Alex Miller & Lindsey McPherson | April 10, 2025

(The Washington Times) — House Republicans coalesced and adopted the Senate’s budget rewrite on Thursday after spending the week bashing the upper chamber’s offering as an unserious attempt at cutting spending.

Closed-door meetings and assurances that Senate Republicans are serious about steep spending cuts, in line with the House’s budget blueprint, helped sway frustrated House fiscal hawks and save President Trump’s agenda from a costly derailment.

The 216-214 House vote to adopt the budget resolution tees up the filibuster-proof reconciliation process that Republicans plan to use to pass sweeping tax and spending cuts, border and defense funding, and energy policy changes.

Two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana, voted against the plan.

A key breakthrough came Thursday morning as House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, held a joint press conference to announce a shared commitment to achieving at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts in the final reconciliation bill.

That’s the floor for spending cuts the House provided its committees in its budget instructions for the reconciliation bill. The Senate had set a meager $4 billion floor to preserve maximum flexibility, given strict rules that risk derailing the bill if committees in the upper chamber fall short of the target.

The speaker said the two chambers are “directly aligned” on the $1.5 trillion target, and Mr. Thune said many GOP senators believe that’s a minimum, although he used more cautious language than Mr. Johnson.

“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’s talked about, $1.5 trillion,” Mr. Thune said. “We’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter.”

House fiscal hawks have said all week that they don’t trust the Senate and demanded the upper chamber show them how they plan to achieve steep spending cuts.

“The Senate is prone to set up, to give us the shaft, like they’ve done for decades and decades,” Rep. Eric Burlison, Missouri Republican, said. “Every time we get to this moment, it’s like Lucy with the football. They pull the football.”

Mr. Thune met with six of the House conservative holdouts Wednesday night to provide some assurances about his chamber’s commitment to spending cuts.

It’s not clear how much detail was discussed during that meeting. The participants, led by House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris of Maryland, left saying they felt better but would not yet commit to backing the Senate’s budget rewrite.

After Mr. Harris briefed other holdouts on the House floor, Mr. Johnson corralled more than a dozen dissenters into a side room for private conservations while keeping a floor vote on an unrelated bill open for nearly an hour.

The speaker, who has used the same tactic during other pivotal votes this year, hoped to sway enough holdouts to hold the budget vote Wednesday night but fell short in his quest.

As he left the meeting with the holdouts, he promised they’d vote to advance the measure Thursday “one way or the other.”

The other way Mr. Johnson considered — but ultimately opted against — was further tweaking the budget resolution to include a binding mechanism to force the Senate to achieve a higher level of spending cuts.

With the $1.5 trillion target set publicly and the budget adopted, Republicans will now get to work fleshing out the details of the spending cuts. They also need to negotiate other policy details for the reconciliation package, including a permanent extension and expansion of the president’s first-term tax cuts.

The budget resolution gives House and Senate committees a May 9 deadline to report their pieces of the reconciliation bill.