Trump Will Finally Have To Jump Into The Gop Budget Fight

First, he wanted “one powerful Bill.” Then he said he’d be OK with splitting it in two. Later, he definitely wanted a single “BEAUTIFUL” bill — until a few days later when he praised senators for pursuing a pair. “You could do three,” he said the day after that. “You could do 10.”

President Donald Trump has never been especially interested in how his vast domestic policy agenda gets enacted in Congress — happy instead to let the House and Senate duke out their differences on Capitol Hill.

But GOP lawmakers are warning that the hands-off approach might not be sustainable for much longer, with profound conflicts looming between the House and Senate over tax policy, spending cuts and more.

So far, the results of the legislative derby have been excellent for Trump: Both chambers have now approved fiscal blueprints for enacting border security, energy, defense and tax legislation, with Trump on Tuesday pushing the House version over the line with a few well-placed calls to Republican holdouts.

Getting that “big, beautiful bill” enacted, however, is going to require more than cajoling a few irritable lawmakers — it will require making tough presidential-level decisions about thorny policy issues.

"He'll be very involved — I think he'll probably need to be,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “There's a lot of distance between where the House and the Senate are on this."

Adding to the challenge is that Trump in recent weeks has been muddying the waters, not clarifying which direction they ought to be flowing.

He has called for a permanent extension of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a costly demand that could make it impossible to rein in budget deficits — while also ruling out drastic cuts to Medicaid, the joint federal-state safety-net program that House Republicans are counting on for savings.

Amid all of this, he has called for a balanced budget — a fiscal aspiration that neither the House nor the Senate plans come anywhere near meeting. “Maybe by next year or the year after, but maybe even sooner than that,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.

Congressional Republicans are familiar with the unpredictable president and his often contradictory policy demands. But reconciling them into a unified budget framework — and, eventually, actual legislation that can get enacted by the GOP’s low-single-digit majorities in the House and Senate — will require making tough choices they say that only the White House can settle.

“He's the most instrumental person,” said Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.), who had a lengthy phone conversation with Trump on Tuesday before she agreed to back the House budget. “This branch [of government] has been very broken, so we need someone like Trump to help us to do our job.”

A person in Trump’s orbit granted anonymity to describe strategy said the president has intentionally stayed on the sidelines early on, using the House-Senate rivalry to move his agenda forward. Having the Senate plan waiting in the wings, for instance, helped House leaders get members to yes this week.

The hands-off approach changed Tuesday when a handful of hard-line fiscal hawks held out on Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget plan, arguing it didn’t cut enough federal spending.

“He wants to see something,” the person said of Trump. “And if [the House budget] failed, it would have looked like [the] GOP doesn’t have their shit together.”

Besides Spartz, Trump placed calls to several of the holdouts, according to Republicans familiar with the whip operation. In the end, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was the only GOP member to vote no.

One of the holdouts, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, said Trump’s call had “considerable" influence on his decision to back the budget measure: "The president assured me that he would work towards cuts, and he's never lied to me. … I trust the president."

So far, GOP congressional leaders have used the phone-a-president button sparingly, aware that they can’t go running to Trump every time they have a whip problem, said two Republicans granted anonymity to candidly describe the dynamics between Trump and Congress.

A larger group of holdouts, including some more moderate members who wanted assurances on Medicaid cuts, didn’t get calls from Trump, the two Republicans said — they were won over with assurances from congressional leaders who emphasized that no safety-net program is mentioned in the budget plan. (Any actual cuts would be carried out in subsequent legislation.)

But now Republicans are facing more profound divides, some of which got hashed out in a White House meeting Wednesday attended by Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune along with Trump, Vice President JD Vance and top administration economic officials.

Among the issues they discussed was the challenge of making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent — a move that would add trillions of dollars to the deficit. Some on Capitol Hill want to essentially ignore that cost by changing the way they handle the bill’s accounting. That could allow tax writers to pursue other Trump priorities, such as exempting tips from income tax, at the risk of angering fiscal hawks who want to slow the growth of the national debt.

Getting it done, in other words, could require Trump to weigh in publicly on the kind of otherwise in-the-weeds policy matters he has previously ignored.

The president’s wishes will be "as influential if not more as things get tougher,” said Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Florida Republican who met with Johnson this week as the budget debate heated up. "The speaker is going to have to tee it up, going to tell him where the ball lies, how it's lying, and then the president is going to have to execute the shot.”

A more delicate matter will involve potential cuts to safety-net programs that many Trump voters rely on. That includes above all Medicaid, which could be targeted for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of reductions under the House blueprint.

Trump has repeatedly said he has no plans to cut Medicaid or other entitlement programs.

“I've said it so many times that you shouldn't be asking me that question,” he said Wednesday when pressed on it. “Read my lips … we're not going to touch it. Now, we are going to look for fraud."

Congressional leaders are hoping to expand the “fraud” loophole as wide as possible. Johnson and other top House Republicans argued to skeptics this week that eliminating waste, fraud and abuse could generate the scale of savings they’d need to make the math work.

But many lawmakers, including Hawley, are doubtful the party can realize those offsets without impacting their constituents. Trump, they believe, will have to decide which Medicaid rollbacks he’s comfortable with.

Already some House members have been in touch with White House officials to argue for provisions they believe can be presented as tackling waste, fraud and abuse — not as cuts to benefits. While Trump has said barring “illegal migrants” could generate huge savings, senior Republicans aren’t sure.

Inside the White House, meanwhile, there is rising faith in Trump’s ability to bend the legislative branch to his will as his agenda moves forward. One administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about interbranch relations, said Trump is “always active in negotiations on Capitol Hill” and is in frequent touch with congressional leaders about how he can be most helpful.

“He put out a [Truth Social post] stating his desire for one big, beautiful bill, and he got it done,” the official said.

Rachael Bade and Jake Traylor contributed to this report.