Rep. Robert Garcia wants to usher in a new era for Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. But don’t ask the 47-year-old Californian if he’s seeking “generational change.”

Garcia has instead fashioned his candidacy for his party’s top leadership post on the panel around his experience as a big-city mayor and contributions on the Oversight panel, sidestepping the age and seniority questions that have roiled the Democratic Party.

That careful approach — calibrated to appeal widely inside a House Democratic Caucus whose members are both eager to promote fresh faces and wary of sticking fingers in the eyes of party elders — has allowed Garcia, only in his second term, to emerge as the prohibitive favorite in the closely watched internal contest to replace the late Rep. Gerry Connolly.

Garcia has emerged as a middle-ground choice ahead of next week’s caucus election for Oversight ranking member that is putting two older lawmakers — Reps. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, 70, and Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, 76 — against two younger Democrats: Garcia and 44-year-old Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas.

His careful pitch was on display in a recent interview, when he sought to thread a needle between a Democratic base demanding an aggressive confrontation with President Donald Trump and the more delicate sensibilities of fellow House Democrats, whose votes he is courting.

“The seniority system in Congress is not going to go away,” Garcia said, playing down the notion that the race is a proxy battle in a larger war over the future of the Democratic Party. “There’s an opportunity here to expand who’s at that table, and I bring a different kind of experience. I may not have the most time served in Congress, but I certainly would put my experience up against anybody’s.”

His approach was no doubt informed by the last election for Democratic leadership of the Oversight panel, where Connolly was elected at age 74 last year over 35-year-old progressive stalwart Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Connolly’s sudden illness and death from esophageal cancer in May only served to rekindle the quiet but urgent conversation about whether Democrats need to promote younger leaders.

Crockett has been more outspoken in presenting herself as the face of that younger, more confrontational generation. She’s built a reputation as a partisan brawler in viral committee-room exchanges and cable-TV appearances. She has raised eyebrows inside the caucus, for instance, by openly discussing pursuing a Trump impeachment should Democrats retake the majority next year.

“For me, it starts with: How do we motivate the base? I think that I am the singular candidate that can really motivate and excite the base,” she told reporters last week leaving a closed-door candidate meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus.

Committee leadership contests, however, tend to center on inside-the-building glad-handing than appeals to voters at large, and that is the campaign Garcia has undertaken. After backing Ocasio-Cortez for the Oversight job last Congress, Garcia has taken pains to avoid the pitfalls she faced. He has personally met with all but a handful of the 214 sitting House Democrats, according to a person granted anonymity to describe his strategy.

In the interview, the former mayor of Long Beach cast himself less as an anti-Trump attack dog and more as a consensus-builder. He shied away from talk of impeaching Trump, calling it “premature” without buy-in from other Democrats, and emphasized that the committee would do more than bulldog the Trump administration under a Democratic majority.

That has been welcome to members who have been put off by some of Crockett’s comments, including her willingness to entertain impeachment. “You can’t get out ahead of your skis if you’re weighing something as serious as this, that requires real buy-in from battleground members and safe-seat members,” said one battleground Democrat who was granted anonymity to react candidly.

There are signs the more prudent approach is paying off. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has already endorsed Garcia, the only Latino member running for the job, while other powerful groups including the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Progressive Caucus and New Democrat Coalition appear unlikely to endorse.

He’s also expected to receive strong support from the 43-member delegation of California Democrats — a historically formidable bloc — and he’s earned plaudits from colleagues who appreciate the millions of dollars he’s raised for the party and candidates as they gear up for an expensive fight to retake the House.

“I really value the people who pay their dues early and on time and who give to other people,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a DCCC national finance co-chair who is supporting Garcia.

Garcia isn’t entirely playing the inside game by any means. He has occasionally sought to bait his Republican colleagues on the Oversight panel and at times has tested what kind of rhetoric crosses the line.

At a hearing of an Oversight subcommittee set up to work alongside Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, Garcia announced he would display a “dick pic.” He proceeded to unveil a headshot of Musk, after reminding colleagues how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — the well-known conservative provocateur who chairs the subpanel — had shown nude photos of presidential son Hunter Biden at a previous committee meeting.

