Hours after Senate Republicans approved their latest budget plan Saturday morning, at least three GOP deficit hawks in the House - the maximum number of R's Speaker Mike Johnson can lose - blasted the package over a lack of spending cuts.
"If the Senate’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ budget is put on the House floor, I will vote no," Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) posted to X on Saturday, adding "Failure is not an option. And the Senate’s budget is a path to failure."
If the Senate’s “Jekyll and Hyde” budget is put on the House floor, I will vote no.
In the classic ways of Washington, the Senate’s budget presents a fantastic top-line message – that we should return spending back to the pre-COVID trajectory (modified for higher interest, Medicare, and Social Security) of $6.5 Trillion, rather than the current trajectory of over $7 Trillion – but has ZERO enforcement to achieve it, and plenty of signals it is designed purposefully NOT to achieve it.
The House Budget is seemingly more modest in its objectives – perhaps OVERLY modest – in laying out a floor of $200B in reductions in spending increases (not cuts). But that “floor” establishes important guardrails to force Congress to pump the brakes on runaway spending and to achieve critical reforms to badly broken Medicaid, food stamp, and welfare programs currently being abused to subsidize illegals, the able-bodied, and blue states.
The America First agenda requires boldness from Congress, not timidity. President Trump’s leadership – and risk taking – requires the same from Republicans in Congress, not more of the same selfish vote-buying, big-spending pork that got us into this debt crisis. We can and must cut BOTH the statutory taxes Americans pay AND the inflation tax they increasingly pay because of Congressional failure.
Failure is not an option. And the Senate’s budget is a path to failure. Instead, we should get busy drafting a reconciliation package that will work - that will ACTUALLY produce spending reductions that will, as a start, return to the pre-COVID spending path - and deliver on the promises we campaigned upon.
Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris also chimed in, saying he "can’t support House passage of the Senate changes to our budget resolution until I see the actual spending and deficit reduction plans to enact President Trump’s America First agenda."
Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) said he "certainly can't support it as written" Thursday night.
We all agree: keep taxes low for individuals & small businesses, drive economic growth. But we must reduce the deficit as well.
— Rep. Lloyd Smucker (@RepSmucker) April 3, 2025
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) called the plan "unserious and disappointing" Saturday morning, but didn't go so far as to explicitly say he would oppose it.
As noted above, Johnson cannot lose more than three Republicans on a party-line vote with his 220-213 majority, which doesn't bode well considering that several other House Republicans have characterized the Senate's plan as fiscally irresponsible, and insist that any budget plan should at least be deficit-neutral, while any tax cuts should also be tied to tax cuts. The Senate's plan, however, essentially kicks the can down the road once again on these issues by providing different targets to critical committees in the House and Senate, Politico reports.
For instance, while the Senate plan sets a modest $4 billion floor for spending reductions, the budget blueprint that House Republicans passed in February calls for $2 trillion in spending cuts.
There are also significant differences in the tax portion of the plan. The House budget provides its tax writing committee $4.5 trillion for spending on tax cuts. Meanwhile, the Senate budget uses an accounting tactic that zeroes out the cost of extending trillions in expiring tax cuts. It allows for potentially up to $800 billion more in tax cuts than the House plan.
In a Saturday letter to their members, Johnson and the other top three House GOP leaders said that approving the Senate budget would "allow us to finally begin the most important phase of this process: drafting the reconciliation bill that will deliver on President Trump’s agenda and our promises to the American people."
"With the debt limit X-date approaching, border security resources diminishing, markets unsettled, and the largest tax increase on working families looming, time is of the essence," they wrote.
The wildcard here is of course, President Trump, who has previously leaned on key holdouts to muscle through an earlier House budget vote. This week Trump demanded that "[e]very Republican, House and Senate, must UNIFY" behind the Senate plan."
"Big business is not worried about the Tariffs, because they know they are here to stay, but they are focused on the BIG, BEAUTIFUL DEAL, which will SUPERCHARGE our Economy," he wrote on Friday, referring to the reconciliation bill.
