Senate Republican committee chairs delivered a blunt message to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) last week that they want the Senate to assert itself and not let the White House and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) dictate to them.
They said the Senate should stand firm, not just on the budget bill that will be used to move President Trump’s agenda, but also on preventing a shutdown and not accepting a year-long government funding resolution that would trigger cuts to defense spending.
“It’s the desire of the Senate to legislate,” said one Senate Republican source who said Thune and the GOP committee chairs discussed their desire to make major changes to the House-passed budget plan, which would not make the Trump tax cuts permanent, as well as to avoid a year-long continuing resolution.
“The conversation on reconciliation was that the Senate still has a role to play here and we can’t be dominated,” the source added. “As much as anything, it’s frustration” over how the House budget was crafted.
The source said about half a dozen chairs expressed their desire for the Senate to rewrite the Senate budget and not allow the House GOP leaders to claim that only their product has a realistic chance of passing the narrowly divided lower chamber.
The committee leaders also voiced their frustrations over the growing momentum behind a long-term continuing resolution that would not allow lawmakers to substantially adjust discretionary spending priorities for the rest of fiscal 2025.
“On appropriations, apparently, the House can’t pass anything but a CR,” the source said, referring to a year-long continuing resolution.
Several other people with knowledge of the discussion confirmed the source’s account of the meeting.
The message was not meant as a criticism of Thune, who took control of the Senate agenda in January.
He has used his leadership perch to forcefully advocate for a two-step approach to moving Trump’s agenda by focusing first on a border security, energy reform and defense spending package before taking up the complex issue of tax reform later this year.
Senior Republicans have a lot of trust and confidence in Thune, the former chair of the Senate Commerce Committee and a longtime member of the Senate GOP leadership.
But there’s growing frustration with the new momentum behind a House-passed budget plan that would lump border security, energy, defense and tax reform into one massive reconciliation package and pay for much of it with up to $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid and other mandatory spending programs.
Trump has consistently endorsed the House plan of trying to pass all of his agenda — an extension of the expiring tax cuts included — in what he called “one big beautiful bill,” even though GOP senators have repeatedly tried to persuade him to embrace Thune’s less risky two-bill approach
Thune flexed his political muscle last month when he brought a Senate Republican-drafted budget resolution focused on border security, energy and defense to the Senate floor, passing it quickly after a marathon session of votes that lasted until nearly 5 o’clock in the early morning.
That power move put pressure on Johnson and House Republicans to get moving on their own budget plan, which they narrowly passed by a 217-215 vote Tuesday.
Several Senate Republican chairs are also exasperated that the House GOP leadership has endorsed passing a year-long government funding resolution that would likely trigger a 1 percent across-the-board discretionary spending cut that would hit defense programs especially hard.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on Thursday called a year-long continuing resolution “a terrible idea” because it would hamstring defense programs and represent the first time in years Congress failed to pass an annual defense appropriations bill.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was not at all pleased with the Speaker’s decision to opt for a year-long continuing resolution for all discretionary spending programs.
“The leadership knows how I feel, that I’m very much opposed to that approach,” she said.
A Republican senator who requested anonymity to comment candidly on the plan to pass a long-term funding stopgap said Johnson needs to “lay out the facts” to House conservatives who have pushed for that option.
“I’m not sure House conservatives understand how detrimental it is to their own interests. Somebody needs to lay out the facts,” the senator said. “It’s not a good idea.”
The lawmaker noted that a year-long continuing resolution would simply extend the spending policies of fiscal 2024 that were negotiated when Democrats still controlled the White House and Senate.
Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned that a year-long continuing resolution would delay the reorganization of the Defense Department’s budget to respond to new and emerging national security threats.
“There’s been plenty of talk about how the Administration plans to reprioritize targeted parts of the Pentagon budget. But there hasn’t been nearly enough talk about the hit the military would take — across the board — if we fail to pass full-year appropriations and wind up with a CR,” McConnell said in a statement shared by his office and first reported by CQ.
The House spending strategy, however, got a big boost when Trump endorsed it late Thursday, urging GOP lawmakers: “Let’s get it done!”
“As usual, Sleepy Joe Biden left us a total MESS. The Budget from last YEAR is still not done,” Trump posted on Truth Social, blaming the Biden administration for not finishing up the spending bills for 2025.
“We are working very hard with the House and Senate to pass a clean, temporary government funding Bill (“CR”) to the end of September,” he wrote.
Thune sought to set the direction of the budget fight at a Senate GOP retreat at the Library of Congress, where he unveiled a plan to break up Trump’s agenda into two separate budget reconciliation packages, hoping it would allow Republicans to ring up early victories on border security, energy policy and defense spending.
Instead, Johnson has insisted on combining those issues with the time-consuming tax policy debate, which gives him more leverage over his slim House majority, where rebellious conservatives are threatening to hold up the tax bill.
Several Republican committee leaders said last week there are major problems with the House-passed budget, such as its failure to use a “current policy” baseline to score the budgetary impact of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which expires at the end of this year.
House Republicans opted to use a “current law” budget baseline, which would assume the expiration of the tax cuts, and require Congress to find trillions of dollars in spending cuts to offset its budgetary impact.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the House budget resolution would need a “major overhaul” in order to pass the Senate.
“The tax cuts are not permanent; they don’t use current policy [budget baseline]. It would be a major overhaul,” Graham told reporters.
Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) said the House-passed resolution would need significant revisions.
Asked if Senate Republicans would simply accept the House budget plan, Crapo responded: “Oh no.”
“I think everybody knows, now the work starts over here,” he said.
The Republican senators’ demands that Congress use a budget scoring method that would make it easier to extend Trump’s tax cuts permanently has already changed the conversation in the House.
Johnson said Wednesday that using the Senate’s preferred “current policy” baseline “makes good logical sense.”
“It’s a really important principle, and I hope that we can employ that because it makes a big difference in the [cost] calculations,” he told reporters.
