This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) hopes to advance two big budget measures before leaving town for the August recess. One seeks to head off a government shutdown before the Nov. 3 elections. The other would authorize $95 billion for the Pentagon, inflation-battered farmers and election security.
But deep divisions in the Republican conference, alongside a widening rift with Democrats, mean House passage is not assured for either measure. And in the Senate, they face an even tougher reception.
With razor-thin majorities in both chambers, Republican leaders would need the support of virtually every member for their plans to succeed. But as their objectives have become intertwined, it has become harder to unite the party’s various factions. Solving one problem inevitably creates another.
Here are the four competing priorities Republicans are trying to navigate before facing a restless electorate.
Avoid another government shutdown
The government will shut down again at the end of September unless Congress acts, a potentially bad look for Republicans ahead of the midterms. But lawmakers are unlikely to pass the 12 spending bills through the normal appropriations process by the Sept. 30 deadline.
To head off a messy funding fight in the fall, Johnson plans to have the House vote on a stopgap spending bill that would fund the government through Dec. 4. But it’s not clear whether all congressional Republicans — much less Democrats — will support that plan.
In his own conference, Johnson may face resistance from House conservatives who have demanded that any must-pass spending legislation include provisions of the Save America Act, which requires states to impose new restrictions on voting. But adding those provisions could torpedo the measure in the Senate, where at least four Republicans have opposed the effort.
Democrats also oppose the voting restrictions. Plus, Senate Democrats have demanded a bipartisan agreement on overall spending levels before they vote to fund agencies into the new fiscal year, a goal that Senate appropriators have yet to accomplish.
Enact stricter election rules
The Save America Act has emerged as a top priority for President Donald Trump, the purported remedy to his unsupported claimthat 278,000 noncitizens lurk on voting rolls in selected states. It would require voters to present a passport or other proof of citizenship, as well as a government-issued photo ID, and impose new restrictions on mail-in ballots.
The measure is stalled in the Senate, where Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) last week called the plan “flawed and impossible.” Addressing Trump directly from the Senate floor, Tillis said, “People are misleading you if they’re telling you this can be implemented by November. The only thing that will occur is an undermining of the election integrity, the integrity of our elections right now.”
In an attempt to overcome that opposition, House leaders have added Save America Act provisions to the $95 billion reconciliation package, which Republicans could pass without Democratic votes. But that strategy faces significant hurdles.
For one thing, Senate rules require reconciliation provisions to have a direct impact on the budget; to be included, the voter ID law would have to cost money. The House framework would authorize $10 billion for election-related measures, alongside $73 billion for the Pentagon and $12 billion for American farmers.
But how would that $10 billion be spent? One idea is a grant program to incentivize states to adopt the new election rules. But a grant program would lack teeth to force states to act, and it was unclear last week whether that idea would prevail. Meanwhile, if those four Senate Republicans vote no, the whole reconciliation package could fail to muster the 50 votes needed for passage.
And there’s another risk: Any reconciliation bill would trigger a vote-a-rama on the Senate floor, traditionally an all-day/all-night affair when anyone can propose an amendment on almost any topic. That means Democrats could use the opportunity to force Republicans to vote on such difficult questions as restricting the president’s power in the Iran war or putting guardrails on immigration enforcement in the wake of recent fatal shootings.
That’s one reason Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has cast doubt on the Senate’s ability to take up any reconciliation package before the elections. “It’s one of those questions,” he said last week, “where is the juice worth the squeeze?”
Fund the Iran war
The larger goal of reconciliation is to provide fresh funding for the Pentagon, where missile defense stockpiles have been badly depleted in the war with Iran. The $73 billion in the House framework is slightly more than the White House ultimately requested for immediate war-related funding.
Still, the figure falls well short of the roughly $350 billion Trump initially sought through reconciliation, and a fierce debate is brewing among defense hawks in both chambers over how to meet the Pentagon’s needs. Last week, Thune noted that “defense guys who want more” would be a major challenge to passing the House reconciliation framework.
While some Republicans want more, others may be uncomfortable approving big sums for a war that is proving unpopular among voters. A recent Washington Post-Ipsos pollfound that only 28 percent of Americans say the war has been worth fighting, compared with 68 percent who say it was not — on par with the worst assessments of the war in Afghanistan.
Avoid adding to the debt
Looming over nearly every Republican budget priority is the same political challenge: Winning over fiscal conservatives who insist that new spending be paired with budget cuts to avoid adding to the nation’s towering $39 trillion debt.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that Washington is already on track to borrow nearly $2 trillion this year. Interest payments on the debt are projected to top $1 trillion — equal to Pentagon spending.
A decade ago, the GOP was obsessed with balancing the budget and paying down the debt. Since Trump rose to power, however, party leaders have largely abandoned that goal.
House leaders considered including budget cuts in the reconciliation package, arguing that they could squeeze savings out of social programs by targeting “fraud.” But it’s tough to root out fraud without cutting benefits, which creates new political problems. Last year, when Republicans cut Medicaid and food stamps to help pay for tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, the move drew pushback from Democrats but also moderate Republicans.
So the House framework avoids that hard work. Instead, it would add $95 billion to the nation’s credit card.
While the House Budget Committee managed to advance the framework, fiscal hawks could sink it when it comes up for a vote before the full House this week.
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