Congress
House GOP still has big problems to solve on its budget
House Republicans are still far from finalizing several key details of a budget blueprint that Speaker Mike Johnson is pledging to advance in the House next week, with negotiations expected to continue through the weekend as the Senate races ahead with its own plans.
While House GOP leaders trumpeted tremendous progress coming out of a White House meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday, key holdouts on Trump’s sweeping agenda of tax cuts, border security and energy initiatives indicated Friday that they remained unconvinced about the level of spending cuts in the bill.
Separately, Republican tax writers continue to struggle with the ballooning costs of Trump’s wishlist, which includes not only an extension of his 2017 tax cut package, but also new income tax exemptions for tips, overtime earnings and Social Security benefits.
Meanwhile, Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham released a plan Friday that would get border and energy policies out the door first and save the thorny tax questions for later. That is directly at odds with House leadership plans to roll everything into a single bill.
House Republican hard-liners continued to push for deeper spending cuts. One prominent budget hawk complained that several key lawmakers were cut out of the White House meeting.
Leadership “failed to talk to us,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn).
“They go to the White House and they take all the people that are going to be for it, and there’s four of us that are pretty consistent, and we’ve let our views be known,” said Burchett, naming Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) and Thomas Massie (R-K.y.) as the other critical holdouts.
“No surprise to me, because nobody ever wants to share any time with the president,” Burchett said.
Johnson, who had previously said Republicans would release a plan Friday, will now work through the weekend with other leaders to try to finalize an agreement. Senior Republicans aren’t expecting any final details until Monday — adding another delay to the speaker’s ambitious timeline.
Leaving the Capitol on Friday, Johnson confirmed in a brief interview that he hadn’t yet spoken with Burchett or similar holdouts. “We’re gonna get everybody there,” he quickly added.
Asked about the group saying they still have concerns about the level of spending cuts, Johnson replied: “Everybody does.”
Winning over Burchett and Massie is particularly critical. Neither lawmaker has ever voted to increase the debt limit, and Massie recently decried the fact that the GOP was considering enacting tax cuts at all.
In an interview Thursday night, Massie was noncommittal about Johnson’s latest plan, saying he’d have to “see if it’s reasonable at the end of the day.”
But Johnson is now trying to wedge a debt limit hike into the massive budget package after Trump again pressed for it to be dealt with quickly during the White House meeting Thursday, according to two people who were in the room who were granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
That’s on top of the difficult tax-related issues that House Republicans have to sort through. Trump on Thursday announced new proposals to increase taxes on Wall Street money managers and sports team owners, alongside reiterating his desire for the income tax exemptions he campaigned on.
All of that adds to the pressure on the Ways and Means Committee to assemble a tax package that can remain fiscally palatable to Republicans who do not want to add to federal budget deficits. Already, leaders are looking at counting economic growth effects alongside spending cuts to keep the overall package’s costs in line.
GOP leaders had tentatively decided on Thursday they’re going to provide instructions to the House Ways and Means Committee that would allow tax writers $4.7 trillion leeway to enact Trump’s tax policies, according to a person familiar with the discussions who was granted anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.
The number has not been finalized and could change as negotiations continue.
“I think it’s getting the Ways and Means [budget] instruction just right,” said House Republican Conference Vice Chair Blake Moore (R-Utah) of the biggest obstacle to getting a plan finalized. “I think we’re all committed to finding the necessary spending reform and spending reductions.”
A longer-standing issue also hasn’t been resolved.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who has been pushing to increase the deduction for state and local taxes, commonly known as SALT, huddled with Johnson for several hours Thursday night. Blue-state Republicans have indicated that they won’t vote for a tax bill without an increase to SALT, but other members in the conference detest the deduction and say that any increase to the $10,000 cap needs to be paid for.
Lawler said on Friday that no agreement on SALT had been reached yet.
“The whole tax bill has to be paid for,” Lawler said. “It’s not just SALT. The president wants to do tax on tips and that has to be worked out.”
No matter what Congress’ official revenue scorer, the Congressional Budget Office, says about the costs on the GOP’s tax bill, Republicans have emphasized that they will be running their own economic models to determine how much growth would be stimulated by the various tax provisions. That, in turn, would lower the cost of their plan.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise indicated Friday that Republicans were close to coming to an agreement on what those growth numbers look like. Notably, head rebel Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) sounded optimistic Friday. But he added there was more work to do.
