GOP hardliners rebel over Johnson’s budget plans

Washington (CNN) — Conservative backlash has brought Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget plans to a halt, offering an early sign of the struggle Republicans will face as they try to muscle President Donald Trump’s agenda through a narrowly divided Congress.

House GOP leaders are struggling to coalesce behind a budget blueprint that will mark the first step toward delivering Trump’s agenda, as some hardliners demanded hundreds of billions more in cuts and more details about how to pay for Trump’s tax cuts. GOP leaders believe they will, ultimately, get consensus to move ahead, but the disagreement is — for now — halting Johnson’s plans to move ahead with the first committee vote on Trump’s big border, tax and energy package this week.

“The American people gave us the gavel for a reason,” said Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a member of the House budget panel who is among those seeking more cuts. “Everybody wants to cut until it’s time to cut.”

Johnson plans to huddle with several key Republicans on Tuesday night as they chart a path forward but said leaders haven’t yet decided whether to move ahead with a committee vote on the budget measure this week.

“We’re in the midst of this process. We’re right on schedule,” Johnson said. “It’s not yet determined if we will be marking up this week or not. We’re having an important meeting tonight with key figures on the committee and others to sort through it. But this is the deliberative process.”

Passing a budget blueprint is only a small piece of the GOP’s challenge this year, since it is a non-binding document that includes no specifics about what will be in Trump’s legislative package. But it’s a critical step toward that final bill: Both the House and Senate must adopt the identical budget measures to unlock the procedural powers to allow Trump’s agenda to bypass the Senate’s filibuster.

And Johnson will need to steer his conference through the politically fraught budget debate at a perilous time for the House GOP: Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York is set to resign from the chamber in the coming days, which will mean Republicans can’t lose a single GOP vote — and Democrats are already scheming about how to stall her replacement.

Norman and other conservatives had generally been on board with the budget plans that Johnson and other GOP leaders had presented at the conference’s policy retreat last week. But problems quickly arose as those plans morphed into a physical document, according to multiple GOP lawmakers and senior aides familiar with the discussions.

While GOP leaders had spoken generally at the Doral, Florida, retreat of a budget that outlined $2.5 trillion in savings, another proposal this week appeared to outline only about $300 billion in savings — by repealing Biden-era programs and adding tougher rules to programs like Medicaid — as well as $300 billion in new spending on border security and other national security measures. (Senior Republicans cautioned that precise details of the budget plan remain highly fluid.)

Conservatives did support those proposals, but they wanted more in cuts. GOP leaders offered to go higher, from roughly $300 billion in cuts to $500 billion to as much as $700 billion. But to Norman and others, it still wasn’t enough. And there was another problem: GOP leadership wasn’t proposing how to pay for Trump’s big tax plans.

“No one has put forward how we’re paying for everything,” one person familiar with the discussions told CNN.

Members of the House Budget Committee spoke on a conference call Sunday night and by Tuesday, it was clear the committee wasn’t ready to release its budget blueprint or hold a vote on it this week as planned. People close to Republican leadership downplayed the impact of the delay, noting that Johnson’s schedule had always been ambitious, if not aspirational.

But members of the House Freedom Caucus, including its chairman, Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, have already begun conversations with their Senate GOP colleagues, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Harris has been speaking to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who could decide to leapfrog the House with his own budget proposal if the lower chamber doesn’t act soon.

If that happens, it could mean further disruption of Trump’s agenda. Many senators — including Graham — have suggested that Republicans should focus on passing a narrower version of Trump’s agenda zeroing in on border and energy policy, and save the politically trickier tax bill for later. House GOP tax-writers, however, have ruled out that idea, arguing it would jeopardize the passage of those tax cuts.

Asked on Tuesday whether the Senate should take the lead, Johnson told reporters, “The Senate will not take the lead. We’re going to take the lead and we’re right on schedule.”

For now, House GOP leaders are working to rescue their own budget blueprint, rather than let the Senate move first. As lawmakers return to Washington on Tuesday night, Johnson and his team plan to resume the parade of one-on-one meetings they’ve been having for weeks as they map out how to pass Trump’s agenda.

Johnson and his team have been urging their more conservative members to support a less-aggressive budget blueprint — one that gives them flexibility to go after steeper spending if they are able, but also one that can realistically pass in a historically tiny majority.

But Norman scoffed at that idea. He said he would reject any “shell” budget because, in his words, with “the first puff of wind, it blows up.”

He added, “They want a starting block, but if you start that low, it’s just a nonstarter.”

CNN’s Annie Grayer contributed to this report.

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