Garcia is also among a handful of Democrats — alongside California Gov. Gavin Newsom, New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver and California Sen. Alex Padilla — who have found themselves in federal law enforcement crosshairs under Trump: In February, a prosecutor appointed by Trump threatened to investigate him after he openly suggested that the public wants Democrats to “bring actual weapons to this bar fight” for democracy.

Garcia denied making any actual threat and said he would not be intimidated.

“I’m not afraid of Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, or Donald Trump, or other folks that are trying to cause harm,” he said in the interview — a sentiment that could appeal to Democrats, like Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont, who want younger, more aggressive leaders to step up.

“We as a caucus need to have structures in place to allow young talent to be cultivated whether it is members who have only been here a few years,” said Balint. “This is what our voters want, so let’s do something about it.”

President Donald Trump called on House Republicans late Wednesday to move “LIGHTNING FAST” to send Senate-passed cryptocurrency legislation to his desk, dialing up pressure on GOP lawmakers in the lower chamber to adopt the measure without any changes.

Trump wrote on social media site Truth Social Wednesday evening that the House should pass a “clean” version of the Senate bill as soon as possible. His post comes as a warning shot to House Republicans — including Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) — who are weighing how much to change the Senate bill and whether to include it in a larger package of crypto legislation that would be sent back to the upper chamber.

“Get it to my desk, ASAP — NO DELAYS, NO ADD ONS,” Trump wrote.

The post comes one day after the Senate passed the crypto bill in question, which would create the first-ever U.S. regulatory framework for digital tokens known as stablecoins that are pegged to the value of the dollar.

House Republicans are on board with passing stablecoin legislation, but they may be reluctant to rubber-stamp the Senate’s bill, known as the GENIUS Act. GOP lawmakers in the lower chamber have introduced their own stablecoin legislation that is similar to the Senate-passed bill, but several key differences remain. The House measure cleared the Financial Services Committee in April.

“The Senate just passed an incredible Bill that is going to make America the UNDISPUTED Leader in Digital Assets — Nobody will do it better, it is pure GENIUS!” Trump wrote. “Digital Assets are the future, and our Nation is going to own it. We are talking about MASSIVE Investment, and Big Innovation.”

Hill, who has pushed for years to advance industry-friendly crypto legislation in the House, is also weighing the best way to get multiple digital assets bills across the finish line this year. He has been considering packaging stablecoin legislation with a second, larger measure — seen as the crown jewel of the GOP-led push to boost the crypto industry — that would divvy up oversight of digital assets between market regulators.

A spokesperson for Hill, Brooke Nethercott, said in a statement Wednesday that the Arkansas Republican looks “forward to continued collaboration with our members and House leadership as we work toward a path forward.”

Some House Republicans fear that simply passing the Senate stablecoin bill — even if it is reconciled with the House version — would take momentum away from the push to adopt so-called market structure legislation, which impacts a bigger swath of the crypto industry than the stablecoin measure.

In the Senate, though, Republicans are eager to quickly notch a legislative win by getting their stablecoin bill to Trump’s desk. The bill was the subject of months of turbulent negotiations, and senators fear that a cumbersome larger crypto package would be difficult to pass through the upper chamber, where Democratic votes are needed to clear a 60-vote threshold.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), the lead sponsor of the Senate stablecoin bill, said in an interview last week that his “goal is just to put a win in place for the American public and have it for the president to sign before the Fourth of July.”

“It’s very clear to me that we have an opportunity to have a great win here for the American public right now,” he said. “If the bill were to be modified [to include market structure legislation], it would have to come back to the Senate for a lot of work.”

Senate Republicans are fielding mounting warnings from economists that their signature legislation would add trillions of dollars to the deficit. It appears to be the last thing on their minds.

As Senate Majority Leader John Thune prepares to jam through the GOP’s sprawling border, energy and tax package to President Donald Trump’s desk, fellow Republicans are largely ignoring a host of reports warning that their bill would worsen the nation’s fiscal trajectory in a serious way.

They’re instead relying on estimates from the White House that assume vastly greater economic growth than virtually every other economic model — while trashing the credibility of Congress’ nonpartisan budget scorer, the Congressional Budget Office, which said on Tuesday that the House-passed border, energy and tax bill would add around $2.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade.

“It’s a model. And obviously, they’ve been famously wrong before,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) of the latest CBO report. “We do have more debt now than we had before, for sure, but I think they grossly underestimate the economic benefits.”