“I think we’re in the ZIP code. There’s still some variables that I’m trying to study to figure out whether I think that’s correct. The levers are what are your assumptions on growth,” Roy said. “We need enough cuts, in my opinion, to sort of go hand in hand with the taxes.”
Members of Congress are confronting a grim reality: They are ill-equipped to rein in advanced artificial intelligence that one expert warns could “kill us all” by the end of the decade.
A viral social media post this week from ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon cautioned that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” as they race to develop superintelligent models — prompting alarm from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and new calls to action.
In conversations with Blue Light News throughout the day Wednesday, more than a dozen lawmakers and aides from both parties said they were hopeful Congress would start taking the issue seriously. By Wednesday evening, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, was pledging to “work with Congress” to implement “mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation.”
But many also conceded that Congress is currently sleepwalking into a crisis, far from ready to tackle the stakes of the moment in light of both philosophical differences and intractable partisan politicking.
“I think we’re finally hitting a tipping point,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who co-chairs the House AI Caucus, said in an interview. “I’m just so grateful that the whole world is finally paying attention … and now the question is, what do we do?”
Mounting worries inside the tech industry about a looming AI apocalypse are beginning to resonate with more members of Congress. Building on the panic seven weeks ago when hundreds of OpenAI-generated “agents” went rogue and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, lawmakers Wednesday called for radical action in the immediate aftermath of Coxon’s X posts late Tuesday night.
“There’s broad consensus — and in speaking with the AI companies directly, they want a regulatory framework,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), a vulnerable moderate incumbent who has introduced bipartisan AI safety legislation, said Wednesday.
He called it “one of the biggest issues that Congress has to tackle over the next two years.”
It’s far from certain this desire to make progress on the issue will translate into meaningful legislative activity — and certainly not before the end of the year, with some lawmakers questioning whether their colleagues take the matter seriously or fully understand how the technology even works.
Democratic Rep. Sam Liccardo of California, who leads AI policy for the centrist New Democrat Coalition, said in an interview his team recently struggled to convince other members to attend a series of events at the Library of Congress that featured OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“There have been serious conversations among a small number of us, and we need that number to be larger. There is a percentage of my colleagues who are still trying to spell AI,” Liccardo said, adding, “we need to dramatically increase the base knowledge of Congress if we’re going to legislate meaningfully. And I know that is not going to happen overnight.”
Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas), who introduced a bill this summer to create an AI “kill switch” with Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), said in an interview he thought efforts to put checks on advanced models would be a priority in the next Congress. Quicker action, he agreed, would be a heavy lift.
“The number of days that we have left between the election and the end of the year is going to be very tough to educate members and then move a meaningful bill,” he said. “The broad scope of members on both sides of the aisle are trying to get caught up.”
There’s also not yet consensus on the appropriate reaction and policy response to the threat posed by superintelligence. No committee in either chamber has considered a substantive proposal to put guardrails on AI development amid disagreements over how aggressive the federal government should be in regulating the private sector and stifling innovation.
Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who convened a markup of AI-adjacent bills in August that steered clear of addressing safety regulations, said in an appearance on ABC’s “The View” Wednesday that the new warnings were “highly concerning” and endorsed passing legislation to prevent “catastrophic risk.”
He pointed to a pending bipartisan bill from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that is expected to represent a more targeted approach than a version of the legislation that advanced out of the Commerce Committee in the previous Congress.
Klobuchar and Thune, however, have provided no timetable for when their new measure might be formally introduced. Thune’s office did not respond to a request for comment, while Klobuchar in a statement said only that she would “continue to work toward a bipartisan agreement on legislation for commonsense guardrails to address the risks posed by AI systems,” while adding, “it’s clear we need to act now and not wait.”
Across the Capitol, House Democrats made especially clear in the aftermath of Coxon’s X posts that they will seek to move quickly if they win the majority in November, with some now discussing whether to establish a select committee on AI.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries convened a Democrat-only AI commission this term to formulate policy recommendations after Speaker Mike Johnson declined to reconstitute a bipartisan AI taskforce, and co-chair Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) projected confidence Wednesday the group’s forthcoming report would pave the way for meaningful legislative action on AI safety.
Passing AI safety legislation will require buy-in from Republicans, however — and Gottheimer, asked if Congress is moving fast enough, blamed GOP leaders for lack of momentum.
“What you’re really asking me is if the Republican leadership is working fast enough on this, right? Because they’re the ones who control the agenda,” he said. “I think you’ve seen a lot of action out of members of Congress. I think our commission has been incredibly active.”
