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IN THIS EDITION

House GOP is in a jam on Trump’s agenda. Here’s how they can get out

DOGE-curious Dems dwindle after early Musk moves

A strong week for Trump’s noms as Vought moves to center stage

The Vault: Mulvaney tries right-sizing GOP strategy against CFPB

Fischer pushes for paid leave tax credit

THE TOP

House GOP is in a jam on Trump’s agenda. Here’s how they can get out

Happy Wednesday morning.

We’re still in the early phase of Hill Republicans’ attempt to pass President Donald Trump’s agenda. Yet it’s fair to say, at this moment, things aren’t going well.

Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.

The House Budget Committee, which was supposed to mark up a budget resolution this week, hasn’t announced any meeting. The conservative hardliners are seemingly unmoveable. As we’ve been reporting all week, the House GOP leadership’s plan is stalled while Senate Republicans are anxious to possibly take over.

We wanted to lay out several scenarios spelling out how House Republicans might jumpstart their reconciliation process, based on conversations with senior aides and lawmakers.

Stay the course — and pull a rabbit out of the hat. Johnson is an optimist. You gotta give him that. The Louisiana Republican has maintained that the mess that we’re seeing right now is all part of what he calls the “deliberative process.” Fair enough. There’s certainly a lot of deliberating going on.

But there’s a path — a narrow path — for House Republicans to get a budget resolution allowing “one big beautiful bill” to move forward.

Following a very long meeting in the speaker’s office Tuesday night that included GOP leadership, committee chairs and some of the hardliners, there were signs of progress, although no agreement yet.

“I think when you look at where we are, we’re close to a trillion [dollars in cuts] and still working,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters afterward.

Scalise added that House GOP leaders “are focused on” trying to mark up a budget resolution next week.

They’ve also directed all the committees involved in this process to come up with more spending cuts. “We’re working on details for each committee,” Scalise said. “But we have gone back to each committee to increase those numbers. We’re not done on it.”

Plus, Republicans will think expansively about how to count savings — DOGE, projected 3% economic growth and a juiced economy from slashing regulations.

Then there’s Trump.

Can Trump, who has had limited legislative success during his first term, get Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) to back Johnson’s plan? Trump hasn’t yet leaned on lawmakers to get the reconciliation process going. By next week, he may have to.

Switch to two bills. Hold onto your hat, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.). There are House Republicans talking about the Budget Committee switching course and marking up the dual-track reconciliation process that Smith, the Ways and Means Committee chair, has railed against for months.

Trump says he doesn’t care if there’s one bill or two bills as long as his agenda gets approved. There are plenty of senior aides in the White House who want two bills. And the House Freedom Caucus wants two also.

The first reconciliation package would have defense spending, energy policy and border security provisions. The second reconciliation package — the tax-cut portion — would be punted until later. When exactly is unclear.

Smith doesn’t like the two-bill approach. In his view, that puts tax cuts at risk. Yet if the Budget Committee remains stuck, House Republicans may not have a choice.

Chip Roy, the floor is yours. There’s always an inclination in House Republican leadership to say something like this: “OK, Freedom Caucus. If you think your idea is so great, give it a shot, and let’s see how it goes.”

Play this out with us for a moment. What if Johnson tells Roy, Norman and the other conservative holdouts that they should write whatever budget resolution they want, try to push it through the Budget Committee and the full House, and then see what the Senate will do with it?

Of course, a Freedom Caucus-favored package may not get through the Budget Committee. If it does, it could fail on the House floor. And it will certainly get ripped to shreds in the Senate.

But there’s utility in that exercise to show that hardliners need to drop their draconian spending-cut demands and embrace a bill that can actually become law. That’s the real goal of legislating, right?

Next batter, Lindsey Graham. If you spend a few minutes in the Senate, you’ll get the sense that Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and his colleagues are ready to move their own budget resolution. Of course, their approach will look far different from what House Republican leaders would draw up. It would be a two-bill play.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s team would put this together, get it through their chamber and jam House Republicans. In fact, getting jammed by the Senate is a familiar feeling for the House GOP.

Failure. Consider this: Republicans split reconciliation into two pieces. The first bill — defense, border and energy — passes and gets signed into law. But Smith ends up being right and it gets too complicated to move a large-scale tax cut package. Then Republicans and Democrats would have to work toward the end of this year to try to pass a bipartisan extension of the 2017 rates.

With a GOP trifecta controlling Washington, that would be a suboptimal result for Republicans, to say the least.

— Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan and Laura Weiss

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DEMS IN ARRAY

DOGE-curious Dems dwindle after early Musk moves

Some Democrats were ready to embrace President Donald Trump’s plans for an Elon Musk-led effort to crack down on government waste and spending. Now they’re distancing themselves from the initiative after seeing how it’s actually being carried out.

