House Passes Budget Bill: Trump Touts ‘Big First Step’ For Mike Johnson
President Donald Trump shakes hands with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., after addressing the
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House Republicans Squeak Through Budget Resolution
But there is a lot more work to do, and no consensus yet.
BY DAVID DAYEN
FEBRUARY 26, 2025
FRANCIS CHUNG/POLITICO VIA AP IMAGES
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) makes a statement to reporters after the House passed a budget resolution at the U.S. Capitol, February 25, 2025.
After sending members home for the night, House Republicans called them back on Tuesday and secured passage of an expansive budget resolution that includes virtually the entire Trump agenda. The final vote was 217-215, with all but one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), voting for the budget resolution, which sets a path for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, partially offset by at least $2 trillion in spending cuts.
That tiniest of margins carried out what is the easy part of the budget reconciliation package, and it isn’t even done. In fact, the House budget resolution is thought to be dead on arrival in the Senate.
Passage of the resolution represents a victory for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), especially as it looked bleak earlier on Tuesday. Johnson was able to flip several conservative House members to advance the measure, and he needed everyone after several House Democrats who had missed votes earlier in the day showed up for the evening. (Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado showed up three weeks after giving birth.)
More from David Dayen
Johnson was able to corral the votes mainly because a budget resolution is so indistinct. The resolution sets topline numbers to instruct the various committees, which will then come back with the specifics. Throughout the day, House Republicans insisted that the proposed cuts didn’t mean what they clearly meant, because they were just instructions for committees that could be carried out in any manner.
In reality, when the Agriculture Committee is told to find $230 billion in cuts, there’s really only one thing that could mean: a rollback of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed poor people. Unless the Ag Committee decides randomly to wipe out the lion’s share of U.S. agricultural assistance, they’re going to go after food stamps, as was laid out in the menu of budget options earlier this year. Likewise, the Energy and Commerce Committee was instructed to make $880 billion in cuts, and there is really no way to do that without massive cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program for over 70 million poor Americans.
Being able to deny reality in the budget resolution is why every frontline Republican in a swing seat quickly agreed to the package, which would also spend about $200 billion over a decade on border security and mass deportations, while boosting the military budget by about $100 billion. When the Medicaid and food stamp cuts are specific and the impact clear, they will have a harder time pretending that the changes won’t harm their constituents.
Meanwhile, the holdouts were all conservatives who wanted more cuts. Massie correctly pointed out that the budget bill would increase deficits. Republicans have claimed that increased economic growth will fill the deficit gap; that’s what they said in 2017 with the first Trump tax cut bill, and it was wildly untrue.
House Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) had already sought to placate conservatives in his committee by creating incentives for additional budget cuts. If $2.5 trillion in cuts is found, for example, the tax cuts can go up to $5 trillion. However, if Republicans only reach $1.5 trillion in cuts, the tax cuts would have to fall to $4 trillion.
Already, House Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-MO) has said that a net $4.5 trillion in tax cuts is insufficient to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent while also adding all the tax promises he made on the campaign trail last year.
In fact, this will be the big sticking point with the Senate, whose budget resolution passed last week is completely different. The Senate preferred a two-bill strategy that included just the immigration and defense spending, offset mostly by energy measures, while saving the tax cuts for a second bill. The House bitterly opposed that, believing they will never have the ability to get two reconciliation votes through in one legislative session.
Passing a budget resolution gives the House the upper hand in the one-bill vs. two-bill debate. But permanent passage of the 2017 tax cuts is a deal-breaker for the Senate, and Budget Committee chair Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) clearly teed up his skinny budget resolution to tuck in larger military spending. The Senate will change the budget resolution significantly—a “major overhaul,” Graham told The Wall Street Journal—and send it back to the House. Both chambers must pass the same budget resolution to continue work.
If that finally happens—and the success of the House on Tuesday suggests it may eventually, if only because Republicans in the rank and file will agree to advance the process forward—then every single detail of a massive bill, the kind of thing that takes an entire legislative session to work out, would have to be hammered out. That includes how to contour Medicaid and food stamp cuts to appease moderates, where to find other available cuts, what level to bring in military spending at, and how to cram in all the tax questions, including expensive changes to the state and local tax deduction cap favored by Republicans in high-tax states, a graduated corporate income tax that favors domestic manufacturing, as well as the no tax on tips, overtime, and other policies supported by President Trump.
Meanwhile, almost none of this is going to be worked on over the next three weeks, because there’s a March 14 deadline to extend government funding. Republicans have little chance of passing that on their own, as their hard right wants tangible cuts as a down payment on the future budget. Democrats have shown no inclination to cooperate with votes that would be needed—not while Elon Musk is unilaterally canceling funding on his own whim. They want ironclad guarantees that anything they agree to will actually be spent for the rest of the fiscal year, something that is almost impossible for someone as mendacious as Trump to give them.