Other Democrats joined Gottheimer in blaming Republicans for slow-walking legislation.
“It only would take one phone call from the speaker to say, ‘I want five Democrats and five Republicans in a room, and I want them to emerge from that room next week with legislation that we can bring to committee and then bring to the floor,’” said Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “That’s it.”
Spokespeople for Johnson and Jeffries did not return requests for comment.
Even if Democrats take back gavels after the midterms, they, too, lack a clear plan to address the growing threat of unchecked AI. Progressive leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), are advocating for a ban on superintelligence — a proposal that more moderate Democrats claim has no viable path to passage.
“Bernie Sanders,” said Gottheimer, “wants to put it in the box and throw it away, but that’s not living in reality. I think we need a reasonable, smart, commonsense approach that’s realistic but also sets up mandatory rules of the road — legislative rules of the road.”
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) brokered a bipartisan safety bill with Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) that the two lawmakers have pitched as a consensus proposal, but it has so far failed to win the support to advance.
“You cannot just put your head in the sand on AI and say, ‘I hope it works out.’ You can’t just go in and say, ‘Government’s got the solution — they’re just going to ban it all.’ That’s just not going to work,’” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a staunch conservative who is leaving Congress at the end of the year, said in an interview. “We’re going to have to be thoughtful as leaders and actually have some friggin’ leadership.”
Owen Dahlkamp, Gabby Miller, Katherine Long, Mia McCarthy and Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.
Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) plans to seek the top GOP spot on the Judiciary Committee, a spokesperson said. The announcement came soon after POLITICO reported that the current chair, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), does not intend to seek a fourth term leading Republicans on the panel. Lee, who is seeking her third term in November, is well down the committee’s seniority list but could make a case to the House GOP steering committee that she is best equipped to lead the key panel as a former state judge.
DALLAS — Rep. Jim Jordan said Wednesday he plans to end his eight-year run leading Republicans on two of the House’s most prominent committees after this Congress, raising fresh questions about what comes next for the veteran Ohio lawmaker.
Jordan, 62, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Republican midterm convention that he has no plans to seek a waiver of the GOP’s three-term limit on committee leaders to retain the top spot on the Judiciary Committee.
Nor, he said, would he seek to return to lead Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. He previously served as ranking member from 2019 to 2020, when he took the GOP reins at Judiciary, and has at least two terms of eligibility remaining there.
“No, I don’t plan to do that,” Jordan said. “There’s other people who are very interested in Oversight.”
Jordan could have requested a waiver from the House Republican Steering Committee, and several other sitting GOP chairs — including Agriculture’s G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) and Armed Services’ Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) — are expected to do just that. He brushed off questions about why we would not join others in seeking to keep the coveted gavel overseeing the Justice Department, immigration law and other high-profile matters.
“I’m just not going to do it,” he said.
The decision is likely to stoke speculation about another potential leadership run for Jordan, who is seeking his 11th term this fall. He unsuccessfully sought the speakership after Kevin McCarthy’s 2023 ouster, and there has been open chatter in recent months that he is quietly setting the grounds to make another run at the top job.
After flatly denying plans to retain a committee gavel, Jordan was far less direct in addressing other questions about his future in the House.
“I’m focused on one thing, one thing only: winning,” he said. “If the left wins, where they want to take the country is very, very scary.”
Jordan, for instance, did not rule out running against Speaker Mike Johnson for the gavel if Republicans hold onto House majority this fall.
“As I said, I’m focused on winning. We got to win,” he said when asked if he could challenge Johnson, adding “that’s why I’ve been … in 15 different states, and so we just keep going to help our colleagues and candidates.”
Jordan only serves on the Judiciary and Oversight committees, and it is rare for veteran Republican members who are term-limited out of committee leadership posts to stick around as back-benchers in the House.
Jordan did not criticize his fellow chairs who are seeking waivers: “They want a waiver, that’s fine. It’s been granted in the past, and sometimes they get them, sometimes they don’t,” he said, noting it was “up to the conference and the steering committee.”
Asked if he would stay in Congress without a committee or conference leadership position, he noted he is running for reelection: “I’m going to go represent the people in the 4th District.”
Asked a final time what’s next for his decadeslong political career, Jordan chuckled and went through his plans for the day.
“I got like three more interviews,” Jordan said. “And then I’m going to go sit down in that suite, and we’ve got to have some popcorn and watch the speeches. I think that’s what’s next for me.”
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