Following Musk’s aggressive and legally questionable blitz on government agencies, Democrats have soured on the Department of Government Efficiency. They worry it’s more about dismantling the government than dismantling government inefficiency.

Initially, centrist and even some progressive Democrats were hopeful DOGE would provide their party with an opportunity to show they’re willing to work across the aisle. Plus, the idea of streamlining the federal government is always popular with the American public.

But now those same Democrats are deeply skeptical of Musk’s motivations and whether there’s any room to seriously work with Trump on the issue. And while they’re still supportive of the general concept of rooting out government waste, fraud and abuse, Democrats now see the Musk-led DOGE initiative as tainted.

Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), a moderate Democrat who expressed interest in coordinating with DOGE told us: “Sadly, this has become a way for the wealthiest person alive, who gets billions in federal money, to hack the federal government data and payment system at the expense of the American people.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who previously said there are certain aspects of DOGE he could get behind, told us he’s “appalled by the unconstitutional efforts to block funding appropriated and authorized by Congress.” Khanna said he’s made those concerns known to Musk.

“I will work on strategic cuts to a bloated defense budget — but Congress has that authority, not bureaucratic coders who get to press a button to stop payments,” he added.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), the first Democrat to join the House’s DOGE Caucus, is questioning the merits of having a congressional DOGE counterpart after Trump and Musk steamrolled Congress during the first two weeks of the new administration. The Florida Democrat hinted he may not stay in the group.

Here’s Moskowitz:

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), a centrist who has also voiced support for the DOGE mission, had been weighing whether to formally join the DOGE caucus. But now Cuellar says: “I think I’m going to take my time.”

However, Rep. Tom Suozzi (N.Y.), another moderate Democrat, said he isn’t quite ready to shut the door on joining the caucus. “I’m very interested in the idea of finding inefficiencies and making things better, but I want it to be done the right way, and I want it to be done legally,” he told us.

— Melanie Zanona and John Bresnahan

NOMS, NOMS, NOMS

A strong week for Trump’s noms as Vought moves to center stage

President Donald Trump is having a week.

The White House is dealing with a crisis tied to mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s plan to radically overhaul the federal government. Trump announced and then canceled tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the United States’ top two export markets — while claiming victory, of course. And then Trump bizarrely floated a plan to send U.S. troops to occupy and rebuild war-torn Gaza while resettling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Democrats were outraged and Republicans were eager to get away from questions about it.

But Trump is winning on the Senate floor. It’s only Wednesday and the Senate has already confirmed three Cabinet officials: Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins and Attorney General Pam Bondi. These were all bipartisan votes, Republicans can crow, although only Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) backed Bondi.

The Senate is on track to confirm two more top-level nominees before leaving for the week: Scott Turner to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

If Turner and Vought get across the finish line — and there’s no reason to doubt they will — then the Senate will have approved 13 of Trump’s nominees during the first three weeks of Trump’s new term. This outpaces the first three weeks of Trump’s first term and former President Joe Biden.

Senate Democrats, however, plan to take the full 30 hours of post-cloture debate time on Vought’s nomination. This means a confirmation vote wouldn’t take place until roughly 7 p.m. Thursday.

Tuesday also saw Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advance out of the Senate Finance Committee and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) clear the Senate Intelligence Committee. Nominations that once appeared in real doubt now appear on a path toward confirmation thanks to aggressive MAGA world lobbying of center-right swing votes.

And despite Democratic calls for a second hearing, FBI nominee Kash Patel is likely to be voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee next week.

In the end, it’s quite likely that Trump gets his way on every Cabinet nominee. The only real stumble for Trump — and it was just a stumble — was being forced to withdraw former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as attorney general. But Republicans didn’t like Gaetz nearly as much as Democrats did, which is why the nomination failed.

Trump also faces Democrats’ blanket holds on nominees following the DOGE controversy. Not something the Senate GOP can’t overcome, but time consuming.

— Max Cohen and John Bresnahan

AND THERE’S MORE…

Fischer pushes for paid leave tax credit

First in Punchbowl News: Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) is reviving her push to expand a tax credit for employers offering paid family and medical leave. The bill, which is also supported by Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Reps. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), would expand the number of employees who are eligible to take the credit.

Fischer previously secured the enactment of similar legislation through the 2017 reconciliation bill, but it expires at the end of 2025. Her new bill would expand and extend these provisions.

Campaign news: Each of the NRSC vice chairs will be assigned a group of in-cycle incumbents that they will be responsible for managing. The goal is to ensure each senator up for reelection doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel, even in states seen as safely Republican. Check out the pairings here.

— Samantha Handler and Max Cohen

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