The budget plan that Republicans squeezed through the House on Tuesday night was the first step in unlocking President Trump’s legislative agenda.
But despite the drama surrounding the close vote, that was the easy part. Now Republican leaders must begin the process of determining which of Mr. Trump’s priorities can make it into an enormous bill they must try to pass through Congress.
It will be an extraordinarily difficult and politically tricky balancing act that will require weighing the president’s demands for a slew of expensive proposals — such as eliminating tax on tips and permanently extending the 2017 tax cuts — against his promises to protect programs like Medicare and Medicaid from cuts.
While Mr. Trump has never been particularly concerned about debt or deficits, a number of the Republicans whose votes G.O.P. leaders need to push the legislation through Congress are. And they have signaled that they will be unwilling to lend their support to any measure that balloons the debt.
What happens next?
House Republicans will turn to writing the legislation that will lay out the policy changes they want in order to reach the spending targets laid out in their blueprint. Before the House votes on that legislation, the Senate will also have to pass its own blueprint. The resulting product would be shielded from a Senate filibuster, allowing Republicans to steer around Democratic opposition and pass it on a simple majority vote.
But achieving unity between the two chambers could be an issue. Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are divided over how best to advance Mr. Trump’s agenda. House Republicans want to pass what the president has called “one big, beautiful bill,” including huge tax cuts and investments in immigration enforcement as well as spending reductions. Senate G.O.P. leaders want to move quickly to pass legislation increasing funding for the military and border security efforts, then follow up with another expansive bill that would make the 2017 tax cuts permanent.
Mr. Trump has equivocated repeatedly over which plan he prefers. After endorsing the House blueprint on social media last week, he told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he was “looking at” both the measure the House was trying to advance and a separate plan the Senate approved last week that would carry out the border and defense parts of his domestic agenda.
“I’m looking at them both, and I’ll make decisions,” Mr. Trump said, adding that “each one of them has things that I like.”
Choosing which taxes to cut
Mr. Trump has mostly focused on the tax side of the legislation. On the campaign trail, in addition to vowing to extend the cuts he signed into law in 2017, he made a number of promises, including that he would eliminate taxes on tips, on Social Security benefits and on overtime pay. Those are all extraordinarily expensive propositions.
The blueprint the House adopted on Wednesday puts a $4.5 trillion upper limit on the size of the tax cut, as part of an effort to placate fiscal hawks who have said they will not vote for legislation that results in a huge increase in the deficit.
Extending the 2017 tax law will cost about $4 trillion over a decade, while several other strongly desired business tax breaks will eat up another couple hundred billion. That leaves only a sliver of the budget for the potpourri of other tax cuts Republicans hope to cram into the legislation, including not taxing tips and lifting the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction.
And Mr. Trump has said he wants to make those tax cuts permanent, a call he reiterated on Wednesday.
House Republicans’ blueprint does not pave the way for permanency. Senate Republicans have not yet released a budget plan that would address lowering taxes at all, but leaders in the chamber have said making the tax cuts permanent will be a top priority.
Navigating Trump’s promise to protect Medicare and Medicaid
A budget blueprint sets only the contours for fiscal policy legislation, so the plan adopted on Tuesday did not detail specific changes House Republicans plan to enact in order to reach their spending targets.
But it instructs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Medicare, to come up with at least $880 billion in cuts. That makes up nearly half of the $2 trillion in spending reductions that Republican leaders have promised their most conservative members that they will include in the legislation to offset the cost of the tax cuts.
While some Republicans denied that they would slash programs for the poor, the amount of revenue they are calling to raise would all but certainly necessitate cuts to at least one of those programs.
That would be starkly at odds with Mr. Trump’s repeated promises that he would not cut Medicare or Medicaid.
“Medicare, Medicaid — none of that stuff is going to be touched,” he said last week in an interview with Sean Hannity. “We won’t have to.”
A New York Times analysis found that even if the committee cuts everything that is not health care to $0, it would still be more than $600 billion short.
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