three presidential elections.
“North Carolina is a truly 50/50 state and Democrats haven’t won a US Senate race in 18 years. We can’t take anything for granted or our eye off the ball,” said Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to the Cooper campaign. “DC is broken and we’re going to continue to run this race like we’re ten points down to ensure North Carolinians get the change they desperately need.”
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