Mike Johnson pushes ahead to unlock Trump agenda, teeing up Senate clash

Washington (CNN) — House Speaker Mike Johnson is vowing to power forward on a key budget committee vote early next week, setting up a clash with Senate GOP leaders who are itching to move a separate blueprint with their own strategy on how to pass President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Johnson and his House GOP leadership team left a marathon meeting with Trump on Thursday touting progress in the march to pass the GOP agenda, which they hope to approve in a “single beautiful bill,” rather than the Senate’s preferred approach of two separate bills. But, notably, House GOP leaders have yet to answer some of the biggest questions, including the price tag for the bill, or how to address raising the nation’s borrowing limit, according to multiple lawmakers who attended the meeting.

An upbeat Johnson told reporters that the more than four-hour meeting yielded some key agreement that could allow House Republicans to move forward with their budget blueprint, which will mark the first step toward passing Trump’s agenda through Congress without the filibuster. But the Louisiana Republican didn’t say what that agreement was. He said the committee could move as quickly as Tuesday, after punting that meeting this week — an ambitious timeline that would put the House ahead of the Senate GOP’s plans to advance their own version.

Key House Republicans planned to hold more meetings through the evening on Thursday in hopes of nailing down more details.

Others at the meeting, though, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, acknowledged that no decisions were made about how much savings to identify in the bill — a number that must be set in the GOP’s budget blueprint — or how to tackle the looming debt limit, another top Trump priority. They also talked about ambitious proposals, such as making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, a costly provision that would require steep spending cuts to achieve the GOP’s fiscal goals.

Scalise said Trump was “very bullish” on how the bill would address conservatives’ calls for big savings. GOP hardliners are seeking $2 trillion in cuts or more, though some had agreed earlier this week to closer to $1.65 trillion.

Trump, who opened the meeting of roughly 15 to 20 members, remained highly engaged throughout the gathering, which became tense at times and went deep into details of tax and spending, according to multiple GOP lawmakers who attended. Now, Johnson and his leadership team will canvas the rest of their members to ensure their emerging framework will pass muster across the party. The stakes are high: Johnson can’t lose more than one GOP vote on the floor.

“We got out the whiteboards and we worked out the framework for what we believe will be the path forward,” Johnson said, predicting that the budget panel could move forward with passing the blueprint as soon as Tuesday. And he added: “I think we’ll be able to make some announcements probably by tomorrow.”

Scalise added that Trump was “very engaged” in the precise details of the plan, including going through the details of his own tax plan.

“We narrowed the areas of disagreement or uncertainty,” Scalise said, adding that the conference discussed contentious issues like debt limit and increasing relief for state and local taxes, though he declined to divulge specific details of the emerging plan.

“There were some big issues where nobody was in agreement on certain things, we actually got agreement on some of them,” he added. “And we narrowed the disagreement on the remaining ones.”

Scalise said GOP leadership now needed to speak to the rest of the members about the details before they make any final decisions. And he said the House GOP budget Committee hopes to meet next week to put forward and pass its budget blueprint, which is the first step in the GOP’s complex process to pass Trump’s agenda.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a governing-minded Republican from a battleground district, said the meeting was tense “at times.”

On the other side of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who did not attend the meeting with Trump, stressed the need for urgent progress in these talks.

“We just need somebody to move and we’ve been trying to give the House space to do that, and hopefully they can come to some agreement today that would enable that to happen,” Thune said.

CNN’s Ali Main and Lauren Fox contributed to this report.

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