House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has two main jobs in funding President Donald Trump’s regressive agenda: setting deadlines and counting votes. He has yet to prove he’s particularly adept at either, which makes it unlikely he’ll get Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the House by Memorial Day as he hopes. And when it comes to getting enough votes to pass what’s likely to be the most consequential bill of the year, he’ll have to skillfully juggle a competing set of priorities in which one dropped ball could cause the whole thing to come tumbling down.
Republicans are trying this week to give some shape to this amorphous blob of a plan. The first few House markups are happening now. Once that process is done, Johnson still must cobble together all the pieces into one bill that achieves near unanimity from his caucus. There are plenty of troublemakers in the far-right camp who have already said they’ll happily let the speaker’s Memorial Day deadline lapse if the bill doesn’t satisfy their demands for savings. And once a final bill passes the House, it will still have to go to the Senate, where it may take pretending math isn’t real and ignoring the chamber’s rules to get the bill over the line. That’s likely to be a bridge too far for some Republicans.
Republicans are trying this week to give some shape to this amorphous blob of a plan.
The House and the Senate passed a budget framework for Trump’s agenda this month only by glossing over the details that had certain factions of the party at odds with one another. For example, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., had to reassure holdout House conservatives that his caucus was more committed to spending cuts than it would appear from the version his chamber had passed the previous week. Johnson told reporters before the bill narrowly squeaked over the finish line that the “first big, beautiful reconciliation package here involves a number of commitments, and one of those is that we are committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people while also preserving our essential programs.”
Where those savings come from, though, is a problem that will bedevil Republicans who will try to fulfill their promise to slash spending without hurting or angering their own constituents. They also want to ensure that the tax cuts for the wealthy passed during the first Trump administration don’t lapse next year. Preserving those tax cuts alone is set to cost an estimated $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years. That doesn’t include Trump’s ideas to end taxes on tips and overtime pay. (The math-centric among you are likely to see that $4.6 trillion in new costs is more than $1.5 trillion in reductions.)
Some Republicans from states such as California and New York are clamoring for even more tax breaks. They’ve been angry since 2017 at the cap placed on the federal deduction for state and local taxes, commonly known as SALT, which more heavily affects their constituents in high-tax states. Others want to preserve previous tax cuts from former President Joe Biden’s administration that have sparked investment and job growth in the green energy sector. While Trump’s administration has waged war on those funds, which are considered a prime target for big savings in the upcoming bill, some Republicans worry about how clawing back that money will play in their districts.
There’s also the little matter of dealing with Trump’s tariffs and the abrupt halting of foreign aid spending, policies that are harming American farmers. Maybe they’ll get a similar bailout package as they did in the first Trump administration, but that would add more spending to the ledger. And we can’t forget the $150 billion increase in defense spending proposed by the House and another almost $60 billion for Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown.
So far that leaves us with nearly a trillion dollars in potential new annual spending and no answer about exactly what will be cut to pay for any of it. So far that leaves us with nearly a trillion dollars in potential new annual spending and no answer about exactly what will be cut to pay for any of it. And as we saw in the first Trump administration, Congress can be very reluctant to follow through when asked what specific cuts might be needed. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent implied Tuesday that the revenue gained from Trump’s tariffs could help offset the tax cuts under consideration, but the incoherent implementation of those tariffs might make it hard for that math to work. None of the initial plans for specific offsets being bandied about are locked in. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is eyeing Medicaid spending as a potential area for slashing to hit its goal of $880 billion in savings over the next decade. That could involve revoking an Obamacare provision that funds state Medicaid expansions, which would potentially reduce coverage for millions of people. Another option includes major reductions in food assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which falls under the House Agriculture Committee’s purview. But not even those draconic cuts still would hit the massive goal that House conservatives demand, and even if they did, moderate Senate Republicans would most likely balk at enacting them. We’ve gotten to the point that Senate Republicans even discussed letting taxes on the wealthy rise slightly to help pay for the rest of Trump’s agenda. As my colleague Jim Downie noted last week, Trump shot that idea down, providing a messaging gift to Democrats in the process. Johnson will have to figure all of this out — and soon. While the current fiscal year doesn’t end until Sept. 30, the deadline for the government to raise the debt ceiling is set to be sometime in midsummer. That means the pressure is on for the speaker to figure out how to satisfy everyone in his caucus and the White House and the Senate and the American people all within the span of a few weeks. It’s a bit of plate-spinning that even the most dexterous of politicians might struggle to handle. It’s easy to see a world where it all comes noisily crashing down on Johnson’s head.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
