Washington Wednesday: Taxing and spending priorities

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 27th of November.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Congress has a few priorities left on its plate before heading home for Christmas.

Item number one: the government’s budget for 2025.

Some want that debated in 2025, others want it out of the way sooner so as to get to work quicker on President Trump’s other priorities.

Here’s WORLD Washington Bureau Reporter Leo Briceno.

LEO BRCIENO: For Republicans who have waited years to restore their governing mandate in Washington, January can't come soon enough.

Two priorities consistently land at the top of the list they want to do: government funding and Tax policy.

JOHNSON: The Speaker has got confidence that we can process all that.

Dusty Johnson is South Dakota’s lone Congressman in the House of Representatives.

JOHNSON: In a perfect world, we would be able to focus on President Trump’s agenda on day one… But we don’t live in a perfect world. So, we just have to see what the art of the possible is.”

Since this summer, Congress has been working on the appropriations bills needed to fund the government and has already moved the deadline from September to December 20th. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he wants to extend the government’s current funding levels into March. That would allow Republicans to figure out government spending for 2025 once they have control of the White House and Congress.

It would also drag the issue into the middle of Trump’s first 100 days back in office, when Republicans also hope to work on renewing Trump’s signature 20-17 tax cuts that are set to expire.

Congressman Dusty Johnson, like many lawmakers WORLD spoke to, says he is waiting on some key information before supporting another short-term spending bill.

JOHNSON: Would sure be nice if we had a deal with the Senate on toplines…

Toplines are the numbers for spending levels.

JOHNSON: Would sure be nice if we knew if Chuck Schumer was interested in making a deal. Would sure be nice if we understood what kinds of poison pills they are interested in working into the legislation.

Poison pills are usually smaller pieces of legislation that lawmakers put into a bigger bill to advance unrelated or partisan priorities. Congressman Johnson is reserving his thoughts on whether he supports the spending plan until he knows what those look like.

So can Republicans manage both government funding and tax policy legislation early next year?

MURPHY: It’s a significant lift. It’s a huge lift.

That’s Congressman Greg Murphy of North Carolina. He sits on the House Ways and Means Committee—the body charged with crafting tax policy legislation. It’s this committee that spearheaded the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, also known as the T-C-J-A. That was Trump’s signature bill that slashed taxes in almost every category.

MURPHY: I would like to think we can walk and chew gum at the same time. They are two critical issues that face the fiscal wellbeing of our country, so I think we have to get both of them done at the same time

He says the committee hasn’t really discussed whether they plan to reimplement the TCJA as is or make changes to it now.

Congressman Mike Kelley helped write the TCJA, and he is one of five Republicans who worked on it that are still on the Ways and Means Committee. I asked him if Republicans were on the same page about what would need to happen this time around.

KELLEY: I would hope so! We were pretty much all on board in 2017 when we did TCJA…Good policy, and now we have to look at what are the things we should have shored up a little more on that we could probably improve this time.

While there might be questions about what, exactly, ends up in that final product, a key difference between then and now is that they won’t be starting from zero. Yes, the current law is a springboard, but the committee has already been at work in the background. Here’s Oklahoma Congressman Kevin Hern. He’s a member of the Ways and Means Committee and the newly elected 2025 Republican Conference Policy Chair.

HERN: We’ve been working on reconciliation and the proverbial what-ifs for a few months now through the committee chairs. So, we’ve done a lot of work already.

Hern mentioned “Reconciliation.” That’s a special legislative process in Congress that allows certain budget-related laws to pass with a simple majority, bypassing the usual 60-vote threshold in the Senate. That means Republicans can pass their tax bill without Democratic votes—if Republicans can get on the same page. And Hern is hopeful that will be the case.

HERN: You contrast that when President Trump won the first time, nobody had anticipated him winning so there was not a lot of work done, so they spent the first three to four months doing the things we’ve already gotten done. There’s a lot of work that hasn’t been talked about.

I asked a few of the other Ways and Means members if they had started having conversations with their counterparts in the Senate. While the members haven’t, committee Chairman Jason Smith has been in touch.

Smith will play a central role in developing any pieces of legislation next year on tax…so I asked him about it.

BRICENO: Is work started on that yet, do you guys feel like you;re on the same page—

SMITH: —We’ve been working on it since April.

BRICENO: Ok, so yes, there are conversations ongoing with the Senate then?

SMITH: All the time.

BRICENO: Ok.

SMITH: And there has been since April.

With just over five weeks left in the 118th Congress, Republicans appear willing to kick a spending fight into the new year though they would need full cooperation in their ranks to pass a short-term bill. Democrats in the House would prefer to pass a 2025 spending bill that contains some of their priorities before they lose control of the White House and Senate. Here’s Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, the number three Democrat in the House of Representatives.

AGUILAR: We’re not giving up hope on passing something more comprehensive than that but we will see what happens in the next couple weeks.

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

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