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House Republican leaders are facing pressure from the clock and from their own members over a $95 billion reconciliation 3.0 framework that they will attempt to advance out of the Budget Committee on Thursday, raising questions about whether the package will make it out of the House, let alone to President Trump’s desk.
The budget framework released Wednesday outlines $73 billion for defense and intelligence funding, $12 billion for agriculture aid, and $10 billion for a fund to encourage Trump-backed voting restrictions.
That is significantly scaled back from the sweeping bill — marrying a big boost in Pentagon funding with “anti-fraud” spending cuts — that GOP members and leaders had originally envisioned. Trump had also originally sought much more for the military in a reconciliation package — $350 billion.
Many members had been counting on an ambitious reconciliation 3.0 package when they rallied to support a “skinny” reconciliation 2.0 bill earlier this year that funded only immigration enforcement. They were anxious to make the most of their last remaining chance at pushing a GOP-only bill through Congress and snagging wins to take on the campaign trail before the midterm elections, like the swath of “affordability” measures pushed by the Republican Study Committee.
The special reconciliation process bypasses the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, meaning Republicans can pass it without Democratic support.
And to top it off, the package includes no “pay-fors” or spending cuts for the $95 billion at all — outraging fiscal hawks.
Republican Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio) predicted that the budget resolution would be “DOA” — dead on arrival — in the lower chamber.
“There is no will to spend less or honestly pay for massive spending. Deficits, Debt, and Debasement all the way to the crash site. Nothing stops this train. Make a plan,” Davidson wrote on the social platform X.
Many of those fiscal hawks sit on the House Budget Committee, which will consider the bill on Thursday.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the Budget Committee and policy chair of the House Freedom Caucus, told reporters Wednesday he’s undecided on how he’ll vote on the resolution.
“We’re still having conversations among committee and non-committee staff. I think the stupidest thing to do would be to try to jam it through committee when we got bigger problems on the House floor, and I think that might be the current state of affairs,” Roy said.
“While some of us are trying to work in good faith to figure out how to move the ball forward, but we still have concerns and problems. It would be a mistake to move it to the floor, even if you can get it through committee, which is unclear,” he added.
Roy told reporters Tuesday before the budget resolution was released that he’s not “one that wants to swallow lack of offsets.”
Republican leadership is arguing that the scaled-back bill is the result of the political dynamics in the Senate and the pressure to provide a funding boost to the Pentagon as it faces depleted munitions amid the Iran war.
“As we engaged with the White House and Senate, it became clear that we would need to respond to their concerns and interests to have a pathway to law. This has resulted in the narrow, streamlined product that you will see today,” a senior House Republican leadership staffer told reporters Wednesday morning.
They also say it is the only chance to enact incentives for proof-of-citizenship and voter ID restrictions in the vein of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act demanded by Trump and the right-wing activist base through Congress.
The SAVE America Act passed the House but has stalled in the Senate, where it lacks the Democratic support needed to overcome a filibuster in the upper chamber. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has rejected calls to eliminate the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act.
Vice President Vance pushed that message in a closed-door meeting with House Republicans at the Capitol on Wednesday, urging the GOP to unify behind the reconciliation framework to accomplish the president’s top legislative priority.
“It’s an important priority for the American people to save our elections. The way you save America is by bringing election integrity. It’s something that matters. It’s a shame that the Democrats aren’t gonna help us get this done … but we got a good piece of legislation to support the troops, support the farmers and get SAVE America Act passed,” Vance told reporters after the meeting.
House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), a fiscal hawk who had for months been telling reporters he was working on a reconciliation bill that included many more spending reductions and “anti-fraud” measures that touched on healthcare and more, argued the “obstruct at all costs” politics of the Democrats necessitated treating reconciliation 3.0 as a way to solve the crisis in defense funding.
Arrington said that he is thinking of the defense funding portion as the kind of supplemental funding request that has not been traditionally paid for in the past — and that he did not believe Democrats would have approved the White House’s separate $87 billion supplemental funding request sent to Capitol Hill last month.
“The immediate needs to replenish munitions and make sure that we have a baseline readiness on the battlefield of today,” Arrington said, later adding: “We do not believe the Democrats will work with us on a defense supplemental.”
As for the lack of spending reductions, Arrington argued that “the politics and the political landscape in the Senate makes pay-fors challenging.”
He worried that if Republicans had opened up the ability in the framework for the Senate to tweak certain areas of government that they had hoped to address with anti-fraud measures, it would result in the Senate actually undoing some of the Medicaid reforms and other cuts that Republicans had passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — reconciliation 1.0 — last year.
Arrington had faced a failed vote in the House Budget Committee on the framework that became the One Big Beautiful Bill Act early last year as he dealt with similar pressures from fiscal hawks on his panel over cuts, before hashing out issues with members and getting it through on a second try.
This time, though, Republicans do not have the luxury of time. The House has only a few legislative days before lawmakers leave Washington for a monthlong August recess, and the closer Republicans get to the midterm elections, the less chance the package has of succeeding.
“If we don’t open it up this week, I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Arrington said. “Time’s running out. Window’s closing.”
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