Congress

The House GOP budget resolution is in trouble

Published

3 weeks ago

February 18, 2025

Speaker Mike Johnson is staring down at least a dozen Republican holdouts on the budget blueprint he wants to put on the House floor in the coming days — and he can only afford to lose one member and still approve the resolution along party lines.

Johnson and his whip team are using the current week-long recess to ramp up engagement with undecided Republicans, including seven members — if not more — who have raised serious concerns about deep cuts to Medicaid in the House GOP budget resolution. Several other members are wary of a move to raise the debt limit as part of the plan.

In private meetings and calls with these members over the last few days, Republican leaders have argued that adopting the budget blueprint is simply the first step toward being able to craft the massive legislative package to enact President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda through the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process.

According to four people granted anonymity to share private conversations, GOP leaders are assuring members they can still debate the specifics of that package in the weeks ahead — appealing to them not to stand in the way of delivering Trump’s biggest priorities.

But the fiscal blueprint adopted by the House Budget Committee last week, to which GOP leaders negotiated a last-minute addition to appease hard-liners, would now require panels to reach a new target of $2 trillion in spending cuts to pay for the bill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will need to cut $880 billion from programs under its purview, including Medicaid.

Many lawmakers aren’t convinced their colleagues will be able to achieve necessary savings without “significantly cutting” the safety net program, according to two Republicans aware of internal party conversations. The GOP plan to enact work requirements for Medicaid would only net about $100 billion in savings over 10 years.

The vulnerable incumbents wary of slashing Medicaid services include Reps. David Valadao of California, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and others from redder districts. They were generally blindsided by the deeper level of proposed cuts, a Republican said, as that possibility never came up in earlier discussions with GOP leaders.

Now, the members want GOP leaders to explain how they’re going to cut $880 billion across Energy and Commerce programs “and not undermine the basic care provided by Medicaid as the President requested,” said another Republican aware of conversations.

Leaders are attending to concerns from other corners of their conference, too — for instance, a slice of lawmakers in high tax blue states remain wary that the budget plan doesn’t include enough room to increase the cap on a key deduction for state and local taxes in blue states.

The House GOP whip team on Monday evening called Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, along with several other remaining holdouts, to stave off opposition based on leadership’s plans to use the reconciliation bill to raise the debt limit, according to the four people familiar with the conversations. GOP leaders have said debt limit concerns among members have softened in recent weeks.

Burchett and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who also opposes raising the debt ceiling, want even deeper spending cuts across the board. Burchett is still undecided on the resolution and Massie has privately told other Republicans that he’s a “no” — though he’s pushing to include in the final bill his legislation that exempts Social Security benefits from income taxes and some Republicans feel he could be persuaded.

GOP leaders are also watching Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who has also pressed for more spending cuts. Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida has also pushed for the reconciliation package to include her “REINS Act” that would curtail federal rule-making.

Another complication to the House GOP whip operation is that Senate Republicans are speeding ahead this week to adopt their own budget resolution. For the time being, however, fiscal hard-liners in the House appear to be standing by their promise to support Johnson’s plan on the floor rather than jump ship for the Senate’s alternative.

Some White House officials and senior House GOP aides are even quietly hoping that the added pressure of Senate action forces House Republicans to fall in line on their side of the Capitol, according to two people aware of party strategy. Trump has yet to call key holdouts in order to secure their support.

Congress

Mike Johnson gets candid about Elon Musk

Published

3 hours ago

March 12, 2025

Blue Light Newsroom

Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday gave his most candid assessment yet of billionaire Elon Musk’s influence in Congress and the potential threat he poses to legislative dealmaking: “He can blow the whole thing up.”

Johnson, during a fireside chat at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center, described his work as speaker as managing a “giant control panel” with dials for his GOP members, one for President Donald Trump and one for Musk.

“Elon has the largest platform in the world, literally,” Johnson said of the X owner and head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. “And if he goes on and says something that’s misunderstood or misinterpreted about something we’re doing, he can blow the whole thing up.”

“So I spend a lot of time working with all these dials and all these folks, and I just run around all day and make sure everybody’s happy,” he added.

Johnson knows the depths of Musk’s influence from personal experience. In December, Musk helped tank a bipartisan government funding bill that the speaker negotiated, triggering chaos on Capitol Hill just before the holidays.

