What to know as Congress starts working on Donald Trump's 'big beautiful bill'
WASHINGTON – It was tricky enough for congressional Republicans to get to this point: After weeks of negotiating a blueprint for President Donald Trump's legislative agenda, lawmakers are returning to Washington from a two-week break with plans to hammer out the details of what Trump calls one "big, beautiful bill."
Over the next several weeks, lawmakers will craft a sweeping package of Trump's priorities for taxes, border security and energy they will eventually try to pass along party lines. It would likely be the marquee piece of legislation passed during Trump's second term.
The path forward will be rife with intraparty challenges as Republicans work through competing priorities such as cutting spending and extending Trump's 2017 tax cuts.
Here's what you need to know.
Two tracks for the House, Senate
The budget blueprint passed in April instructs the House and Senate to craft separate proposals that will eventually need to be reconciled. The Senate's instructions require lawmakers to find very few spending cuts while implementing the president's expensive tax proposals.
The two houses agree on the broad strokes: They want to lock in the tax cuts implemented during Trump's first term, which are set to expire this year; eliminate taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security payments; boost defense and border security spending; and raise the debt ceiling to avoid a looming default.
But the details look different for each chamber. In addition to different spending totals, House Republicans have instructed lawmakers to find at least $1.5 trillion in cuts, and Senate Republicans have said that's a goal – but instructed their committees to find only $4 billion in cuts.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had instructed committees in the lower chamber to start hashing out the details of legislation between April 28 and May 9 in the hopes of having a final package passed by Memorial Day. The Senate leadership expects the process to take a little longer, aiming for a final bill to be passed by the Fourth of July.
Somewhere along the way, the two sides will have to reconcile their differences – a process that is sure to be politically challenging.
Fight over Medicaid
Several Republicans in both chambers – and all Democrats – are concerned that the final bill will include significant cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program that provides coverage to 72 million low-income Americans.
That's because House lawmakers' instructions include a directive to cut $880 billion from programs under the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which nonpartisan experts have said is not possible to meet without slashing Medicaid.
House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said earlier in April that there's plenty of opportunity to save money without cutting benefits. The federal government loses $233 billion to $521 billion a year to fraud across all programs, according to the Government Accountability Office, though it's unclear how Congress would seek to reduce that.
"It's pervasive," Arrington said. "You check the Medicaid rolls twice instead of once, like President Biden, and you save $160 billion."
Several Republicans, such as Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, have said they will not vote for a package that includes Medicaid cuts. And Trump himself has said he would veto a bill if it cut Medicaid benefits beyond the Republicans' aims to eliminate "waste, fraud and abuse."
Spending concerns
Another cohort of the Republican conference is worried that the package will add trillions more to the deficit than it cuts.
These fiscal conservatives in the House almost blocked passage of the budget blueprint over concerns that the package doesn't go far enough to cut spending.
Their protest pushed House and Senate leaders to commit to at least $1.5 trillion in spending reductions – a priority that will be tough for leaders to reach without cuts to benefit programs like Medicaid. But if hard-line conservatives believe leaders have gone back on that promise, they may withhold their vote for the final package.
A policy test
Republicans plan to use a process known as reconciliation to pass the package without Democratic help in the Senate.
That process, however, is reserved for legislation that is related to government spending. The Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan adviser in the upper chamber, will review the final bill to ensure each piece of policy is indeed related to spending. That incentivizes lawmakers to limit what they pack into the legislation.
But GOP senators have already decided not to consult the parliamentarian on a crucial accounting maneuver that allows the chamber to count the extension of Trump's 2017 tax cuts as "current policy," which makes an extension of them appear free rather than costing $3.8 trillion over 10 years.
An adverse ruling from the parliamentarian after lawmakers have written the bill could complicate things for Republicans down the line.