On Thursday night, the House Budget Committee advanced their budget resolution, the first legislative step toward fulfilling Donald Trump’s policy agenda. The fiscal blueprint was advanced in a 21-16 party line vote after GOP hardliners on the committee were brought on board following weeks of negotiations. The next step for the resolution is a floor vote in the House, another difficult task with the GOP’s razor-thin majority.
The budget resolution contains reconciliation instructions, meaning that, if adopted by both chambers, it will instruct certain committees to draft legislation implementing spending changes. Each committee that receives instructions then writes a bill to achieve the prescribed target, before the bills are packaged into one large piece of legislation. Crucially, this legislation cannot be filibustered in the Senate, meaning that it can be passed by a simple majority in both chambers.
The passage out of committee comes after weeks of negotiations and infighting among House Republicans, with Budget Committee hardliners holding up passage by demanding larger spending cuts. The uncertainty in the House led Senate GOP leaders to introduce their own budget resolution last week. Senate Republicans largely favor a two-step reconciliation approach, with border security, defense, and energy being tackled early in the year and tax cuts receiving a separate legislative package later on. House GOP leaders, on the other hand, favor the Trump-backed plan to advance the entire legislative package in “one big, beautiful bill.” The passage of their resolution out of the Budget Committee brings them one step closer to achieving this goal.
The resolution, which House Budget Chair Joey Arrington (R-TX) called “the fiscal framework for what will be one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in modern history,” instructs the House Ways and Means Committee to come up with tax cuts that will increase the deficit by up to $4.5 trillion over a decade. It orders other committees, including the Education and Workforce, Energy and Commerce, and Agriculture Committees, to cut at least $1.5 trillion from mandatory spending programs to help offset these tax cuts.
The House is set to schedule a vote on the resolution during the last week of February.
As noted above, the Senate Republicans’ preference on reconciliation is through two bills and the Senate Budget Committee approved its first budget resolution on Wednesday. The two chambers will need to bridge their differences along the way.