Should Republican leaders have to abandon their current plan to pass a government funding bill at “flat” levels, hard-liners warn that another fiscal framework is at risk: the budget to advance President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, cautioned Tuesday that fiscal conservatives will demand changes to the budget measure Speaker Mike Johnson pushed through the House last week if Congress ends up clearing a government funding package with fresh, higher spending levels.
It’s a warning that comes 10 days until a government shutdown and amid stark disagreement among House and Senate Republicans about how to adopt a single budget resolution that would pave the way for a party-line package of tax cuts, energy policy, military funding and border security investments — the key pillars of Trump’s agenda.
With the government shutdown deadline looming ahead of March 14, Trump is personally lobbying House Republicans to support a “full-year” stopgap funding measure to keep the military and non-defense agencies running on static budgets through September. Since top Democrats are threatening to vote “no” on the plan, GOP leaders are likely to need nearly unanimous support on their side of the aisle for passage — an unprecedented feat in a chamber stocked with deficit hawks who have never voted on any flavor of funding bill in their time in Congress.
If that stopgap bill fails in either chamber, the risk of a government shutdown increases, and Republican leaders could be forced to instruct their negotiators to double down on talks with Democrats to land a bipartisan, bicameral appropriations package at new spending levels.
Roy, a Texas Republican, says the budget resolution setting the parameters for the bill Republicans want to pass through the budget reconciliation process will have to make up for it.
“If any of our guys think we’re going to bust through that, then we’ve got to go adjust the budget and find more mandatory savings,” Roy said.
Demands for more cuts to mandatory programs like Medicaid and SNAP food assistance would rile the moderate Republicans who were already wary of backing the minimum of $1.5 trillion in cuts prescribed under the budget framework. And to jumpstart the party-line process to enact Trump’s agenda, the House needs to vote on that measure again.
Technically, the two bills are wholly separate, but politically, they are inextricably linked.
To whip support for the budget framework last week, some Republican lawmakers claim that Johnson made commitments to cut the regular government funding set to expire next week. Now Democrats in either chamber could thwart the speaker’s effort to make good on that promise if they vote against a stopgap measure.
On Tuesday, the No. 2 Democrat in the House said the onus is on GOP leaders to pass the long-term funding patch next week or risk a funding lapse on their watch.
“They control government,” said Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark, the chamber’s Democratic whip, in an interview. “That’s up to them to pass that and continue to allow them to dismantle and shut down our government.”
The House’s top Democratic appropriator, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, told reporters on Tuesday that Republican appropriators have yet to respond to the latest offer Democrats sent them 10 days ago on government funding levels — though GOP appropriators insist that they did not “walk away” from bipartisan negotiations.
“For me, that is moving away from the table — leaving the table of negotiation,” DeLauro said.
Even if a bipartisan deal were struck on overall funding totals, it would take several more weeks to negotiate the specifics of the dozen annual funding measures and craft bill text. So top Democrats are calling for a short-term stopgap to buy more time to reach an overarching agreement and then hammer out the details.
The Senate’s senior Democratic appropriator, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, said Tuesday that Democrats “cannot stand by and accept a yearlong power grab,” warning that a full-year funding patch would help Elon Musk “take a chainsaw” to federal agencies as he leads the Department of Government Efficiency. Instead, Murray said she is ready to “immediately” pass a “short-term” stopgap “to take down the risk of a shutdown so that we can finish our negotiations and write full-year spending bills.”
Trump plans to meet Wednesday afternoon at the White House with a group of House Republicans, including members of the House Freedom Caucus, in an attempt to get them to go along with the stopgap plan, after White House budget director Russ Vought already met with the fiscally conservative group Monday night.
Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.
