House Republicans Call Out the Budget Plan Passed by the Senate As 'Unserious,' a 'Path to Failure'

Red State ^ | 04/05/2025 | Becca Lower

[SeekAndFind]

Some in the U.S. Senate stayed up way past their bedtimes on Friday night, voting into the wee hours in a battle against mainly Democrat amendments attempting to derail President Donald Trump's agenda before managing to pass a budget plan.

After the six-hour vote-a-rama ended, the legislation passed nearly along party lines, with "no" votes from Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Susan Collins (R-ME), 51-48, around 2:30 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday morning.

Here is what we know so far about the plan:

On paper, the new Senate budget outline allows for $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, a seemingly modest amount. But that figure disguises an additional $3.8 trillion for extending the 2017 tax cuts that Senate Republicans also want to include in the bill, which they argue should not show up as a cost on the federal balance sheet.

The 2017 tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of the year, so an extension must be included in their bill, but Republicans have said that they will steer around budget rules and declare the move cost-free. The real size of the tax cut envisioned in the Senate outline is therefore roughly $5.3 trillion over a decade, with $1.5 trillion available for new tax cuts like Mr. Trump’s proposal to not tax tips. That is far larger than the $4.5 trillion House Republicans have given themselves.

Then there's this:

...With additional spending on defense and immigration, and minimal spending cuts, the Senate resolution could add roughly $5.7 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. It calls for a $5 trillion increase in the debt limit, compared with the $4 trillion increase in the House plan. And House Republicans are pursuing deep spending cuts aimed at keeping the cost of their overall package to $2.8 trillion.

Before the Upper chamber voted, Senate Majority Leader John Thune called the plan "the first step toward a final bill to make permanent the tax relief we implemented in 2017 and deliver a transformational investment in our border, national and energy security."

The question now is: what is the likelihood of reconciliation with the budget House Republicans have already laid out? So far, those waters look choppy.

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Read related: BREAKING: House Takes Critical Vote on Budget CR

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One member concerned about what Senate Republicans approved overnight is House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who released a statement in an X post:

Chairman @RepArrington’s statement in response to the Senate’s amendment to the House-passed budget resolution:

pic.twitter.com/vR6pse8VA1— House Budget GOP (@HouseBudgetGOP) April 5, 2025

"In order to bring down prices and restore fiscal sanity in Washington," he wrote, "President Trump has been working at warp speed to root out wasteful and fraudulent spending, right-sizing the federal bureaucracy, and pushing Congress to balance the federal budget."

He continued, explaining that "[t]he House followed suit by sending the Senate a fiscally responsible budget resolution, that included the entirety of President Trump's America First agenda."

Rep. Arrington said the resolution includes "pro-growth tax cuts, border and defense funding, deregulation, American energy production, and enforceable spending cuts that would reduce our nation's debt-to-GDP putting our budget on a path to balance."

Then he turned to the Senate's plan, calling it out as "unserious and disappointing," as he believes it contains two major problems: first, the Grand Canyon-sized gap between House and Senate on how much each body is proposing to raise the debt limit, along with the larger price tag envisioned by the Senate.

The second problem relates to how Pres. Trump's first-term tax cut is figured in:

The Texas lawmaker also took a shot at Senate Budget Committee Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) plan to score the cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts as not adding future federal deficits, something Graham would achieve by judging an extension of those cuts on a “current policy” baseline.

He said the blueprint “sets a dangerous precedent by direct scoring tax policy without including enforceable offsets.”

Also pushing back on the Senate's legislation is Freedom Caucus member Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who also released a statement on X. In it, he said that “[i]f the Senate’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ budget is put on the House floor, I will vote no,” calling their plan "a path to failure."

House GOP leaders, however, are urging caucus members to pass the Senate's plan:

In a “Dear Colleague” letter sent to members on Saturday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), and Conference Chair Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) are getting a head start on arguing in favor of the legislation as hardline conservative publicly balk at the Senate product.

“Adopting the Senate’s amendment to the House resolution will allow us to finally begin the most important phase of this process: drafting the reconciliation bill that will deliver on President Trump’s agenda and our promises to the American people,” they wrote in the letter.

