DORAL, Fla. — House Republicans traded the bitter cold of Washington, DC, for President Trump’s ritzy resort near Miami this week to figure out how their tenuous majority can fulfill the grandiose promises they’ve made for a legislative package that will define the 119th Congress.
They left Wednesday seemingly no closer to clarity.
“Everything’s up in the air. This pie’s got a lot of different ingredients,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) bluntly told The Post Tuesday about the state of the GOP agenda. “We’ll come together on it in the end.”
Others were more pessimistic after two-plus days hunkered down at Trump National Doral Miami.
“We still do not have a plan on budget reconciliation and our Speaker and his team have not offered one. Not even if we are in a one bill or two bill framework,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) griped on X Wednesday morning.
“Basically, just get started doing something,” she added. “We have only been presented with the same policy and budget cut proposals that we have been presented with for a month now at all our meetings and at a full Saturday conference meeting earlier this month.
“I would say sink or swim, but our country is already sinking, so we MUST swim.”
Since securing a trifecta in the Nov. 5 elections, Republicans have talked about a colossal legislative package to enact sweeping reforms on the border, energy, defense, taxes, spending and more. They have model legislation from the prior Congress on border security and energy reforms to use as a framework.
But tax reform and spending offsets are a different story.
The GOP wants to extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which has key provisions set to expire at the end of the year. Then they want to add in Trump’s campaign promises of no taxes on tips, Social Security checks, or overtime pay as well as an increase in the state and local tax deduction (SALT) cap.
“I would like that as deficit-reducing but we’re putting the fine points to it now,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters during a fireside chat moderated by the Hill’s Emily Brooks. “The number one threat to our nation right now is our debt.”
“Congress has kicked the can down the road for decades, and we’re out of road.”
The Tax Foundation estimates that extending the 2017 tax cuts alone — without offsets — would add $3.5 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, even accounting for the economic growth spurred by the reductions.
Yet Republicans want additional tax cuts and significantly ramped-up spending on border and defense — all of which is likely to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade.
It’s unclear what spending items will get cut to compensate for all this, and few are volunteering suggestions.
How can the GOP make the math work? Right now, there’s no easy answer.
Competing interests
“My biggest fear is all our newfound fiscal hawks take all that money we save and give it to an already bloated Pentagon,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) groused to The Post.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who was stuck in DC navigating cabinet confirmations during the House GOP retreat, has made clear he believes “we are dramatically underfunding our military.”
To help pay for the reforms, Johnson, 52, publicly said there “is some mandatory spending” that needs to be “addressed” — referring to entitlements not subject to annual congressional appropriations, like Social Security.
But both the speaker and the GOP rank-and-file have ruled out cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which when combined with interest on the debt and national defense — both of which presumably wouldn’t get cut either — account for well over 60% of spending. There will almost certainly be discretionary cuts as well.
For context, the government spent $6.75 trillion last fiscal year with a deficit of about $1.83 trillion.
“Stay tuned on the specifics,” Johnson said Tuesday. “We have long lists of menu items. We’ve been doing this for weeks. Members are working through their priority lists.”
While the Republican right flank could derail the agenda package for not having enough spending offsets, other lawmakers are warning against cutting too deep into their constituents’ benefits.
“[I’ve been] stressing to my colleagues that New York cannot take a disproportional amount of cuts,” Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), NYC’s sole GOP federal lawmaker, told The Post while acknowledging the urgency of addressing the ballooning deficit.
“I’ve made that clear and that we need to focus on the fraud, the waste, abuse and the mismanagement of these agencies and programs and not on the benefits that could hurt my constituents,” she added, arguing that the spending cuts need “to be equally distributed.”
There are also grievances about raising the SALT deduction cap, a top priority for many blue-state Republicans.
“I think some of the big SALT people had expectations coming out of last year,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) told The Post.
“Every tax provision affects the way people behave. I’m not sure, with all the limited resources we have that a tax cut to encourage state and local governments to grow government would be one we want.”
‘Everyone’s a hardliner’
This year’s House GOP issues conference was moved up from its usual March date to get the pulse of the membership and try to keep unpleasant surprises to a minimum down the line.
Key committee chairs held workshop sessions and hit rank-and-file members with a barrage of policy pitches.
Turnout was considerable. Somewhere between 160 and 170 of the 218 current House Republican members showed up in person, according to organizers. Johnson claims that 94% of the House GOP caucus “had been directly engaged in the discussions.”