The problem highlighted by CBO and other economists is this: While the GOP’s tax cuts may provide some economic growth, they will likely not juice the economy as much as when Republicans first enacted Trump’s tax cuts in 2017. On the flip side, with federal debt closing in on $37 trillion, the rising costs of servicing more expensive interest payments will far outweigh any additional revenue that is generated from increased economic growth.

“The economic and fiscal state is not what it was in 2017,” said Paul Winfree, president and CEO of the Economic Policy Innovation Center, who was previously a top economic official in the first Trump administration. Winfree added in a text message that “the stock of debt is so large that anything we do to modestly increase productivity (and growth) without reducing spending … will lead to higher costs.”

That was underscored Tuesday when CBO put a number this week to the warning economists have been making for months: that the GOP package would hike interest rates and in turn increase borrowing costs.

Higher interest rates would boost payments on the national debt by an estimated $440 billion over a decade, CBO predicted, while the megabill would drive yearly economic growth of just 0.5 percent on average during that time. House Republican leaders are claiming the bill would generate $2.5 trillion by banking on total average growth of 2.6 percent.

That finding prompted an unusual phenomenon. Usually tax-cutting bills tend to cost less under so-called “dynamic” scores that include economic effects. Not so here: The $2.8 trillion figure released Tuesday outstripped the CBO’s prior $2.4 trillion estimate that did not include economic analysis — mostly attributable to the fact that, in their words, the bill “would increase interest rates.”

Lack of recognition of the dynamic has upset at least one Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who dropped his own report Wednesday illustrating that the GOP’s megabill has little shot of bending the deficit trajectory downward, even in the rosiest of economic circumstances.

Johnson, who said he will vote against the massive tax and spending package as it’s currently written, is challenging his colleagues in the Senate and in the administration to show him where he’s wrong.

“The whole point of laying out the report was to get everyone to acknowledge and admit reality,” Johnson told reporters. “Nobody’s pushed back on my numbers. Here’s an opportunity to do it. … I’ve shown people my work. Who else has shown people work?”

But Thune took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to argue that the party-line megabill would generate enough revenue — around $4.1 trillion — through economic growth to completely make up for the deficit impact from the reduced revenue, citing a report from the White House’s Council for Economic Advisors that asserts the bill would lead to long-run GDP growth of up to 3.5 percent.

Thune added that CBO “characteristically, I should say, underestimates the economic growth, and hence the revenue, that this bill would provide.”

The White House figures are outliers compared with other economic models. The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation found, for instance, that the GOP’s plan would boost economic growth by 0.8 percent in the long-run but still, on a dynamic basis and after $1.5 trillion in net spending cuts, add $1.7 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that the bill would spur economic growth of 0.4 percent over 10 years and add $3.2 trillion to the deficit over a decade, all things considered.

Kyle Pomerleau of the American Enterprise Institute called the White House estimates “outrageous” and “way higher than everyone else’s.” He said the in-house analysis takes into account tax incentives, like those for domestic manufacturing, that didn’t end up in the bill that passed the House in May.

“They just say that, ‘well, the individual income tax — that’s going to make people work more and that’s it,’” he said. “But it misses so many different details of the actual reform itself.”

Democrats say voters will notice if the GOP package becomes a drag on the economy rather than the boon Republicans are marketing. Reiterating a claim party leaders often voice, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said the 2017 tax bill “ended up being a stone” around Republicans’ neck “that helped lead to their bloodletting” in the 2018 midterms.

“At some point they have to look at all this new information and decide to stop and go back to the drawing board,” Murphy said in a brief interview. “Because what they’re designing is not going to help our economy and is going to hurt a ton of people.”

The release of the CBO report comes as Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) fields requests from several of his GOP colleagues to scale back changes to taxes that fund Medicaid and cuts to green energy credits. Crapo has been also pushing to use an accounting maneuver known as a current policy baseline, which would effectively zero out the cost of around $3.8 trillion in tax cut extensions.

It would allow Senate Republicans to make Trump’s tax cuts permanent without having to offset much of their deficit impact, which would otherwise be required by the Senate’s budget rules.

Asked for his reaction to the new CBO report, Crapo said he has “the same reaction I’ve always had” to the official scorekeeper’s numbers: “They’re not using the right baseline, and they aren’t analyzing it dynamically.”

Jordain Carney, Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.