Does Trump Have a Legislative Agenda?

Republican infighting dominates the Hill (again)

Lindsey Graham is tired of waiting.

Just wait until you see this dramatic announcement that was released by his office yesterday:

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, today announced the committee will mark up the Senate’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget resolution next week.

Spicy, right? 🔥🔥🔥

That statement shot up eyebrows — and heart rates — across Washington. But just in case it didn’t quite have that effect on you, allow me to explain the backstory. (Stay with me here. The legislative language might sound sleepy, but after I unpack it for you, you’ll be in-the-know on how this move could have major policy consequences, with trillions of dollars hanging in the balance.)

Let’s start by defining our terms. A “budget resolution” is a non-binding blueprint passed by Congress that lays out how much money it plans to spend and tax over the course of the next year.

For our purposes, the important thing to know here is that passing a budget resolution is also the first step in unlocking the reconciliation process — a special budgetary tool that allows a majority to ram legislation through by party lines, without having to meet the Senate’s typical 60-vote filibuster threshold.

To avoid having to deal with the filibuster, and its pesky requirement that bills receive bipartisan support (the horror!), new presidents usually use reconciliation to achieve their first — and most important — legislative priorities.

It’s how Barack Obama managed to pass the final parts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare. It’s how Donald Trump tried to repeal the ACA, and then how he successfully pushed through his 2017 tax cuts. It’s also how Joe Biden passed his 2021 Covid stimulus package and his 2022 climate change/health care legislation.

But none of that can happen until lawmakers start by approving a budget resolution.

Normally, they would have done that by now. At this point in 2017 (under Trump I) and 2021 (under Biden), a budget resolution had already passed both chambers of Congress, allowing the new president and their congressional allies to begin crafting a reconciliation measure.

But Republicans have not been able to get their act together so quickly.

It’s been more than two months since Trump won the presidency — and the GOP won control of Congress — and the party is still going back and forth on how to structure its reconciliation package.

House Republican leaders, overseeing one of the smallest (and most fractious) majorities in history, want to push through all of Trump’s priorities in “one big, beautiful bill,” combining extensions of his 2017 tax cuts (many of which are due to expire at the end of this year) with new immigration, energy, and defense policies.

That way, they only have to ram a bill down everyone’s throats once, and they can ensure that potential Republican defectors — of which they can only afford one — will be tagged with tanking The Entire Trump Agenda if they stray from the pack.

But Senate leaders think that hashing out one big mega-package (especially one that tackles the tax code) will take too long, and they want to split the tax and immigration portions into two separate bills, to ensure that Trump can quickly score a major win on border security.

To the frustration of many congressional Republicans, Trump — not unlike his predecessor, “the president who could not choose” — has been loath to take a side and call a play, vacillating for months on which approach he prefers.

House Republicans had been hoping to hold a vote in committee on a budget resolution this week — in order to force the matter and begin a one-bill process — but they haven’t been able to finalize a blueprint yet, amid protracted intraparty negotiations about how much government spending should be cut as part of the package.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s initial plan was for the measure to add about $300 billion in new border security and defense spending, while cutting $300 billion elsewhere. But fiscal hawks in the House Freedom Caucus shot that proposal down, insisting that the bill would have to cut more spending than it created.

Per CNN and Punchbowl News, Johnson then tried to offer $500 billion in cuts, then $700 billion — then, finally, $1 trillion. The Freedom Caucus responded “no,” “no,” and “no.”

According to Punchbowl, Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Ralph Norman (R-SC) have said they are looking for the package to cut spending by $2.5 trillion. Because the GOP majority is so slim, if both Roy and Norman vote against the budget resolution, it would go down in flames. So House Republicans are still stuck at the drawing board.

Growing increasingly desperate, per the Wall Street Journal, Republican leaders have even started discussing making their tax cuts effective for only five years, in order to keep the cost of the package down. But that could cause problems of its own: other GOP lawmakers are insistent that the tax cuts be made permanent.

Senate Republicans are officially done waiting for their House brethren to settle on a plan. In the Wednesday statement excerpted above, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced that he plans to leapfrog the House. His panel will start considering a budget resolution of its own next week — and this one will be structured to match how the Senate has wanted to do things all along.

Graham said that his blueprint will call for about $150 billion in new defense spending and about $150 billion in border security spending, both of which will be offset by commensurate spending cuts. Any changes to the tax code can wait to be hashed out in a second reconciliation package later in the year.

“To those who believe that Republicans should fulfill their promises on border security, mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens: I agree,” Graham said in his statement. “It’s time for the Senate to move,” he told reporters.

The South Carolina Republican has also been back-channeling with the House Freedom Caucus, trying to convince them to endorse his proposal; if the conservative bloc insists on adopting Graham’s two-bill approach, then Johnson’s one-bill plan would lose any chance at it has at passing.

Johnson isn’t giving up yet, though. “It’s gonna be one bill,” he told Punchbowl News.