This is a developing story. RedState will provide updates as they become available.

[mass55th]

Susan Collins and Rand Paul were the only two Republicans to vote against the Bill. RAT Patty Murray didn't vote.

Here's the Senate vote for this Bill:

H.Con.Res. 14: Establishing the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2025 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2026 through 2034.

[clintonh8r]

Great to see the party uniting…(roll eyes)

[Owen]

Neither the Senate nor the House’s bill can accomplish anything. $37T in debt precludes everything.

[BruceS]

OK, serious question here:

Why don't the Republicans just pass a budget equal to the 2019 (pre-pandemic) budget. It won't balance, but it will get rid of all the COVID spending and it will have less of a deficit than whatever they are planning (I think).

[SoConPubbie]

Great to see the party uniting…(roll eyes)

Just the normal GOP Grand-Standers.

[napscoordinator]

That’s Elon musk’s job. Supposedly he has saved a trillion so we should be a trillion less in debt to 35 trillion. Not to shabby for three months of work.

[WildHighlander57]

Does this bill have the “no tax on tips, overtime, and social security?

[Owen]

There will have to be proof, and if there’s proof that would mean there will be indicted defendants.

I’ve heard nothing of that at all. I think it’s great that he’s finding any efficiencies and errors, but announcing that you have a list of people over 100 years old is not the same as having found people who have been collecting money under the name of someone over 100 years old.

I have not seen anything to suggest that actual money has been found. You have to find actual money to reduce the debt.

[Owen]

The 2019 budget lacks 6 years of inflation. Employees got pay raises. You can’t take them away without due process. Federal employee protections are extremely difficult to get past. Even law passed by Congress and the president signing it would not cut pay of employees without cause. The lawsuit would be a slam dunk.

[Teacher317]

The 2019 budget lacks 6 years of inflation. Employees got pay raises. You can’t take them away

The 2019 budget has over a trillion in waste and fraud and kickbacks. That's many times higher than the slight percentage that 3 years of 6% inflation on just wages.

Quick thought experiment: Let's call it 2m federal employees, and give them a ridiculous salary estimate of $1m each in 2019. Now increase that by 6% three times and 3% twice more to cover the 5 years since. $2Tr x 1.06, x 1.06 x 1.06 x 1.03 x 1.03 = 2.527Tr... An increase of a half trillion... which is clearly less than the trillion-plus in waste and fraud that we have found so far. And of course, they don't all make 1m, so the real wage increase is far far less than the half-trillion in my example.

So once again, getting rid of the waste and fraud allows us to make those cuts easily, without any impact to the (remaining) federal employees.

Nice try though.

[maddog55]

Any deficit spending should be a no period.

[Bernard]

There should be massive increases in tariff revenue, right?

[Owen]

I don’t think you understood the post.

It was in response to saying that the current budget could be returned to 2019 levels. I was explaining why not. The 2019 budget was $4.4 Trillion in spending. That $4.4 Trillion has 6 years of inflation on it. Using your 6 and 3% inflation numbers that rises to 5.55T (and a bit more since we’re halfway through FY2025), excluding the Ukraine and Covid non-inflationary increases.

That 4.4T number included more than 2 million federal employees. It is also contractor employees. They all got raises. Taking the current 6.5T or so down to 4.4T requires all the employees to take a paycut, whether Federal or non-Federal. Some of them are not just Federal with civil service protections, but those working at, say, GM making vehicles for the US Govt fleet . . . they are union. You can’t cut their salaries either.

As for fraud savings, I think DOGE is going to find some. A few hundred billion. All the savings talked of so far have produced no indictments I have seen and if there is no recipient of this money, then there is no fraud. If there were trillions going to be found, we would have seen arrests by now.

It is not only

[napscoordinator]

I understand that he may not find savings in social security. But he’s gone into ten other organizations and completely made cuts to programs and tired hundreds of thousands. That’s the money I’m talking about going to the debt. If nothing goes to the debt, why bother destroying lives and departments?

[Lazamataz]

You are the single most gloomy poster on the forum.

I have only one possible solution for my problems: