News: Democrats on the House and Senate Appropriations Committee say Trump and top administration officials are improperly holding up more than $430 billion in federal funding already approved by Congress and signed into law.
The blocked funding covers everything from medical research, COPS grants, disaster relief, aid to farmers, Head Start, school lunches and major infrastructure projects, according to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrats on the House and Senate Appropriations panels.
“Just one hundred days into office, President Trump and Elon Musk are continuing their unprecedented assault on our nation’s spending laws, and it is families, small businesses, and communities in every part of the country who are paying the price,” DeLauro and Murray declared in a joint statement.
Appropriations Democrats have created a “tracker” to determine what funds are being withheld.
The reconciliation road ahead: House Republicans have a new, patriotic deadline for their bill enacting Trump’s domestic legislative agenda: the Fourth of July.
That timetable requires that everything goes precisely to plan.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson said the final four committees involved in reconciliation will hold markups next week. This includes the Agriculture, Energy and Commerce, Natural Resources and Ways and Means committees, though not all of those panels have settled on markup timing.
Johnson said the House Budget Committee would assemble the various committee pieces into a single reconciliation package during the week of May 12, teeing up a floor vote the week before Memorial Day.
But there are a lot of things that could derail the House’s one-month sprint or stall later Senate action. Let’s talk about how the GOP’s reconciliation rush could play out.
1) Offsets upset. Republicans’ warring views over slashing hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending could devolve into a bitter standoff.
Massive cuts to spending on social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP may be a bridge too far for the competing factions within the House Republican Conference. That could derail things in the House. If not, the package might still prove irreconcilable in the Senate, where it’s going to be even harder to get the votes for deep spending cuts.
GOP conservatives view reconciliation as the chance they’ve been waiting for to slash $1.5 trillion-plus in federal spending. But cuts to critical programs put moderate Republicans in a terrible spot politically. These disagreements played out during a series of internal meetings on Monday afternoon. Moderates and the hardline House Freedom Caucus expressed concern over whether the bill will fit their preferred framework.
2) The tax bill goes awry. Overall, Republicans’ tax agenda is a uniting force in the reconciliation push. But efforts to address the SALT cap, claw back clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act and find additional offsets for tax cuts could all spur standoffs.
Even if tax writers find revenue raisers that can pass the House, GOP senators could decide they’re unwilling to raise taxes of any sort. Any offsets also will spur a massive wave of lobbying designed to kill them.
Plus, Senate Republicans could run into trouble with the current policy baseline, the accounting method they’re using to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent in reconciliation. If the Senate parliamentarian issues any rulings that make it unworkable to use the baseline, Republicans’ plans would go off the rails.
3) The GOP gets a debt limit surprise. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that the department may have a better sense later this week or next of the “X date” when the federal government will hit its borrowing limit.
Republicans are adamant about addressing the debt limit in reconciliation to avoid having to cut a deal with Democrats. That makes the “X date” the real deadline for the GOP’s reconciliation package.
Bessent told reporters that tax revenue is on track to outpace what the federal government collected last year. If true, that’s a good sign for Republicans that they may have more time to get a debt-limit hike done.
But if the “X date” ends up hitting in early summer, that would complicate everything the GOP is working toward. Rushing the reconciliation bill through in time seems unlikely. Republicans don’t have an easy Plan B.
4) Trump being Trump. The president could deliver a shocker or last-minute demand that throws Capitol Hill into chaos. Sound familiar?
Trump already has a list of expensive tax cuts he wants. Some were born from campaign trail musings and will now become very real policies.
The president could toss out tax curveballs or nix spending cuts that Republicans want to include. This is Trump’s legislative agenda. If he changes his mind, Republicans have to listen.
5) Reconciliation clockwork. Republicans somehow dodge every political landmine and things go according to plan.
For this to happen, House and Senate Republicans will have to be closely aligned on the initial wave of policies that pass the House. The House GOP leadership has asked committees to work closely with Senate counterparts.
Johnson has proven a lot of doubters wrong getting House Republicans behind the reconciliation bill up to this point. The next few weeks present his biggest test.