Weeks into the Trump presidency, Republicans are completely at loggerheads on how to move forward with a legislative agenda — and Trump himself isn’t weighing in (almost an inverse of lawmakers’ hesitance to intervene in his executive actions).

“How are the taxes doing? OK?” Trump asked House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) at an event on Wednesday, not seeming particularly stressed about the details. “We’re gonna get good things passed I hope, right?” (Smith posted the exchange on X, adding a caption that promoted the House approach: “One big, beautiful bill coming right up, Mr. President.” Notably, Trump hadn’t said anything about one bill or two in his remarks.)

The president is expected to meet with Johnson, Smith, and other House Republicans today at the White House; perhaps he will take the chance to definitively set a path forward for the party, after whiffing on several previous opportunities to do so.

None of this is a particularly good sign for the GOP’s legislative aspirations, considering this should be the easy part — setting the process by which their agenda will march through Congress. They haven’t even started really getting into the weeds of the policy that will go into the package(s).

Once they do, a whole new host of disagreements is sure to crop up. It won’t be easy to find one or two trillion dollars in the federal budget to cut, especially considering there are more moderate GOP lawmakers on the other side of the ideological spectrum to reckon with. Republican centrists are already pushing back against proposals to cut Obamacare, eliminate tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, and impose work requirements for parents who rely on social safety net programs.

Republicans also differ on other matters, like whether to increase the federal State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction and whether to expand the Child Tax Credit. To make matters more complicated, Trump has previously signaled that he wants to raise the debt ceiling as part of the reconciliation package; that will likely be impossible, as four dozen House Republicans have made a habit of always voting against debt ceiling increases.

Are you getting a sense of how hard this will be yet?

The truth is, though, this level of internal disagreement is pretty typical.

In their book “The Limits of Party,” political scientists James Curry and Frances Lee calculate how many of the priorities a majority party articulates at the beginning of a Congress end up becoming law. “The modal outcome is failure,” they found.

During times of divided government, that’s the case in large part because of the Senate filibuster — but their finding also holds true for periods of unified government, when party infighting often has a way of sinking filibuster-proof reconciliation packages as well (or at least ensuring that those packages end up considerably less ambitious than party leaders originally intended).

Dating back to the 1980s, on average, majority parties in unified government have achieved nothing on 43% of their agenda priorities, according to Curry and Lee. They’ve achieved most of what they wanted on 35% of their priorities and some of what they wanted on the final 22%.

It’s easy to all agree on policy when a party is campaigning from the minority; actually implementing something as a majority party is much harder. “It’s different when it’s real,” Lee told me earlier this week in an interview, recounting the many examples of “parties fragmenting under the pressure of unified government.”

Bill Clinton’s health care plan collapsed. George W. Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security went nowhere. Barack Obama failed to get climate legislation through the Senate. Courtesy of John McCain’s thumbs-down (below), Trump was unable to repeal Obamacare, his first reconciliation push in his first term. And most of the priorities in Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda ended up on the cutting room floor.

“Every example of unified government in the polarized era features at least one giant, catastrophic party failure,” Lee told me.

Trump — as dominant a figure in his party as he may be — was unable to buck that trend in his last term. And, if the last few weeks are any sign, he won’t be able to this time either. Republicans will likely settle on a strategy, and pass a package, eventually, but history suggests that it will end up far slimmer than they currently are hoping.

The president has spent his first few weeks in office churning out executive actions. But that’s the easy part of a president’s job — and also the more ephemeral part. His executive orders will last only until the next Democratic administration, at best, or the next court hearing, at worst. Laws passed through Congress are more lasting, which is why Republicans are hoping Trump will drop the “I alone can fix it” act and turn his attention over to Capitol Hill eventually.

He would be wise to do so sooner rather than later. Republican lawmakers may be loath to disagree with Trump — but they have no problem disagreeing with each other. And as long as Trump doesn’t take a side in their disputes (which he has shown no interest in doing yet), the intraparty bickering will go on… and on… and on, threatening his legislative agenda.

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• USA Today: Senator Mitch McConnell falls twice, leaves Capitol in wheelchair

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The day ahead

• President Trump will deliver remarks at two National Prayer Breakfast this morning — one at the Capitol and one at the Washington Hilton — continuing a decades-long bipartisan tradition. He will then meet with Republican lawmakers at the White House about the budget resolutions and sign more executive orders.

• The Senate is still technically in session from yesterday, as Democrats held the floor in an all-night marathon to protest Russell Vought’s nomination to be Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency from which the federal funding freeze emanated last week. The 30 hours of maximum debate on Vought’s nomination is expected to expire around 7 p.m. ET tonight, at which time the Senate will likely confirm him along party lines.

• The House will vote on the HALT Fentanyl Act, which would permanently add fentanyl — the drug at the center of the opioid epidemic — to the list of Schedule I substances, which are the most strictly regulated.

• The Supreme Court has nothing on its schedule.