Welcome to December, the final month of a tumultuous 2025.
The House has just 13 days left in session — it’s only 12 for the Senate — before lawmakers head home for the holiday season.
So it’s going to be a crazy couple of weeks, during which a barely functional Congress and an increasingly volatile president have to tackle a host of high-stakes priorities.
Health care. The most critical deadline is Dec. 31, when enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies expire. Millions of individual Americans and small businesses face higher premiums or could even lose coverage if the ACA premium subsidies end.
Before Thanksgiving, President Donald Trump sent signals that he might propose a pared-back two-year extension of the tax credits in order to give Hill Republicans time to come up with a longer-term health care plan.
But after significant blowback from Republicans on the Hill — including Speaker Mike Johnson — Trump administration sources tell us it’s exceedingly unlikely that the White House will embrace an ACA subsidies extension or offer its own plan.
Granted, this administration hardly operates via linear thinking patterns. Senior Trump aides shift their strategy with little warning, thanks to a president who does the same. Yet as of now, it looks like Congress is on its own with this issue. That will infuriate vulnerable House and Senate Republicans who see an ACA extension of some sort as a political necessity for their own 2026 races.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has promised Democrats that he’ll hold a vote on extending the subsidies by next week. Yet without White House involvement, this is shaping up to be a partisan exercise in which both parties put forward their own plan and neither gets 60 votes.
Case in point: We’re told that Senate Democrats are expected to revert to their original position in this fight — a clean extension of the ACA subsidies. This will be a challenge for the handful of Democratic senators trying to strike a bipartisan deal on a pared-back extension.
There’s a sense inside the House GOP leadership that vulnerable rank-and-file Republicans are going to want a health-care-related vote at some point in the next month or so. With the White House seemingly taking a pass on releasing its own plan, the House GOP leadership team is discussing its own proposal.
It’s not entirely clear what will be in a plan like this. But Republicans have described the broad outlines as expanding health savings accounts and allowing companies to pool insurance plans. Note: Republicans have huge Hyde Amendment concerns with the tax credits.
Government funding. Thune hopes to get the ball rolling on the next FY2026 appropriations minibus following the end of the 43-day government shutdown. The South Dakota Republican wants to group Defense, Labor-HHS, Transportation-HUD and Commerce-Justice-Science into one funding package. The Interior funding bill could also be in the mix.
Doing so would require unanimous consent, and both sides have been running hotlines to check for objections to different formulations of this. In the meantime, Thune intends to use the failed vote on the Defense spending bill from October as the vehicle.
Thune can bring this back up at any time, possibly this week, although the Senate floor will be jammed up with judicial nominees and a new package of executive branch nominees.
House Republican leaders don’t expect to put any spending legislation on the floor this month, instead waiting to see what the Senate is able to do.
NDAA. The text of the National Defense Authorization Act is expected to be finalized this week, and it should be made public in the coming days.
GAIN AI is still an issue in the annual Pentagon policy bill. GAIN AI, written by Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), would limit foreign exports of high-tech chips. Nvidia, which has a close relationship with the Trump White House, is adamantly opposed to the measure.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast (R-Fla.) reworked the proposal, giving Congress the ability to block exports. But it seems as if the White House and the House Republican leadership are still opposed to the new GAIN AI’s inclusion in the NDAA. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will be on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to meet with Senate Banking Committee members.
On another issue, House Republican leaders have an agreement with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and the White House on language for the NDAA that would block states from regulating AI. This has been a priority of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and the White House. We’ll see if Democrats agree.
House action this week. The SCORE Act is on the House floor this week. This is landmark collegiate athletic legislation that would put new rules on NIL deals.
House Republicans’ weekly meeting on Tuesday will be at the Capitol Hill Club. It’s a political meeting.
The NRCC also has its annual New York City fundraiser this weekend. After that, House GOP staff directors will have a retreat in Boston a week from today. We expect lots of talk about the 2026 agenda during this retreat.
The House is expected to take up a number of permitting reform bills next week.
Highly special. An unusually pricey special election in a deep red seat in Tennessee is on Tuesday. Johnson will be in Tennessee today campaigning for Matt Van Epps, the GOP candidate. This is a district Trump won by 22 points in 2024.
Tennessee GOP insiders predict Van Epps will win by roughly five points, which would be a massive underperformance from what former GOP Rep. Mark Green did a year ago.
It’s no longer an exaggeration to say that House Republicans could lose their majority during this Congress. Whether Republicans agree or not, their majority is slipping away.
