WASHINGTON — While billionaire Donald Trump adviser Elon Musk’s minions raid federal agencies in an effort to cancel federal spending and lay off staff, Republicans in Congress are struggling to come up with an actual budget plan.
Republicans in the House are eyeing as much as $1 trillion in cuts over a decade, but the various factions don’t yet agree, with far-right lawmakers wanting cuts twice as big.
There’s also a significant disagreement among Republicans about whether to move their agenda as one big bill or several smaller ones.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the No. 2 Republican in the House, said he and his colleagues were still talking to President Donald Trump and among themselves about what they should do.
“Ultimately, we’re setting a target goal,” Scalise told HuffPost on Wednesday after a party meeting in the Capitol basement. “We’re still working through that, but it’s in, you know, over the $900 billion range, which is historic. I mean, Congress has never done anything close to that in budget reconciliation.”
“Budget reconciliation” is the special lawmaking process Republicans hope to use to beef up border security, boost the military and extend a sweeping package of tax cuts and spending cuts this year. Reconciliation is special because it allows Republicans to pass a bill through the Senate without being subject to the normal filibuster rules, meaning Democrats won’t be able to stop them. But it also has some limits on what can be included that could cause Republicans problems ahead.
First, though, they have to agree among themselves on some overall numbers, including how much spending they want to cut from the budget.
“We’re not going to get it done this week, but hopefully we will get it done next week,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), a member of the House Budget Committee, told HuffPost.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said he would like to see the House accomplish the first stage of reconciliation (passing a budget resolution) by the end of the month. But with no action happening this week (as it appears) and the House only in for two of the three remaining weeks of the month, that goal may already be sliding.
Part of the problem is that Trump seems uninterested in the smaller details of the legislation, leaving Republicans to find their own way and hope the president doesn’t wind up unhappy with their work at a later stage in the process. That’s what happened on a government funding bill in December that Republicans had to abandon at the last minute.
Carter specifically cited Trump’s recent comments in which he seemed to rule out cuts to Medicaid, the federal program that covers health care expenses for 70 million Americans, from which Republicans have long hoped to reap billions in savings.
“As soon as we get some clarification from the president on some of his recent remarks about Medicaid, then I think we’ll be ready to roll,” Carter said.
Trump has also seemed unwilling to tell Republicans whether they should do one bill or two. “I think there’s a lot of talk about two and there’s a lot of talk about one, but it doesn’t matter,” he said during a visit to the Capitol in January.
Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that anyone who opposes doing it all as one bill is against the president. HuffPost asked how he knew the president favored a single bill, given his prior statement.
“I think the president understands this, and I’ve been in meetings with the president on this,” Barr said. “One bill is what we need to have. And so I think that’s the direction we’re heading.”
Musk, meanwhile, has dispatched aides to federal agencies, encouraged the entire federal workforce to quit their jobs by taking a buyout of dubious legality and boasted of putting the U.S. Agency for International Development through a “wood chipper.” Junking the agency wholesale theoretically would save $40 billion annually.
The problem is, it’s not clear if it’s legal for the executive branch to unilaterally undo spending Congress authorized by law. Already, courts have stymied a Trump administration effort to freeze federal grants, and it’s far from certain Trump could win a court battle over what’s known as “impoundment,” or a refusal by the executive branch to carry out statutorily required spending.
Republican lawmakers seem wary of relying on Musk’s assumed savings, which so far don’t appear anywhere near the $2 trillion mark he said he could achieve while campaigning for Trump.
“Those cuts are great, but then we got to see what those turn into in practice, right?” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told HuffPost. “We got to see what happens with impoundment. We got to see what happens with savings, how much it is in the aggregate.”
Speaker Johnson defended Musk’s actions, which appear in many cases to break laws regarding congressionally approved spending, administrative procedures and possibly information security, saying there had been a “gross overreaction” to what he was doing.
“The executive branch of government in our system has the right to evaluate how executive branch agencies are operating,” Johnson said at his weekly press conference Wednesday.
“By putting a pause on some of these agencies and by evaluating them and by doing these internal audits, that is a long-overdue and much-welcome development. That’s what the American people demand and deserve. That’s what’s happening,” he said.
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If the House cannot get its act together to start work on a budget bill that would set the parameters for the later bills to make big changes in taxes and spending, it may have to make way for the Senate to instead start the process.
That would mean a change in overall strategy, though, as Senate Republicans have mostly united behind a piecemeal approach of boosting spending on border security and defense in an initial bill and then later in the year dealing with the thorny issue of taxes in a second one. That approach has also garnered the support of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative and libertarian clique of members within the House GOP.
Asked how much longer he might wait before starting in on passing a budget, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told The Washington Times, “Not much longer.”