A government shutdown would complicate the budget debate. With Trump taking on the entirety of the state, he’ll be unable to escape blame for something that, combined with already fading economic fortunes, will further chip away at his economic approval. It also gives more time for Democrats to hammer away at the painful cuts that make some Republicans uncomfortable, especially those in areas with large numbers of working poor.
The expectation should be that Republicans iron out their differences, as the House did on the budget resolution. But there’s a very long way to go to get there, and so far nothing meaningful has actually passed. If it takes driving the length of the field to get to the president’s signature, right now Republicans are still back at their own 15-yard line after barely eking out a first down.
David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’
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The House of Representatives has adopted a resolution that will eventually become a massive multi-trillion-dollar bill full of President Donald Trump’s priorities on the border, defense, energy and taxes.
In a major victory for House GOP leaders, the resolution passed in a 217 to 215 vote.
All Democrats voted against the measure, along with lone Republican rebel Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who was concerned about its effect on the national deficit.
The next step is now for the relevant House committees to meet and build their own proposals, which will eventually be returned into the framework and negotiated into a compromise deal with the Senate.
BLACK CAUCUS CHAIR ACCUSES TRUMP OF ‘PURGE’ OF ‘MINORITY’ FEDERAL WORKERS
Speaker Mike Johnson is advancing a reconciliation bill aimed at Trump’s priorities through the House of Representatives. (Getty Images)
It was a dramatic scene in the House chamber on Monday night as Republican leaders delayed formally ending a vote for roughly 45 minutes as they worked to convince conservative fiscal hawks to support the legislation.
Impatient Democrats called out loud for the vote to be closed as Republicans huddled in varied groups.
Two people on the House floor told Fox News Digital that President Donald Trump got involved at one point, speaking to one of the holdouts, Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., by phone.
Reps. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, could be seen on the phone at other points on the House floor as well, but it’s not clear if they were speaking with Trump.
At one point, House GOP leaders appeared to lose confidence that they had enough support and abruptly canceled the planned vote.
Moments later, however, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were rushing back to the House floor and Fox News Digital was told the vote would be held.
Meanwhile, three House Democrats who had been absent early in the day returned for the Tuesday evening vote in dramatic fashion.
Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., who had a baby roughly a month ago, returned to the House floor with her infant to oppose the bill. And Rep. Kevin Mullin, R-Calif., who was recently hospitalized for an infection, appeared in the chamber aided by a walker.
House and Senate Republicans are aiming to use their majorities to advance Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process.
It’s a Senate maneuver that lowers the threshold for passage from two-thirds to a simple majority, but it’s used when a party controls both houses of Congress and the White House because it allows that party to pass its policy goals even under the slimmest margins.
And Republicans are dealing with slim margins indeed; with current numbers, the House GOP can afford no more than one defection to pass anything without Democratic votes if all liberals are voting.
On the Senate side, Republicans can lose no more than two of their own in the reconciliation process.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune is waiting in the wings with a Plan B. (Getty Images)
The House resolution aimed to increase spending on border security, the judiciary and defense by roughly $300 billion, while seeking at least $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending cuts elsewhere.
As written, the House bill also provided $4.5 trillion to extend President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions, which expire at the end of this year.
An amendment negotiated by House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, and conservatives on his panel would also force lawmakers to make $2 trillion in cuts, or else risk the $4.5 trillion for Trump’s tax cuts getting reduced by the difference.
The resolution also fulfilled Trump’s directive to act on the debt limit, raising it by $4 trillion or roughly two years.
NONCITIZEN VOTER CRACKDOWN LED BY GOP AHEAD OF 2026 MIDTERMS
A bipartisan deal struck in 2023 saw the debt limit suspended until January 2025. Now, projections show the U.S. could run out of cash to pay its debts by spring if Congress does not act.
The resolution’s odds were touch and go for much of the week so far, since House lawmakers returned from a week-long recess period Monday.
Several fiscal conservatives had demanded more assurances from House GOP leadership that Republicans would seek deep spending cuts to offset the cost of Trump’s priorities.
Republican lawmakers in more competitive districts are concerned some cuts may go too far, however.
The resolution directs the House Energy & Commerce Committee to find at least $880 billion in spending cuts – which those lawmakers fear will mean severe cuts for federal programs like Medicaid.
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Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., pushed back against fears of such cuts during his weekly press conference on Tuesday.
“Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste and abuse. Everybody knows that. We all know it intuitively. No one in here would disagree,” Johnson said. “What we’re talking about is rooting out the fraud, waste, and abuse. It doesn’t matter what party you’re in, you should be for that because it saves your money, and it preserves the programs so that it is available for the people who desperately need it.”
It was also supported by a wide swath of Republicans, including conservative Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, a member of the House Budget Committee that approved the bill earlier this month.
“It’s the best bill we’re going to get,” Gill said while praising Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, for his efforts. “If I were writing it then I’d write it differently, but this is the best we’re gonna get it.”
Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, said he was eager to begin working on “cutting taxes for Iowans, securing our border, unleashing American energy production, and eliminating waste and fraud in our government.”
Elizabeth Elkind is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital leading coverage of the House of Representatives. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.
Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com
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