News: The House Republican leadership has asked the incoming Trump administration to hold off on rolling back several Biden-era policies by executive order so that GOP lawmakers can repeal them in a reconciliation bill instead.
Remember: The GOP-run Congress has to find savings as part of any reconciliation package. And if President-elect Donald Trump wipes out big-ticket Biden policies using executive orders, Congress can’t claim them as savings in reconciliation.
So House Republicans have asked the incoming Trump administration to avoid several executive orders. These include:
– Rolling back President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which Republicans estimate to cost as much as $250 billion.
– Provisions providing incentives for electric vehicles.
– Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, known as CAFE standards. These are fuel efficiency benchmarks for cars and light trucks sold in the United States.
This behind-the-scenes effort is part of an overall hunt by senior House Republicans for additional budget savings to help offset their reconciliation package, which includes plans for tax cuts and border funding. Many Hill Republicans want to go big, like a long-term or even permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts in the reconciliation package.
But one of their chief obstacles will be pressure from the House GOP’s deficit hawks, as well as the arcane rules of reconciliation and budget scoring, especially in the Senate.
CBO concerns. How to produce enough cost-savings for reconciliation has been a major topic of conversation — and source of anxiety — in House GOP ranks.
Case in point: Republicans are bracing for the Congressional Budget Office to be a potential problem. In multiple meetings Wednesday, House Republicans lamented how they believe the non-partisan scorekeeper has gotten budget estimates wrong in the past.
House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) even presented lawmakers with a slide show highlighting past disparities in what the CBO estimated versus how much revenue was actually raised under the 2017 tax-cut law.
There was also some internal discussion of how to circumvent a “bad” CBO score.
Yet the reality is that the role of the House and Senate budget chairs during reconciliation is limited. They can ask CBO to use different assumptions to score a measure or direct the CBO on more technical matters. But they can’t order the CBO to change a score or permanently alter the numbers in a baseline.
Committees get to work. Ultimately, it will be up to House committees to compile cost-saving measures for their reconciliation package. The budget resolution, which Speaker Mike Johnson aims to pass by the end of February, will instruct committees to draft recommendations for spending or revenue changes.
Even before they finalize those targets, House GOP leadership is trying to game out what they think is realistically achievable while also taking into account potential lower-than-expected CBO scores.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has been the point man on this issue, working hand-in-glove with all the committees that will receive reconciliation instructions. Scalise and House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) have been in constant communication with committee chairs, but we’re told they’re hosting another round of one-on-one meetings this week.
Some committees are expected to play a bigger role than others. The Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, Education and Workforce and Agriculture committees are likely to be given some of the biggest spending-reduction targets, given their areas of jurisdiction.
Yet it’s going to be all hands on deck. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Sam Graves (R–Mo.), who expects his panel to play a smaller role in the process, held a meeting Wednesday evening to brainstorm ideas for raising revenue or decreasing expenses through his committee.
Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), the head of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, has also been having discussions with his committee about what cuts are possible and believes his panel has the potential to produce $50 billion to $55 billion in savings.
“There’s fat everywhere, and there’s waste, and there’s redundancy, and that’s just the kind of things that we’re looking at,” Babin told us.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told us he’s been drawing up proposals — such as certain fees for people applying for asylum, temporary protected status, or parole — and has already sent some text to the CBO for preliminary scores.
“We’ve got a whole list of potential ways to raise revenue, and certain funds, specified funds, needed to accomplish what (Tom) Homan and (Stephen) Miller and the Trump administration and the transition team are talking about doing,” Jordan said. “We’ve been working on that for weeks.”