“Some members chose not to show up to this. They need to be a part of the team huddle because when we go on the field and execute the play, they need to be a part of it,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told reporters.
Perhaps the most notable no-show was Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a fiscal hawk who could prove to be one of the more challenging members to get on board with the package.
“It is being reported I am not at the so-called Republican retreat in Florida,” Roy wrote on X. “I am not. I am in Texas, with my family & meeting with constituents, rather than spending $2K to hear more excuses for increasing deficits & not being in DC to deliver Trump’s border security $ ASAP.”
“The GOP ‘leadership’ is working to jam through massive deficits & criticize the [conservative House Freedom Caucus] while protecting GOP members who won’t vote to fully cut the green new deal, won’t reform Medicaid, want to water down border security, and want to subsidize high-tax blue states.”
“Everybody’s a hardliner right now,” Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) quipped Wednesday about the leverage each member has, with the GOP unable to afford a single defection given the current makeup of the House.
“The beautiful diversity of thought that we have in the Republican Conference is such that we’re going to have to make a play call some point and move forward,” Moore added.
Vice President JD Vance addressed the conference Tuesday and impressed upon them the need to work together and recognize that not everyone is going to get all of what they want, according to multiple lawmakers present for his remarks.
GOP leadership has tried to drive home that message as well.
“The main takeaway that I hope we all understand,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) told reporters Wednesday, “is that our agenda is absolutely unstoppable if we remain united.”
Other unanswered questions
So how much will the SALT cap be raised by? What government programs will have their budgets reduced? And what constitutes a tip, anyway?
At this point, Republicans don’t even know whether the package will include a debt limit increase — or even whether it will take the shape of one or two bills.
“No final decision yet,” Johnson said about the former question Tuesday. “I think there’s some concern in the Senate that may be difficult to do.”
Republicans are planning to utilize a process known as reconciliation which enables them to bypass the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a legislative filibuster — ensuring they won’t need Democratic support.
They are poised to kick off that process next week by beginning markup on the budget resolution, which GOP leadership hopes to get passed by late February.
But Senate Republicans almost universally prefer breaking Trump’s agenda package into two separate reconciliation bills to get a quick win on the border, energy and defense, then having more time to focus on the more difficult task of figuring out the tax components. Many of the conservative House hardliners also want two bills.
House GOP leadership wants the one-bill approach because it feels that’s the only way it will have enough leverage with its members to get the package through.
“We have a very diverse conference,” Johnson said. “We have interests and district-level-specific concerns that are just not an issue in the Senate and so our math is more complicated.”
Initially, Trump, 78, favored the House approach, but he’s since shown indifference.
“We got to get that done,” Trump said during his speech at the GOP retreat on Monday. “And we don’t want to get hung up on the budget process … whether it’s one bill, two bills, I don’t care.”
‘Right on schedule’
There are just over 80 days between the end of the GOP retreat and Easter Sunday. Johnson has said that he wants to get the Trump agenda package through the House before the April 20 holiday.
“We’re right on schedule. We really are following the timeline that we set out months ago,” Johnson insisted on Tuesday. “If we stay on our schedule, then we’re sending it to the president’s desk by the end of April or early to mid-May.”
Perhaps the first major test will be the budget resolution. Back in 2017 when Republicans had the trifecta, 20 members defected on a budget resolution, which is needed to unlock the Senate reconciliation process.
“I don’t know if y’all know this, but we have a very small margin now,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) quipped about the dilemma. “[If] we stay unified, we can get anything done. We have to hash out our differences, and that’s what we’re doing.”
There are also considerable procedural risks on the horizon. The Senate Parliamentarian, who interprets the rules in the chamber, could reject elements of the package, a problem Democrats frequently encountered during the Biden administration during work on their signature legislation which became the Inflation Reduction Act.
GOP leadership is adamant that “failure is not an option” and believes the party could reap significant rewards, potentially even defying the historical trend of the party in the White House losing congressional seats during midterm elections.
“If we do our job over the next 21 months, not only will House Republicans be re-elected and expand our majority in 2026, we will cement a national governing coalition for generations to come,” Trump boldly proclaimed Monday evening.
“If we fail to do that, we fail as a Congress,” said McCaul, reflecting on the agenda. “The American people gave us a gift. They gave us the trifecta. If we don’t deliver back home, there will be consequences. And I think every member here needs to understand that.”