Five weeks away from a government funding deadline, tensions are spiking among lawmakers and shutdown fears are rising.

Top-level relations soured Friday, with Speaker Mike Johnson accusing Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of “trying to set up some sort of a government shutdown” and saying Democrats were “unresponsive.”

Jeffries then shot back, telling reporters Johnson’s comments were “projection” as Democrats remain at the negotiating table. He had backing from the top House GOP appropriator, who said he had spoken with his Democratic counterparts Thursday.

Republicans have been hounding Johnson about a spending plan as the speaker tries to hammer out their conference’s differences on their separate, party-line domestic policy bill. Johnson told reporters later Friday he’d been “laser focused on reconciliation for the last 24 hours,” referring to the budget procedure Republicans intend to use to pass their agenda.

Despite the bluster, top appropriators from both chambers and both parties — known as the “four corners” — are trying to hash out an agreement on topline spending levels. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the panel, continues to present a relatively upbeat — if urgent — mood about the talks even as the shutdown deadline approaches.

But there are obvious snags. Democrats say they are awaiting a unified offer from House and Senate Republicans, whose numbers are still not aligned. Republicans, meanwhile, are openly discussing a full-year continuing resolution, which would continue fiscal 2024’s spending levels into fiscal 2025 with only a few potential modifications.

Democrats, still feeling burned by the last-minute blowup of a funding deal they cut with Republicans in December, aren’t in any mood to help out with that. DeLauro, for instance, said a yearlong stopgap bill “should be acceptable to no one.”

DeLauro said it was still possible to come to a deal but added that what happened in December — with billionaire Donald Trump ally Elon Musk publicly seeking to tank the agreement — “can’t happen again. We need assurances that once the agreement is made, we can move forward and get these bills done.”

“After twice breaking deals last session, I don’t think there’s a Democrat who says, let them hold up a football again so we can try to kick it,” added Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.). “And it’s going to have to be something consequential and verifiable before I think any of us would be there to support.”

Cole said he continues to prefer passing new, written-from-scratch spending bills for fiscal 2025 over a full-year stopgap. But as appetite grows within his conference to keep spending down, doing so could be a tall order.

“It’s not an unreasonable argument. We’re halfway through. We haven’t gotten it done. Why don’t we wait for the president to lay out his budget and proceed from there?” Cole told reporters Friday morning, discussing the rising calls for a CR. “Every day that goes by, the pressure to just throw in the cards and quit mounts.”

Meanwhile, some Democrats are discussing using their limited leverage over government funding and a coming debt ceiling deadline to extract concessions from Republicans. Those could include protections for “Dreamers,” farmworkers and immigrant families as they seek to respond to GOP hard-line moves on immigration.

“They are a crossroads in this entire process that would allow us to perhaps insert those three pieces into the debate,” said Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus.

But with Republicans in control of the House and Senate and the White House, Democrats could face a hard choice next month between shutting down the government — something they typically oppose under nearly any circumstance — and supporting a GOP-drafted bill to keep the lights on.

“We’ll see,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Friday. “Everybody knows that Democrats don’t want to shut down the government.”

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

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.”

Senate Republicans will hold a committee vote next week on a budget blueprint that will unlock their two-bill strategy for enacting the heart of President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda.

Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced Friday that his panel will meet Wednesday and Thursday to debate and vote on the budget resolution, which paves the way for a border, defense and energy bill. Graham also released the text of his budget resolution Friday.

“This budget resolution jumpstarts a process that will give President Trump’s team the money they need to secure the border and deport criminals, and make America strong and more energy independent,” Graham said in a statement Friday about the budget resolution.

The formal announcement comes after Graham told Senate Republicans during a closed-door lunch Wednesday that his committee would vote next week on their budget blueprint. Senate Republicans will be at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night for a celebratory dinner with Trump where they intend to ask him about whether their chamber should move first on the budget reconciliation legislation.

The Senate is effectively in a race with the House, which wants to pursue one sweeping bill that would also fold in an overhaul of the tax code. House Republicans have been struggling to get on the same page regarding their strategy, which delayed their plans to consider their own budget resolution this week inside the House Budget Committee.

But after around-the-clock meetings this week, Republicans are intending to work through the weekend and want to have a vote in committee next week on their own budget blueprint, which would tie together tax, energy, border and defense spending.