The budget reconciliation bill is a generational opportunity to deliver on President Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and other Trump allies don’t want to waste the opportunity, Lee told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Thursday evening.
The bill is in the latter stages of making its way through the House, and the further the House can go in improving the bill they send to the Senate, the more quickly Republicans can send a bill to Trump’s desk, Lee believes.
“There are some things that we need to address as we advance legislation, in order to advance President Trump’s agenda, in order to advance what he has laid out as what needs to be to be done, that both he and those who elected him have demanded,” Lee told Breitbart News.
Lee and other Trump allies believe the reconciliation bill represents a generational opportunity to deliver on a a campaign mandate — a rarity in an era of a very divided Washington.
But on tax cuts, spending cuts, and reforms to Medicaid and other government programs, a growing chorus of Republicans is worried that many of the changes billed as true reforms are little more than window dressing that fall short of Trump’s mandate.
Some of the so-called reforms don’t kick in until years later — like work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients, which don’t kick in until 2029. If past is prologue in Washington, future legislation will gut those reforms before they are enacted.
As Lee puts it, “don’t let kicking the can be the enemy of the good.”
“I’ve been very clear for many weeks — in fact, months — with my colleagues in the Senate, counterparts in the House, Senate Republicans and House leadership, with White House, and, in fact, with the President himself — we need to advance now,” Lee said. “We need regulatory reform and we need spending reform.”
Lee knows he can’t get everything he wants in the bill. But getting reconciliation right is the key to moving other Trump legislative priorities in the near future.
“What can’t be achieved through reconciliation, we’ll have to achieve through other legislation, other must-pass vehicles, spending bills, things like the rescissions packages,” he said. “But we need to see a plan for what we can achieve there that can’t be done through reconciliation while advancing everything through reconciliation for regulatory reform and spending reform.”
Lee correctly pointed out that the legislation currently being considered by the House Budget Committee is far from a complete package. The committee itself will have the opportunity to amend the bill, perhaps substantially. The powerful House Rules Committee, which prepares legislation for the House floor, will be able to make whatever changes it deems necessary as well. And the bill can be amended on the House floor too.
Of course, whatever passes the House is then subject to amending by the Senate. The House will either have to swallow the Senate-amended bill, or else the two legislative chambers will continue working towards a compromise — most likely through a conference committee of Senators and Representatives, after which each chamber must vote to pass the compromise legislation.
The process isn’t always smooth, but Lee believes Congress can achieve a bill that more fully advances Trump’s agenda if it keeps working with the White House to get there.
“I’m optimistic that we can get there as we work together to pursue the President’s agenda, but it’s not there right now,” he told Breitbart News.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Republicans aimed to pass the bill by Memorial Day. Since eleven sections of the giant reconciliation bill were marked up in a Friday Budget Committee session for full House consideration, passage may be delayed over concerns from conservative committee members including Reps. Ralph Norman (R-SC), Chip Roy (R-TX), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), and Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX).
Lee sees no problem if the bill’s House passage is slightly delayed as long as the end result is a better product.
“If we get the point where we can bring on more votes, it’s not going to harm if it’s going to advance it,” Lee said, making the case that whatever bill the Senate receives from the House would get delayed there if the House doesn’t “do anything meaningful on spending reform.”
Despite the Senate’s reputation for watering down conservative legislation from the House, the energetic Lee, who communicates almost constantly with his Senate Republican colleagues, believes enough of them are serious about using reconciliation to enact conservative spending reforms that the package might actually improve in the Senate.
The Senate’s hunger for spending reform is conference-wide, not confined to the conservative bloc, he said.
“It’s somewhat surprising to many of us, but it’s quite arguable that the 50th Republican vote in the Senate – which is the minimum where we have to get, with the understanding we’ve got the Vice President to break a tie — least aggressive spending reformer in the Senate is probably to the right of where the House is on spending reform,” Lee told Breitbart News.
Democrats have attacked Republicans as their frustrations with the reconciliation negotiation have spilled over into the public (although most notably from the moderate House Republicans wanting red states to shoulder the burden of constituents in tax-heavy blue states, with one even boasting he was more popular in his district than Trump). But the perceived chaos of the process is a necessary component of the legislative process, especially for a bill holding such consequential, even generational, opportunity for Trump’s America First Agenda, Lee says.
For his part, Lee and his conservative colleagues have worked openly and in good faith to advocate for a bill they believe most closely realizes Trump’s legislative mandate.
“I think the legislative process isn’t easy, but its necessary, and one of the reasons why I tried very hard to be clear from the beginning of this process of where I think we need to go,” Lee said. “There are at least four of us who expressed many of these concerns publicly, and I know there are a lot of others who share them with varying degrees of having spoken publicly or not.”
“So this is a necessary part of the process of trying to improve the bill and make sure that we can get to where we need to go. We are not there yet, but we can get there, and we’ve outlined very clear and achievable steps toward getting there.”
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
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