The reigning irony in Washington as the second Trump administration reaches the 25-day milestone is the contrast between the breakneck pace of executive activity and the plodding, often confused meanderings of the congressional Republicans presumed to carry the burden of implementing much of the 47th president’s agenda. We’ve been told that planning for the big congressional budget bills needed to impose Trump’s will on the country began well before last November’s election gave the GOP a trifecta and reduced Democrats to a fractious minority looking for ways to remain relevant.
Yet here we are in mid-February of 2025 and Congress’s ruling Republicans have a lot of problems to solve, without a lot of specific direction from the presidential master they all want to serve. If they don’t begin to answer these questions soon, they are in real danger of being made as irrelevant as their Democratic colleagues, thanks to Trump’s executive orders and Elon Musk’s wild raids on federal agencies, which are creating new facts on the ground every day. So it’s helpful to sort through the decisions they need to make pronto:
1.
Who goes first, House or Senate?
While House and Senate Republicans are more aligned than ever before in their support for Donald Trump, they are really struggling to get on the same page about how to implement his legislative agenda. The most basic question of all is: which chamber takes the lead? According to Article I of the U.S. Constitution, revenue measures must begin in the House, but over time Congress has found many highly technical ways around that provision, and it’s now more of a tradition than an actual rule. In the 119th Congress, it was originally assumed the House would initiate a budget resolution setting up the basic framework for the big changes in spending and taxes Trump has demanded, and then once both chambers had acted on it the House would take the lead in writing a budget reconciliation bill (or bills) that would make these changes without being subject to a Senate filibuster.
But partly out of impatience over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s struggles to reach consensus with his troops over the basic structure of the budget, and striking differences of opinion over legislative strategy (see below), the Senate Budget Committee (chaired by the very opinionated Lindsey Graham) decided to move on its own, and reported a budget resolution days before the House Budget Committee reported its own. The race to become lead-dog on the legislative sled continues.
2.
Should there be one reconciliation bill or two?
All along, the GOP’s House-Senate disconnect has included a sharp strategic difference, with the Senate preferring two bills (the first, focused on giving Trump “quick wins” on border security and energy and getting the mass deportation program rolling, and the second, providing the tax cuts he wants and the vast spending offsets needed to keep them from blowing up deficits to intolerable levels) and the House just one with all of Trump’s legislation. The latter approach is mostly motivated by Johnson’s fears that one big vote is all he can muster thanks to the tiny majority he enjoys in the House, but it’s complicated by the fact that the extremely pivotal House Freedom Caucus faction prefers the two-bill strategy. Meanwhile in multiple meetings with his congressional vassals Trump has expressed a mild preference for “one big, beautiful bill,” but with his vice president, his chief policy advisor Stephen Miller and his budget director Russell Vought reportedly favoring the two-bill approach, he’s not insisting on anything.
It’s long past time for this very basic question to have been resolved, but a resolution is not in sight unless Trump makes up his mind and puts down his foot.
3.
How deep a deficit hole will Congress dig to meet Trump’s tax and spending demands?
With either a one- or two-bill approach, Congress will be constrained by the deficit reduction requirements of the Congressional Budget Act, which makes reconciliation and the ability to avoid filibusters possible in the first place. Rules aside, political momentum has been steadily building among Republicans in and beyond Congress to make deficit reduction a much bigger priority than it was in the first Trump administration.
Yet Trump is demanding multiple costly things. He wants an extension of the tax cuts Congress enacted in 2017, most of which expire at the end of this year, which will cost an estimated $4 trillion over 10 years. Trump also wants an assortment of new tax cuts (e.g., an exemption of tips and of Social Security benefits from income taxation) he promised during the 2024 campaign, which could add a trillion or many trillions to the cost of tax cuts, depending on how they are framed, along with more recent pledges to reduce corporate income taxes and restore a deduction for state and local taxes, both potentially costing trillions more. And he also wants major increases in both defense and border security spending (at least a few hundred billion dollars) to redeem his pledge to “close the border,” and also to begin his mass deportation program.
