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But first…

House Republicans remain consumed with internal drama regarding how they’re going to
pass Donald Trump’s tax cuts and border security agenda. After months of debate and endless listening sessions, the current paralysis is stoking deep frustration with the usual conscientious objectors (Thomas Massie, Chip Roy, etcetera), as well as trepidation that Republicans are on track to prove yet again why their party struggles to govern even with a power trifecta in Washington. And yet, despite failing to achieve true consensus, the House
has finally decided to move forward with their “one big beautiful” budget bill. 

Republican leaders haven’t completely secured the votes of reluctant members yet, but they decided on Monday night that time’s up, they’ve released topline numbers, and they plan to move the bill through the Budget Committee this week. Now comes the very public loyalty-oath stage of this choreography—determining who will stand
with the president and who is willing to block his agenda. Naturally, the results could unleash a torrent of MAGA pressure on the holdouts.

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Leadership did try to get this done in private: The internal negotiations have
largely been about bringing along a group of hardline Republicans who not only want to separate the tax bill from the border security bill, but also have different priorities from the rest of the conference in general. The hardliners, led by Roy, are deficit hawks: They want to cut spending far more than what’s likely possible or palatable to their slim Republican majority, and they’re more concerned about spending cuts than tax cuts. The latter will add an estimated $4.6 trillion to the
deficit, after all, if the expiring Trump tax cuts are simply extended for another five years—and that doesn’t include other goodies, like no tax on tips, or raising the cap on the dreaded SALT deduction. 

Roy, a member of the Budget Committee, has the ear of fellow Texan and Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington, a relatively recent disciple of fiscal restraint, who is focused on
reducing spending to a level that might be painful for members whose constituents will be impacted (especially if, say, the party slashes Medicaid). But Arrington is under a tremendous amount of pressure to get the bill through his committee, and he’s anxious to do so. It was Arrington who announced on Tuesday morning, unbeknownst to the often indecisive speaker, that he’d move the bill on Thursday. It was only then, in front of the whole conference, that he asked the speaker if that was
amenable. A surprised Johnson said he’s ready. 

The reconciliation numbers that Arrington’s committee released Wednesday morning are designed to win over the Budget Committee, whose members include Roy and several other deficit hawks—a tactic that leadership thinks will be successful. The blueprint includes a floor of $4.5 trillion for the Ways and Means Committee for tax cuts—the bare minimum to
extend Trump’s tax cuts and a lower amount than tax-cut-focused Republicans would have liked—and a minimum of $1.5 trillion for spending cuts, less than what Arrington and spending czars would have liked but with the possibility that the cuts could go even deeper. (Every additional dollar that Republicans find in spending cuts, the Ways and Means Committee can use in tax cuts, but it’s unlikely they’ll be able to find $4 trillion-plus in spending to slash unless they start to make massive cuts
to Medicaid, which cost $871 billion in 2023 according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And, clearly, even cutting Medicaid to $0 wouldn’t get them there, or even close.)

Trump himself
has been mostly M.I.A. in the process, acting more like a counselor than a dealmaker. Last week, for instance, he hosted a group of House Republicans from different ideological factions for a meeting that lasted more than four hours. The point was to get the opposing members out of the Capitol and into the grandeur of the White House to see if they could settle their differences. But I’m told by two people familiar with the summit that Trump came and went throughout the afternoon without giving
any directives other than to get it done, imploring members that they needed to agree in order for his presidency to be successful.

Meanwhile, according to several Hill Republican sources, the White House legislative team led by James Braid hasn’t been heavily involved in negotiations to this point, either. That may change in the next 24 hours, I’m told, when the White House could activate a pressure campaign to muscle
the legislation through. Even if the bill advances through the Budget Committee, the MAGA knives could come out very quickly for any committee hardliners who vote against it, including via the now-familiar online attacks, sudden difficulties in fundraising, and/or primary threats. 

Much of the rest of the conference won’t shed a tear if that happens. They’ve watched Johnson make concession after concession to the hardliners since his 2023 ascent, which has
yielded little change in their behavior in return. Last year, for instance, the speaker put two controversial members on the Intelligence Committee—Scott Perry and Ronny Jackson—and more recently, he swapped out the moderate, well-liked chairman, Mike Turner, who got along well with Democratic House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, for a more right-leaning member, Rick Crawford. None of this has forestalled his current
budget headache.

Roy, of course, is just one problem for Johnson—though, having endorsed and campaigned for Ron
DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary and been reelected anyway, he’s especially impervious to MAGA pressure. Indeed, he’s built a brand on defying leadership and bucking his party. He was Ted Cruz’s chief of staff when the senator shut down the government over demands that then-President Barack Obama defund Obamacare. Roy’s House colleagues now grumble that he acts as if the House is the Senate and any one member can hold up legislation. But
in the House’s current micro-majority, he’s not necessarily wrong.

Meanwhile, other potential nays in the full House include representatives Massie;
Ralph Norman, who is also on the Budget Committee; and Victoria Spartz—all of whom you may remember from their roles in the short-lived, unsuccessful rebellion against Johnson’s bid to keep his gavel in January. Norman changed his initial “no” vote after Trump personally pleaded with him; Massie was the only final “no” in the conference; and the unpredictable Spartz telegraphed doubts in public before voting “yes.” Together, they have more than enough votes to
kill the measure, even if no other far-right members join them. 

Meanwhile, patience is wearing thin with the handful of holdouts—most of them representing safe districts—who continue to complicate, or threaten to derail, the rest of the conference’s agenda. “The Freedom Caucus is responsible for us having a narrow majority, and they’re in the process of trying to do the same thing in 2026. They need
to pull their heads out of their asses,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden told me. 

Still, there’s a lot of skepticism among centrist Republicans that they’ll have the numbers even if the bill does make it out of committee and gets brought to the floor, likely after the President’s Day recess. One possible indicator of Republican desperation: Preliminary conversations have already begun with Trump-district Democrats such as Jared Golden
in Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington State to see if they’d be willing to cooperate with Republicans on the measure. That’s right: The Republicans’ right flank has once again forced them to face the unsettling prospect of bipartisanship.

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