Washington Wednesday: Spending cuts

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 16th of April.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

The Senate and House of Representatives are on Spring recess, but before they left town, lawmakers agreed on the outline for President Trump’s “big beautiful bill.” The legislation would overhaul border security and tax policy, and with an outline in place, lawmakers can get to work writing it.

BROWN: But the blueprint almost didn’t pass the House of Representatives.

Washington Bureau Reporter Leo Briceno explains why.

LEO BRICENO: Last Wednesday evening, as many as 20 Republicans were ready to vote against the Senate’s budget proposal. They saw it as woefully short on one key ingredient: spending cuts.

SELF: They’re ridiculously low.

That’s Congressman Keith Self of Texas, walking through the basement tunnels underneath the Capitol ahead of that vote.

SELF: We have no confidence in the Senate to do anything other than reach the lowest point they can on savings and the highest point on spending.

A little bit of background: The way a budget reconciliation bill works, the House of Representatives passes a budget outline, and then the Senate creates its own version. They then iron out any differences and pass a final budget that sets the general parameters of how much the bill will cost, how much it will cut, and so on. The line by line details that make up the budget will then get filled in by lawmakers over the next month or so.

In recent weeks, the House passed a detailed plan for Congress to slash up to one and a half ($1.5) trillion dollars over ten years.

The Senate’s budget fell well short of that, proposing just a four billion dollar minimum for spending reductions.

To put things in perspective, the House plan would be similar to cutting $1500 dollars in your family budget, while the Senate plan would be agreeing to cut at least $4 dollars.

House Speaker Mike Johnson sought to reassure the conference that they could fill in more cuts later.

PRESSER: The budget resolution is not a law. Okay? All this does is it allows us to continue the process, begin drafting the actual legislation that really counts. And that’s the one big beautiful bill.

Other Republicans in leadership agree this stage was not the one worth fighting over the size of spending cuts.

Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma is chairman of the House appropriations committee—the group that drafts Congress’ spending legislation every year.

COLE: Let’s have the fight when we’ve produced the bill ourselves that has done that. And we’ve won those kinds of fights. And it’s not like we’re without allies in the Senate. There’s a lot of people in the Senate that didn’t like the $4 billion number themselves and would like real spending reductions.

Despite assurances from leadership, at least 20 Republicans still balked at the bill ahead of a scheduled vote on Wednesday.

Fiscal hawks wanted a guarantee that the Senate would follow through with promises to work on more spending cuts.

And moments before the vote came to the floor, they dug in.

Usually, a routine vote would be over in about fifteen minutes. When a vote stays open for significantly longer than that, it’s usually a sign that leadership is stalling for time, trying to find the votes they need.

This one dragged out nearly an hour and a half.

In a side-room off the House floor as many as 20 Republicans were locked in negotiations with the Speaker.

During that time, hardliners pushed leadership for some guarantee that Republicans would use Trump’s “one, big, beautiful bill” to enact meaningful spending cuts.

By the end of that meeting, Republicans had come up with a plan to bake spending cuts into rules for the chamber. Here’s Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison

BURLISON: You basically put in the House Rules language that says no reconciliation bill can, that doesn’t meet the Smucker language in our instructions, can be brought to the floor.

That would be like promising to keep to your monthly budget by putting it in the terms and conditions of your home’s leasing agreement.

Even so, President Trump seemed on board. Here’s Burlison again, describing the hour-and-a half meeting with the Speaker.

BURLISON: The president called in, spoke with the speaker. The president likes this idea.

With that tentative agreement beginning to take shape, the Speaker pulled the budget vote off the floor with promises to implement the plan the next day. But then the next morning, those plans changed.

Instead of implementing the changes to House rules—or any other kind of an in-writing agreement—Senate leadership instead made a verbal agreement to increase spending cuts.

THUNE: One of the principal objectives in our budget resolution and in the House’s, as outlined by the speaker, is spending cuts….

That’s Senate Majority leader John Thune at a joint press conference with Speaker Johnson.

THUNE: Our ambition in the Senate is we are aligned with the House in terms of what their budget resolution outlined in terms of savings. The speaker has talked about one and a half trillion dollars, we have a lot of senators who believe that is a minimum.

Later on Thursday, House Republicans voted to advance the Senate's budget. Congressman Chip Roy of Texas was one of the 20 Republicans who had threatened to defeat that same bill just one day before. He explains why he changed his mind.

ROY: We have now three strong statements from the speaker, the president, and the Senate majority leader. We did not have those 48 hours ago. We do now…We got a commitment on that and that’s why we’re here.

In many ways, this was the best shot fiscal conservatives were going to have to put a commitment to large-scale spending cuts in writing. From here, getting the Senate to agree with the House on spending cuts will become a line-by-line fight over what to cut and what to leave in place.

One of the most ardent fiscal hawks in the House of Representatives, Representative Thomas of Kentucky, believes conservatives let the moment go—in return for little more than a handshake agreement.

MASSIE: I hope it works out for them. The people who traded their vote for a promise—I think that’s just salve for their conscience. They were probably, maybe looking for an off-ramp because what was coming next was a lot of pressure from the president to vote for this.

Massie was one of just two Republicans who voted against the budget framework. He was joined by Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indianna.

For now, Congress will get to work writing the contents of Trump’s “one, big, beautiful bill,” when they return to D.C. on April 28. Speaker Johnson has said he wants to have a final version ready for a vote sometime around Memorial Day.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno in Washington, D.C.

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