Congress returned to Washington on Monday after a two-week break that began with the House agreeing to a budget resolution that would serve as the vehicle for President Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill."
The bill will ostensibly include much of Trump's domestic policy agenda, ranging from increased spending on immigration enforcement at the US-Mexico border, more energy production and extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts that Trump signed. House and Senate Republicans plan to pass the bill via budget reconciliation, allowing them to avoid a filibuster as long as the legislation remains germane to spending.
The push comes at a crucial moment for Trump. Despite his tidal wave of executive orders, he has not passed that much legislation. And while Trump has yet to nominate anybody to become a judge, a contrast from his first term, when Mitch McConnell turned the Senate into a judicial confirmation factory.
But Republicans in the House and Senate still face a major problem: They are too far apart on how to pay for the tax cuts with spending cuts. As Inside Washington explained before, the House resolution that passed in February requires that the House find $1.5 trillion in spending cuts to pay for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
It also stipulates that if the House GOP fails to find an additional $500 billion in savings, the House will have to reduce the amount of money for tax cuts by the difference between $2 trillion and the final number of savings.
But the Senate is trying to find any way to make sure the Trump tax cuts survive.
While House Republicans see an opportunity to finally slash spending, although their bill would also run up the debt, the Senate sees spending cuts as perfunctory at best. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget flagged, the Senate version of the bill sets the spending cut floor at $4 billion.
But Republicans have to extend the legislation for another reason: they are racing against hitting the debt ceiling.
The Treasury Department will soon notify Congress of the "X-date," the date when it will officially hit the debt limit and will be unable to pay the government's bills for debt it has already incurred.
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