The House Budget Committee approved a budget resolution Thursday night, a necessary step towards enacting President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda through the budget reconciliation process.
The budget resolution, which deals with tax, border, defense, and energy policy, will next receive consideration by the full House, which recessed Thursday until the week of February 24.
Critically, the resolution boosts the debt limit for four years – a priority for Trump – while including spending cuts required by spending hawks to go along with any easing of the debt ceiling.
Thursday night’s vote was a victory for committee chairman Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX), who had to thread the needle carefully between factions of his party to achieve the 21 to 16 party line vote.
Arrington called the committee’s budget a “a blueprint to right-size the bloated federal bureaucracy, rein-in the reckless spending that spurred record inflation, and roll back the barrage of burdensome regulations that are crushing our small businesses.”
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“This is the only comprehensive deal Congress has on the table to get the job done,” he added, derisively referring to the “skinny” budget resolution advanced by the Senate Budget Committee earlier in the week.
The Senate is pursing a two-step budget resolution process, arguing in part that Republicans can quickly use the reconciliation process – by which the 60-v0te threshold in the Senate can be bypassed for a simple majority – to give Trump a quick win on the border. A second reconciliation bill could then be pursued that works out the more complicated tax policies Trump desires.
House Republican leaders, facing slim margins, have advocated for a single bill, presumably a lighter lift than passing twice the legislation. Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee overseeing tax policy, has argued that complicated and politically fraught tax policy should be combined with the lower hanging fruit of border policies, and that breaking the bill into two might jeopardize Trump’s tax agenda.
The Senate Budget Committee passed its resolution Wednesday on an 11-10 party line vote, putting pressure on the House to act or else lose leverage with its one-bill approach.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, has told lawmakers in recent weeks the administration needs an influx of cash to continue cleaning up Biden’s border crisis, putting additional pressure on lawmakers to act fast after weeks of behind-the-scenes negotiations and, in the House, missed deadlines.
Arrington’s budget passed with an amendment providing a pathway for deeper cuts that could enable Trump to use reconciliation to make permanent all of the tax cuts in his 2017 bill which will expire after this year. Additional spending cuts the amendment makes possible would enable the House to use reconciliation to enact other Trump tax priorities, including no taxes on tips or Social Security payments.
The House Freedom Caucus secured a budget resolution that has 7 times more spending cuts than the original Republican plan! pic.twitter.com/Gt88471oqw
— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) February 14, 2025
Conservatives and spending hawks on the committee, who had pushed for deeper cuts, supported the amended bill, which could be subject to a litany of additional amendments on the floor.
“Today’s budget resolution will enable us to reach $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and potentially more than $2 trillion in spending cuts over ten years,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a member of the panel who has advocated the two-bill approach, said in a statement.
“Most urgently, this sets us up to rush $300 billion in funding for border security, immigration enforcement and the military so those critical missions continue uninterrupted,” he added.
The hard work is ahead, as Republicans on Capitol Hill not only must agree on a one- or two-track reconciliation approach but must reconcile on the specifics of that resolution(s) before then proceeding to the actual underlying reconciliation bill itself.
The Senate could bring its own budget resolution without tax provisions to the floor as soon as next week while the House recesses. That bill could see hundreds of amendment votes in a Capitol Hill spectacle known as a vote-a-rama.
That days-long process – which subjects Senators to actually voting, an increasingly rare occasion in today’s controlled, top-down Senate – would open Senators to votes on potential campaign fodder for opponents.
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If the Senate moves forward, it will be a clear sign its leaders mean business with their two-track approach.
Trump himself has been patient, but recent history shows Republicans should decide on a plan and move forward expeditiously.
In 2017, Republican plans to repeal Obamacare through reconciliation failed in July when Trump nemesis Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in an attempt to milk maximum drama from his vote, withheld his intentions until giving a thumbs down on the floor.
Republicans then altered their approach to use reconciliation to enact tax reform, ultimately passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
But the time wasted on unsuccessfully repealing Obamacare meant that the tax bill was not passed until December. Most Americans did not see the benefits of the tax bill until 2019, after the 2018 midterms in which Republicans lost the House and many statewide offices in an election many Democrats characterized as a “blue wave.”
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