Some tricks are available to Republicans to reduce the hole Trump wants them to dig. They can pretend the tax cuts they are creating and extending will expire before ten years are up, reducing the cost artificially (as was done in 2017). They can inversely pretend that simply extending existing tax cuts are deficit-neutral even if they aren’t offset, or they can assume (using the ancient mythologies of supply-side economics) that tax cuts will produce glorious levels of economic growth that pay for them in automatically higher revenues. All these essentially phony stratagems would need to be endorsed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that “scores” budget bills, and also by the Senate Parliamentarian who decides whether reconciliation bill provisions are allowable under the rules.
4.
How far are they willing to go with controversial domestic spending cuts?
While congressional Republicans may try to minimize the need for spending cuts with the above-mentioned tricks, or simply back-load them on the calendar with a two-bill reconciliation strategy that postpones expensive tax cuts until later in the year, they will definitely need to enact significant cuts in domestic spending.
Trump has largely placed the highly popular and politically sensitive middle-class entitlements of Social Security and Medicare off-limits (though Republicans may be tempted to advance Medicare “reforms” like expansion of private-sector Medicare Advantage plans that save federal dollars without overt benefit cuts). The brunt of the burden thus will be borne by low-income entitlement programs like Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps), and also by the broad category of non-defense discretionary spending that covers everything from agriculture benefits to education and environmental protection to lands management (largely addressed through appropriations bills rather than reconciliation).
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what we are talking about, the draft House budget resolution assumes between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion in spending cuts (depending on the size of tax cuts). Medicaid (and the closely associated Obamacare health care subsidies) as a whole cost just over $800 billion a year, and if they can’t get the requisite savings from entitlement programs, all of non-defense discretionary spending amounts to under a trillion dollars a year. These cuts will be controversial, and the pain will be felt not just by low-income beneficiaries of these programs, but by the state governments that often administer and jointly finance them. One key example is the proposal, which was included in the GOP’s failed 2017 “Obamacare Repeal” legislation and may emerge again this year, to impose a per capita cap on federal Medicaid spending. The federal savings will largely be accomplished by shifting costs to the states. State leaders, including Republicans, won’t be happy.
But it’s hard to imagine a budget reconciliation bill getting through the House without the deep spending cuts the House Freedom Caucus favors as ends in themselves. Adding the intense pressure is the fact that Trump has demanded a debt limit increase that the House has included in its budget blueprint. Many HFC members oppose such measures as a matter of principle, and may demand even deeper cuts than ever as a trophy.
5.
How will these budget decisions be coordinated with executive-branch initiatives like DOGE?
If this scenario isn’t complicated enough, congressional Republicans will have to somehow coordinate budget cuts with the “efficiencies” being achieved via executive branch spending reductions forced by Elon Musk’s DOGE and possibly a renewal of federal funding “freezes” by Vought’s Office of Management and Budget. The original idea of DOGE as sort of a super-auditor making recommendations to OMB and Congress gave way to Musk’s high-speed efforts to lop personnel and entire programs based on relatively vague presidential directions and a radical usurpation of congressional authority. All this madness is caught up in nationwide litigation that may lead to multiple landmark Supreme Court decisions. How congressional Republicans process all this in pursuing their own plans represents an unprecedented challenge and something of a shot in the dark.
6.
Will Democrats use their leverage to gain some input into the budget decisions?
While House and Senate Republican budget plans are being developed with the assumption that Democrats will have no input at all, minority party votes will be required to keep the federal government operating beyond March 14, when a stopgap spending bill enacted in December expires. Normally Democrats as a party have dutifully supported appropriations bills to avoid government shutdowns, but that won’t be the case this year; the big question is what concessions they will demand with this one source of leverage. They could simply play their hand to keep current year spending from succumbing to the deep cuts the House Freedom Caucus will want, or instead make other demands affecting budget reconciliation measures and/or DOGE’s rampage through the federal government. So strictly speaking, Republicans aren’t the only members of Congress with decisions to make very soon.
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