Speaker Mike Johnson flashed a grin as he chided reporters in the Capitol this morning: “I told you not to doubt us.” Moments earlier, the House had approved a budget proposal that could allow Republicans to pass the president’s “one big beautiful bill”—a boost for not only Donald Trump’s legislative agenda but also Johnson’s job security.
In fairness to the speaker’s doubters, they had good reason to question whether the budget would pass. And they still have reason to question whether Congress’s warring Republicans will ever agree to slash the trillions in taxes and spending that Trump is demanding.
Adopting the budget resolution was supposed to be the easy part. The 70-page document that the House and Senate approved in the past week contains scarcely any policy details. Republicans have yet to agree on which programs to cut, which taxes to reduce, and by how much. The most politically sensitive of the GOP’s potential targets is Medicaid, yet the word appears only once. The main purpose of the measure is procedural, not substantive: Republicans in both chambers needed to pass a budget in order to unlock a process known as reconciliation, which allows the party to circumvent a Senate filibuster and pass Trump’s economic agenda with 51 votes rather than 60.
[Read: Bad news for Trump’s legislative agenda]
Yet Johnson made even this preliminary step look nearly impossible. When Senate Republicans finalized their version of the budget over the weekend, archconservatives in the House denounced it immediately, even though Trump had endorsed it. Perhaps the conflict was inevitable. The Senate GOP’s priority is not to lower spending but to make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. So instead of actually offsetting the estimated $5 trillion that the extension would cost, Republicans in the upper chamber simply changed their budget baseline to give the impression that extending the cuts wouldn’t explode the deficit. The House’s hard-liners balked. Representative Chip Roy of Texas called the Senate proposal “a joke” that didn’t add up. “Math still doesn’t math,” he said, according to NBC News.
Johnson faced well more than a dozen holdouts in his conference when the week started; to pass the budget over unanimous Democratic opposition, he could afford to lose no more than three. In past internal party fights this year—including his own bid for speaker in January—Johnson has relied on Trump to coerce his most recalcitrant members. The president obliged once again: “Stop grandstanding!” he warned Republicans when he addressed a party fundraiser on Tuesday night. But this time, not even Trump could persuade some of the House conservatives. On Wednesday, lingering opposition forced the speaker to call off a planned vote.
The conservatives’ problem wasn’t with Trump but with Republicans in the Senate, who have resisted the deep spending cuts that far-right GOP lawmakers have long demanded—and which, thanks to Elon Musk’s aggressive moves at DOGE, they believe they are on the verge of achieving. “In DOGE we trust,” Representative Tom McClintock of California said during a House debate on the proposal. The budget plan requires that the Senate find only a fraction of the spending reductions that the House has to find, suggesting to conservatives that when a final bill comes up for a vote later this year, the cuts won’t materialize.
In exchange for their support, conservatives demanded that the Senate agree to cut at least $1.5 trillion in spending. This morning, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune stood before TV cameras to promise just that: “We are committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people while also preserving our essential programs,” Johnson said. Thune, however, was not so explicit. “We are aligned with the House,” he said. “The speaker’s talked about $1.5 trillion. We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum.”
The problem for Thune—and for spending hawks in the House—is that he also has plenty of Republican senators who believe $1.5 trillion is far too deep to cut. Budget experts have said it will be difficult, if not impossible, to slash that much without significant cuts to Medicaid (or to other prized safety-net programs, such as Medicare and Social Security). And several GOP senators, including conservative Trump allies such as Josh Hawley of Missouri, don’t want to touch Medicaid.
Nonetheless, the assurances from Johnson and Thune proved sufficient to sway the conservative holdouts, which is no small achievement. (For good measure, the speaker reportedly told conservatives that they should oust him if he breaks his promise.) GOP hard-liners have typically been the House’s most recalcitrant members. Today, though, all but two conservatives voted for a proposal that they had trashed just a few days earlier, based only on nonbinding pledges from their leadership. “In the interest of comity, I will take them at their word,” Roy said in a statement afterward, explaining his change of heart. But he warned that he wouldn’t support a final package unless it had specific and significant cuts, including “Medicaid reforms.”
[Reihan Salam: The fiscal choice the GOP needs to make]
Such threats were pervasive after the House vote today, and not just on the right. Representative Rob Bresnahan, a swing-district Republican from Pennsylvania who also backed the budget, said he would oppose a final bill if it “guts Medicaid.” Still, it would be foolish to bet against congressional Republicans in the weeks and months ahead. The pressure to pass Trump’s agenda will be intense: If the GOP can’t pass a final bill, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts will expire, resulting in an across-the-board hike at the end of the year. And the president has demonstrated that he’ll go to great lengths to ensure loyalty from his party.
Yet today’s vote won’t clear the legislative path for Trump’s agenda as much as Johnson and his colleagues might hope. Republicans have punted their biggest decisions and settled few of their biggest fights. They’ve taken the easy votes, but the hardest ones are yet to come.