As our ever more unpopular president continues shuffling through a series of new shticks—meme-ifying himself as a pontiff in waiting, promising to make the maximum-security prison at Alcatraz, uh, great again, and vowing to enact crushing tariffs on foreign film studios in spite of possessing no authority to do so—Congress is flirting with the business of actual legislating. For weeks now, GOP congressional leaders have been trying to get the new administration’s signature budget bill on track for an eventual floor vote, with decidedly equivocal results. The latest revised ETA for the legislation is now Memorial Day.

The “big beautiful bill” that President Trump keeps touting has sputtered in legislative turnaround for a simple reason: It’s full of spending cuts and dubious budget workarounds that will not bode well for a broader Trump agenda that’s already hitting the skids. Congressional strategists have stuffed as many right-wing wish-list items as they can into the bill, since they’ve also designed it to proceed on a reconciliation vote—a streamlined process reserved for budget-driven bills that bypasses the specter of a Senate filibuster.

But simple majorities are also a big ask for a fractious House GOP conference operating on a narrow seven-vote majority—particularly since the emerging provisions of the bill pull House Republicans in several directions at once. For starters, there’s the demand from House leaders for $1.5 billion in spending cuts, more than half of which are slated to come from the chamber’s Energy and Commerce Committee. The Congressional Budget Office has found, to no one’s surprise, that this translates into massive cuts to Medicaid, the state-grant program helping low-income households meet basic medical expenses. Steep Medicaid cuts would be a body blow to the MAGA movement’s white working-class base—and key GOP lawmakers have already flagged projected cuts to the program as a nonstarter in budget negotiations.

Twelve House Republicans wrote to party leaders decrying the cuts, and one of the signatories, New Jersey Representative Jeff Van Drew, told The Washington Post that nearly all of them intend to stand fast. “There’s about 25 people that have real concerns, but I know there’s eight to 10 that are serious as a heart attack about this,” he said. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to ensure we lose the midterms.” Trump has also indicated that he wouldn’t support cuts to Medicaid or Medicare in the budget bill, as have key GOP senators such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Yet holding the line on key spending items will alienate a battle-tested foe of past GOP budget packages: the spending hard-liners clustered around the small-government House Freedom Caucus. This swing constituency uncharacteristically sat on its hands during the last continuing resolution to fund the government, at Trump’s behest, but it’s already signaling a showdown over any measures that would add to the deficit or increase federal spending. And the Freedom Caucus has brought on some fellow travelers this time, including Arizona Representative David Schweikart on the Ways and Means Committee and Pennsylvania Representative Lloyd Smucker, who sits on the Budget Committee. House Speaker Mike Johnson has special reason to want Freedom Caucus insurgents and their allies to stay on the sidelines, since they’re the people who effectively torpedoed the speakership of his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy.

Another contingent of potential House detractors are lawmakers keen to increase the so-called SALT deductions on IRS filings, which allow their constituents to write off tax payments to state and local governments. These House members also have a powerful electoral incentive to fight for this benefit, since many of them represent districts that swing Democratic, with high-earning constituents who are quite attached to their SALT deductions. One of them, Mike Lawler, just hosted a town hall in his suburban New York district that turned into a raucous series of Trump denunciations; his colleagues representing a similar demographic base can descry ugly midterm reckonings ahead for them if they’re peddling increased tax obligations alongside all the other economic liabilities the Trump White House is creating for their home districts.

Current Issue

May 2025 Issue

Still other GOP lawmakers find themselves in the awkward position of fighting to retain key outlays in former President Joe Biden’s signature budget bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA, like all Biden legislation that squeezed through with GOP backing, featured many carve-outs for projects directing major spending to Republican districts and constituencies, and beneficiaries in both chambers aren’t about to surrender them unilaterally, particularly amid the broader economic uncertainty kicked up by Trump’s unhinged tariffs crusade. Nearly two dozen GOP House members have pushed to keep green-energy tax credits under the IRA, and a trio of Republican senators prevailed on majority leader John Thune of South Dakota to keep energy subsidies in the Act, arguing that their suspension could create “significant disruptions for the American people and weaken our position as a global energy leader.”

These internal spending tensions are forbidding enough, but the bill is also taking on long-standing GOP hobbyhorses that have always run afoul of the Senate filibuster in the past, as party leaders seek to make the most of a reconciliation measure. Chief among these is the REINS Act—a massive regulatory boondoggle that goes by the deceptively anodyne name of “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny.” The REINS bill moved out of the House Judiciary Committee last week, and GOP strategists have been preparing it for what’s known as a Byrd bath in the Senate—a series of tests pioneered by former House Speaker Robert Byrd to keep bills focused on the fiscal requirements of the reconciliation process.

Building on the dismal precedent of the recent Supreme Court ruling undoing “Chevron deference”—the long-standing practice of permitting executive agencies to frame basic regulatory policy—the REINS Act would empower Congress to act as a powerful arbiter of regulation. It would require a joint resolution of the House and Senate to approve “any major rule that increases revenue,” and empower lawmakers to review and rescind all manner of past federal regulation. The rules not subject to such approval would automatically sunset.

The REINS Act is, in short, a recipe for industry capture and corruption of the regulatory process on a heretofore unimagined scale. The same lobbying interests that have already used their largesse to direct Congress to bend to ruling-class whim in key arenas such as financial oversight and environmental policy would now be poised to undo all kinds of basic protections for consumer safety, public health, and housing, education, and transportation policy, on a blatant pay-to-play basis. Right-wing lawmakers are thrilled at the prospect, and are confident that Trump, an all-purpose panderer for cash, will exuberantly sign the bill into law.

There are, in addition, plenty of other realms in which the bill serves as a Festivus pole for pet GOP obsessions, from draconian border crackdowns to a plan to starve out higher-education funding to a trillion-dollar boost in the defense budget. And all the frantic efforts to recast the budget are, of course, in service of the top-line goal of extending the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts, to the tune of $4 trillion. Republicans are counting on the extended tax cuts to mitigate at least some of the chaos and uncertainty created by Trump’s tariffs crusade—even though the individual benefits of the 2017 cuts aren’t likely to recur in today’s tariff-straitened economy.

Trump has sought to gussy up the tax package with a series of gimmicks targeting the MAGA base, including rescinding taxes on tips and Social Security benefits, and the institution of deductions for auto loans. Yet these measures won’t yield much in the way of economic growth in an already contracting economy. And if the other lobbyist giveaways and brutal benefit cuts go into effect, the voting public will be brought face to face with the real agenda lurking behind all the legislative maneuvering here: a bid to redistribute hard-won social spending upward to the big-ticket donors who tolerate all of Trump’s demented showboating and culture-war posturing for the sake of their bottom lines. In other words, Trump’s big beautiful bill may come bearing some very ugly electoral fallout for the GOP.