Musk, who is leading efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy under Trump, has stayed out of Johnson’s latest push to pass a stopgap plan to keep the government open through September. Speaking just after the House passed the bill Tuesday, Johnson called it “a feat” that Republicans were able to do so without needing help from Democrats.

With the funding bill heading to the Senate, Johnson said it would be up to “one man alone” — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — to avert a shutdown Saturday.

Congress

Johnson and Thune hash out future of GOP agenda

Published

5 hours ago

March 11, 2025

Blue Light Newsroom

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune met on Tuesday and discussed the sweeping domestic policy legislation at the top of their 2025 agenda.

The closed-door conversation came as the House and Senate struggle to quickly get on the same page as they try to pass President Donald Trump’s tax, energy and border priorities into law. Thune separately convened a meeting of GOP senators Tuesday to discuss the legislation.

“Both of us understand we’ve got to get this done. We’re trying to figure out the best way to do that,” Thune said after the meeting with Johnson, part of a regular series of meetings between the two leaders. “This is just a long, arduous process, but we’ll get there.”

House Republicans are negotiating a bill that aligns with their budget resolution, which teed up a single sprawling package containing all of Trump’s party-line priorities. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are warning that they are weeks away from being ready move as they discuss specifics of tax and spending cuts.

That’s led to House Republicans increasingly kvetching that they believe the Senate is moving too slowly. After a member of the Senate Finance Committee floated this week that the real deadline for getting the bill done is August, Johnson told reporters that “August is far too late.”

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Congress

Jordan lays out timeline for tackling high-skilled tech visas, immigration overhaul efforts

Published

5 hours ago

March 11, 2025

Blue Light Newsroom

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan has a strategy for how to give President Donald Trump’s top ally, Elon Musk, the changes to high-skilled visa rules the tech billionaire so desperately wants.

In interviews this week, the Ohio Republican said he is eyeing his party’s flagship immigration bill as the legislative vehicle for overhauling existing laws to increase the flow of immigrants into the United States with expertise in science, technology and engineering.

But Jordan made clear he wouldn’t be the driving force behind making those changes to so-called H-1B visas, which let tech companies hire foreign-born experts. The high-tech visas have support among some Republicans but far from the majority of GOP lawmakers.

Rather, Jordan said, he would expect the H-1B overhaul to come up as one of any number of concessions Republicans might make to sway Democrats in the Senate, who will be needed to clear any legislation for the president’s signature.

“I think we got to come back and pass [the bill] and send that to the Senate,” Jordan explained, at which point both chambers could “then start that debate on what happens with various visa programs we have — whether it’s the high-skilled one, whether it’s [agricultural] workers, whether it’s what happens to Dreamers.”

He added that a House-Senate conference committee on that immigration bill would also allow the White House to “weigh in” on high-skilled immigration.

“I think that’s the best play for it all to work, and to have the full debate on everything that impacts immigration policy,” Jordan said.

Still, Jordan’s openness to allowing some sort of visa reform to come to fruition in a final immigration bill suggests that top House Republicans are now willing to negotiate with the tech lobby, Democrats and some Senate Republicans who see workforce benefits to allowing more specialists into the country.

It’s also the first time Jordan has articulated his long-range vision for overhauling immigration policy, including in an arena that’s important to Musk, with whom the committee chair enjoys a longtime rapport. Musk has framed the push for high-skilled immigrants as a top priority for the Trump administration.

Trump has backed Musk in his fight with immigration restrictionists over increases to skilled visas or green card exemptions for high-tech workers. Jordan said Tuesday that he has yet to talk to Musk about high-skilled immigration, but “I’m sure we will.”

A lot has to happen before tackling the issue on Capitol Hill, however — notwithstanding that a new version of the Secure Our Borders Act, which passed the House in the last Congress and is commonly referred to as H.R. 2, has yet to be reintroduced.

First, Jordan said, congressional Republicans must pass broader legislation through the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process, which he sees as necessary for the GOP to enact broad swaths of Trump’s domestic policy agenda — including beefed up border security enforcement.

“There’s a sequence to this,” Jordan said, explaining his plans. The House Judiciary chair said it was necessary to “demonstrate to the country we’ve fully secured the border, and then you can look at the visa issues in the context of H.R. 2.”