‘Very Serious Mistake’: GOP Sharply Divided over How to Deliver on Trump Agenda

D ays before his swearing-in, President-elect Donald Trump is giving congressional GOP leaders some wiggle room over how to prioritize his ambitious legislative agenda this year.

“Whether it’s one bill or two bills, it’s going to get done,” an open-minded Trump told reporters after his closed-door meeting with GOP senators on Capitol Hill Wednesday evening, during which he was reportedly more deferential to Speaker Mike Johnson’s “one big beautiful bill” strategy.

Talks are ongoing as some congressional Republicans gripe in private that their leaders are behind on the negotiation timeline.

Senate Republican leaders have spent recent weeks pushing for a two-track approach that would prioritize an early legislative win for the incoming GOP trifecta on defense, energy, and securing the southern border, while punting a more complex tax fight until later in the year. But that strategy is running into opposition from House Republican leaders — including Johnson and House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith — who continue to favor a package that would lump those agenda items into a single bill.

As NR has reported at length, House GOP leaders worry that a two-bill approach will jeopardize the GOP’s chances of renewing many provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that are set to expire at the end of 2025, especially given Johnson’s fractious and extremely narrow majority. They argue that budget hawks will face more pressure to vote the party line on taxes if they are faced with a single package that includes immigration-focused provisions. In their view, passing two reconciliation bills in one year is simply too big a lift.

As things stand, Trump’s current approach to this year’s reconciliation process seems to boil down to one mantra: whatever can pass the House. “My sense is that the president is more interested in getting these items across the finish line and is less concerned about the vehicles by which it happens,” says Representative Kat Cammack (R., Fla.). “Of course, there’s the political reality that the closer we get down the year, the politics gets a little bit dicier, and the enthusiasm and the ability to wrangle votes gets a little bit tougher.”

Both strategies would rely on the budget reconciliation process, which allows lawmakers to circumvent the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. This will give a helpful cushion to Senate Republicans’ 53-seat majority. But the speaker has little margin for error in the lower chamber. House Republicans’ current 219–215 majority will shrink even more when two members take high-profile slots in the administration, meaning Johnson will be working with a one-seat majority during the first few months of this year until those three seats are filled.

During their private huddle with Trump, several GOP senators forcefully pushed back against the speaker’s preference for one mammoth bill. A one-track reconciliation strategy would be a “very serious mistake” that “maximizes the chances of failure,” Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), the incoming chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, told National Review on Thursday when asked about Wednesday’s meeting with Trump. “And we can’t afford to fail.”

The Texas Republican expressed his desire to renew the 2017 tax cuts but maintained that negotiations will be fraught and time intensive.

Case in point: House Republicans from California, New York, and New Jersey are descending on Mar-a-Lago this weekend to lobby Trump to increase or lift the cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction — a controversial tax write-off that fiscal conservatives say unfairly subsidizes progressive states’ tax-and-spend schemes. Many Republicans believe SALT concessions are a necessary pill for congressional leaders to swallow to get blue-state House Republicans on board with a broader tax bill, even though raising or scrapping the deduction cap would further shrink federal revenues.

Congressional Republicans will also need to figure out how and whether to deliver on some of Trump’s other tax-related campaign promises, such as no taxes on tips and overtime pay.

“When we passed the Trump tax cuts in 2017, I spent hundreds of hours negotiating provisions of that bill. And tax reform is, by its nature, a long, extended discussion that involves complex tradeoffs. It’s not going to happen in a month,” Cruz told NR. He’s optimistic that the $4 trillion tax increase that would result from failing to renew TCJA will incentivize on-the-fence fiscal hawks to get on board with renewing the expiring tax cuts.

“But tying border security and rebuilding the military and energy to the long, extended negotiations on tax cuts is a recipe for dooming the entire endeavor,” he insisted.

Supporters of the two-track strategy believe that an early legislative win on the border will allow the Republicans to quickly deliver on their immigration-related campaign promises.

Executive action is the first step. Yes, Trump plans to issue a series of sweeping executive orders on Day One of his second term to secure the southern border. But to effectively stem the flow of illegal immigrants, he needs Congress to appropriate funding to hire additional border patrol agents and ICE agents, create additional detention facilities, deploy sufficient security assets, and much more. Senate Republicans say that the one-track strategy will unnecessarily delay this appropriation process.

For now, Johnson also plans to raise the debt ceiling through the reconciliation process. That will further complicate the reconciliation negotiation process, considering many House Republicans have never voted to suspend or increase the country’s borrowing limit. Johnson got a taste of this last month, when 38 House Republicans voted against a Trump-endorsed government funding bill over a provision that would have suspended the debt ceiling for two years. To avert a shutdown, Johnson ended up muscling a funding bill through the lower chamber — but only after scrapping the Trump-preferred debt-ceiling provision.

It’s possible that House Republicans will end up attaching a debt-limit increase to a government-funding bill instead. “I don’t know the answer” to the debt-ceiling question “just now,” said Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R., N.Y.), one of several blue-state House Republicans attending this weekend’s SALT-focused meeting in Mar-a-Lago with Trump. “It’s too early to tell.”

Congressional Republicans are feeling the pressure. Many Republicans are still haunted by the first few months of the first Trump administration, when GOP leaders tried and failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act. This time, they say, failure is not an option.

James Lynch contributed reporting to this article.