CNN
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President Donald Trump’s ambitious agenda may be on the brink of a stinging setback in the House before it even gets started, offering a flashing warning sign about Speaker Mike Johnson’s ability to deliver other key White House priorities this year.
The relentlessly upbeat Johnson acknowledged Tuesday that he may need to pull a critical vote to advance Trump’s agenda later that night, with at least three Republicans vowing to oppose it and a dozen more skeptical. Johnson has a math problem with a razor-thin majority.
“There may be a vote tonight, there may not be. Stay tuned,” Johnson said at a news conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning, the first sign that leadership’s timing had begun to slip after top House Republicans projected confidence earlier in the day that a vote would indeed go forward that evening. Since then, he and his leadership team – with help from Trump – have been furiously trying to twist the arms of their own members for the evening vote.
“It’s very complicated negotiations. A lot of numbers, a lot of factors, a lot of different opinions. But we will get there, as we always do,” Johnson said.
Even as Johnson and his leadership team insist they’ll ultimately succeed in passing the sprawling budget resolution to unlock Trump’s legislative plans, it’s not clear how they’ll get there. And the outcome will have major consequences for the White House’s agenda and for Johnson’s own political survival as the party faces crushing deadlines ahead, including avoiding a government shutdown next month and the threat of an economic default later this spring.
“I think the last few weeks are showing us how difficult it is to move any package through the House,” Rep. Dusty Johnson, a leadership ally, said after a tense hour-long meeting of the GOP conference on the fate of the budget plan. “This is a motley crew.”
Hours before the scheduled vote, hardline conservatives insist there aren’t enough spending cuts in the plan, even as centrist-leaning Republicans remain uneasy about the size of those cuts and whether they could impact popular programs like Medicaid. And Johnson’s efforts to win support have even backfired in some corners. Rep. Thomas Massie said he left a meeting Tuesday morning even more dug in against the budget than before.
“They convinced me in there, I’m a no,” the Kentucky Republican said, holding up a thick packet of leadership talking points and railing against their plans line by line.
Trump himself plans to step up the pressure campaign with the president set to meet with a group of House Republicans Tuesday afternoon. The stakes for both Trump and Johnson are high: If the framework fails, the president will be forced to dramatically downsize plans for his first legislative package — temporarily abandoning big plans for tax cuts, spending cuts and a debt limit hike without Democrats at the table. Instead, Congress would likely have to pivot to taking up a border security and energy production package and be forced to deal with the rest later.
“I assume that President Trump will probably be calling them to say, you are standing in the way of my agenda,” said Rep. August Pfluger, a Texas Republican who leads the conservative Republican Study Committee.
But some Republicans, like House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith, argued that the House’s budget plan is essentially the chamber’s only chance to advance Trump’s agenda, including tax cuts, and noted that if it doesn’t pass, then Congress will have to resort to a bipartisan tax bill.
Pressed by CNN on if that’s what he’s warning members, Smith answered, “It’s not a warning. It’s just a reality. There’s 207 million people that really care about whether their taxes go up or not, and that’s who you need to be paying attention to.”
He told CNN the Senate’s narrower strategy to pass Trump’s agenda, which begins with a border and defense funding bill and saves tax reform for a second bill, “won’t ever have the votes” to pass the House.
A failure would risk hurting Johnson’s standing among GOP lawmakers, many of whom have grown increasingly frustrated with the speaker’s inability to maneuver in his tiny majority.
Tuesday night’s vote itself is procedural: There are no policy details and it is instead a framework for the eventual package. But the vote is still highly significant: Republicans must pass an identical budget blueprint through both chambers before they can move on to passing a legislative package in the Senate on a party line vote without support from Democrats.
So far, Republicans from northeastern states have been particularly wary of plans to cut $880 billion over a decade from federal health and energy programs, which they fear cannot be achieved without cutting Medicaid, the hugely expensive health program, since Trump has vowed not to touch Medicare.
Some Republicans have gotten an earful from voters about the issue, while others in purple districts worry that they’re taking a critical vote without any GOP polling on the salience of Medicaid cuts.
A survey conducted last month by House Majority Forward, an outside group aligned with House Democrats, found that voters in battleground districts strongly opposed the idea of removing low-income children from Medicaid coverage, according to internal data shared with CNN.
House Republicans have stressed publicly and privately that their budget blueprint does not contain cuts to Medicaid. Yet the Democratic polling — which has not been reported — is a stark sign of how strongly Democrats plan to hammer the GOP on the issue in the upcoming midterms.
“Well, I’m still making my point all the way to the end about the need to protect the services that are important to my district,” said Arizona Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who is one of the swing-district House Republicans who has warned Johnson directly about potential cuts to programs like Medicaid, food assistance and Pell grants.
But GOP leaders have strongly pushed back against the idea that benefits would be cut, noting that the budget plan is only a framework and not specific policy. They argue there are ways to cut hundreds of billions in wasted money on federal health programs without slashing Medicaid benefits, though it remains unclear where those cuts would come from.
“This is a procedural vote. You tell me what the cuts are,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told CNN when asked about swing seat lawmakers’ concerns about Medicaid cuts.
If they can’t move forward, Johnson and his allies acknowledge they’ll need to pivot to the Senate GOP’s plan — which includes hundreds of billions to bolster border security and energy production but forgoes Trump’s more ambitious plans on tax cuts and the debt limit. It also doesn’t include the $1.5 trillion in cuts that have been demanded by ultraconservatives like those in the House Freedom Caucus.
Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Dan Meuser warned that if House Republicans can’t get the votes to follow through on their strategy, the message to voters “won’t be a good one.”
“It will be that the mandate that they voted for on November 5 is not being carried through. We really need to pass this, and I think we will,” he told CNN.
Johnson and his whip team had spent the last several days trying to win over their more moderate members, many of whom had raised concerns that the budget plan could ultimately lead to cuts to the low-income health program Medicaid. Party leaders held dozens of meetings and phone calls, and seemed to have made progress with members like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York who had been worried about the scope of cuts.
But even as House GOP leaders resolved one headache, more kept coming.
“We’re spending money and we need to be saving money,” said Rep. Scott Perry, a Freedom Caucus member who said he has yet to commit to the budget plan as he seeks more assurances on spending cuts.
Frustration among ultraconservatives like Perry has been mounting for weeks about party leaders’ plans to pay for Trump’s agenda among other spending matters. Some conservatives are also expressing concerns to leadership that they don’t have enough visibility yet on what the plan is for the spending bill to fund the government, which hits a deadline on March 14.
Rep. Chip Roy, a Freedom Caucus member, said one of his concerns about backing the budget is he doesn’t have “clarity” on what the plan is for March 14 and passing a spending bill to avert a government shutdown.
“So we need an actual plan on what we’re doing, on approach,” the Texas Republican said. As some in GOP leadership privately prepare for a short-term funding bill, Roy said he may be able to support it depending on the circumstances. But he needs more details.
“If a (continuing resolution) buys some time for DOGE, continue to do its work, and then we can do appropriations in July. I’m probably pretty comfortable with that, if we can hold spending flat, but we’ve got to work to get consensus what we’re going to do,” Roy said.
CNN’s Manu Raju and Ali Main contributed to this report.
