The House and Senate are racing to reach deals on their respective budget resolutions with action scheduled on both sides of Capitol Hill this week. However, House leadership remains reluctant to accept the Senate’s two-step strategy that would punt tax cuts until later in the year.
The Senate Budget Committee is scheduled Wednesday to take up the first of two budget resolutions. This one calls for increasing annual spending by $85.5 billion for four years and designating that funding for the military and border security.
The resolution only instructs committees to find a total of $5 billion in spending reductions over 10 years, with $1 billion coming from the Senate Agriculture Committee.
While the House has yet to produce its own plan, leaders have already said they would reject the Senate resolution should it come to the House floor.
A budget resolution serves as the blueprint for a later reconciliation bill that is needed to enact spending cuts and increases as well as tax cuts.
“The House’s bill addresses all of President Trump’s priorities, and it’s the only legislation that does that,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said on Tuesday.
Instead, the House leadership is working to push ahead on its one-bill approach, with a markup scheduled on Thursday. In theory, this means the draft text of the bill will be released 24 hours ahead of the meeting.
Still, conversations with House Republicans Tuesday indicated there was a lack of consensus on some key issues involving spending reductions. This includes remaining divides on how to reform the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“The speaker gives the impression that we’re coming to focus,” said Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla. “But he’s given that impression for some time.”
House committees are still waiting for the budget resolution to provide instructions on how much they'll have to find in spending reductions. House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn "GT" Thompson, R-Pa., said there’s not a final number on potential cuts his panel will offer up, but they are currently looking at all potential options.
“Does it facilitate a farm bill, is that number actually attainable, is it realistic to get it done and does it leave us in the majority after we do it,” Thompson said Monday night. “Those are the four criteria that I’m applying as I wade through all the possibilities.”
House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson, R-Pa.He said a number of suggestions would violate at least one of those criteria.
Policy changes to SNAP have been floated as the most likely place for spending reductions. Thompson and other Republicans have insisted these will not result in cuts to benefits and are instead focused on reducing fraud and waste.
“There’s no draconian stuff that’s going to happen,” Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., said about SNAP policy changes that could be made through reconciliation.
Work requirements have been floated as one option, but LaMalfa and other members said the conference is still not in complete agreement on how these changes should look.
He added that it’s hard to tell if significant progress was made Monday night or in the GOP meeting Tuesday morning, but he believes the Thursday markup timeline is realistic.
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Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., said the party is getting close to an agreement on SNAP, with a focus on how to improve the program by “making sure that we have work requirements that are a good fit for what families need.” However, he declined to provide details on specific policy disagreements.
An analysis by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service for fiscal 2023 showed an 11.68% payment error rate in SNAP. This includes both overpayments and underpayments, which totaled 10.03% and 1.64%, respectively. Policymakers often point to payment errors as a reason to reform the program.
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said that the majority of people participating in SNAP are already working.
“Life is very complicated for them, and many of them still have to go to food pantries to be able to put food on the table,” McGovern said. “To pile on work requirements … what a cruel and rotten thing to do to poor people.”
Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C., said there are broader challenges within the conference to get a deal on a budget resolution.
“I think the bigger sticking point is you have such a divergence of concerns,” Rouzer said. Some members are going to draw red lines on different issues, ranging from the limit on state and local tax deductions (SALT) to spending cuts, and there's a greater variation in priorities in the House than in the Senate, he said.
In the House, GOP deficit hawks have been calling for more spending cuts. Members of the House Freedom Caucus have insistently backed the Senate’s two-bill approach for weeks while Johnson has rallied behind Trump's request for “one big, beautiful bill.”
The Freedom Caucus this week circulated a strategy titled “218 for DOGE.” The document details a two-step approach with instructions to provide $200 billion in new funding for border security and defense, while cutting spending by $486.3 billion in other areas.
These cuts would include $105 billion in restoring “Clinton-era work requirements on welfare programs.”
The Freedom Caucus plan also includes a $4 trillion debt ceiling increase paired with their suggested spending reductions.
They argue this will give Congress time to craft a second deficit-neutral bill focused on tax relief and energy.
Even in areas like SNAP work requirements, though, it may be difficult to win consensus from more moderate Republicans. Thompson had previously indicated he was hesitant to raise the age on SNAP work requirements above the current 18-54 limits.
“Just the metrics, the situation, I’d say favor the Senate moving forward a little quicker than the House can. And I think that will dictate how things get massaged over here later,” Rouzer said.
Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C.Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman, R-Ark., said his staff is going over accounts they oversee and looking for places to “cut back a little bit” and contribute to the spending reductions. He said the panel is still wrestling with the specific policy changes in SNAP but emphasized these would be focused on finding areas for more efficiencies.
Boozman said the Senate Budget Committee understands that the Agriculture Committee needs to pass a farm bill soon and will need resources to do that.
“They’ve been a little bit easier on us because they know we’re going to need additional dollars in order to get the farm bill passed,” Boozman said.
Senate Ag member John Hoeven, R-N.D., said the committee is looking for accountability and ways to limit waste, fraud and abuse in SNAP. This could include ensuring there’s a work requirement that “makes sense, that helps people get to self-sufficiency.” This doesn’t necessarily mean raising the age on work requirements, Hoeven said.
“It’s more about making sure that there is an incentive to work,” Hoeven said.
Additionally, he said there need to be more incentives for states to ensure benefits are administered to those who need it and “not the ones that shouldn’t.”
While some members have indicated the Senate bills could be a more likely pathway, it doesn’t contain the sweeping spending reductions many House Republicans are pushing for.
“That doesn’t get us anything,” Thompson said of the Senate Budget instructions for four committees to cut $1 billion each. “We need to go a little deeper than that.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit public policy organization, said the Senate Budget Committee blueprint fails to adequately address budget deficits.
“While we appreciate that Chairman Graham has signaled the intent to fully pay for all new spending included in the forthcoming reconciliation bill, this commitment should be reflected fully in the contents of the budget resolution,” wrote Maya MacGuineas, president of CRFB.
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