Vice President JD Vance did little Wednesday afternoon to calm fiscal hawks concerned about House GOP leadership’s current plans to ram through a party-line policy and military spending bill that would not be fully paid for.
Inside a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill, Vance pressed House Republicans to vote in favor of a fiscal blueprint for a $95 billion package, which the House Budget Committee is scheduled to mark up Thursday morning and which Speaker Mike Johnson wants the full chamber to advance next week.
He framed the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process as a must-do endeavor, stressing it was the best vehicle for passing some elements of the GOP elections overhaul bill known as the SAVE America Act — according to five people granted anonymity to share details from inside the room.
“The president’s priority is to actually get the SAVE America Act passed,” Vance told reporters following the meeting.
He also told House Republicans in the meeting that his White House-based task force on fraud was already tackling waste in government programs to pacify members angry with leadership’s decision not to address the issue as part of reconciliation.
But many fiscal conservatives were not convinced. GOP leaders will also only be able to put a watered-down version of the SAVE America Act into the bill in the form of grants to encourage states to adopt strict voter ID and citizenship laws, to comply with the strict rules governing reconciliation.
Budget Committee Republican Chip Roy of Texas left the meeting with Vance insisting “there’s more work to do” on the budget framework before it has the support to advance out of committee, let alone on the floor.
“I think the stupidest thing to do would be to try to jam it through committee when you’ve got bigger problem[s] on the House floor,” Roy added, “and I think that might be the current state of affairs.”
House Republican leaders unveiled a budget framework Wednesday for a bill containing funding for the military conflict with Iran, farm aid and election administration — with no spending cuts or plans to pay for even part of the package. It was a blow to deficit hawks who have heard Johnson for months tout that another party-line package could include spending cuts and ways to target hundreds of billions in alleged fraud across social programs.
But Johnson changed course this week, under intense pressure to advance any reconciliation package that would include new Pentagon funding plus appease President Donald Trump’s demands for passage of the SAVE America Act, which has stalled in the Senate.
“We’ve been lied to,” Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said Wednesday, before the Vance meeting. “We were told we were going to do a ‘skinny reconciliation,’ and then … we were going to put … a lot of our key priorities in his reconciliation package.”
He was referring to the immigration enforcement-only reconciliation bill congressional Republicans passed in June to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol.
“I think that the attitude that we don’t want to have the debate or the argument by opening up certain committees to the Senate is taking the weak posture, weak approach,” Burlison continued. “So to me, there’s not enough meat on the bone for me to want to support this.”
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), asked if he had concerns the bill would add to the deficit, replied as he left the meeting with Vance: “I think we all do.”
Some Republicans believe they can still force GOP leaders to add spending offsets into the package.
“I think it still has some amount of fluidity,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), “and I just need to see it in its final form.”
Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that while talks were ongoing on the topic of pay-fors, it was proving a challenge to identify politically palatable offsets. The main goal, he added, is to get a GOP elections overhaul bill to Trump’s desk by any means necessary.
“The Senate ultimately is where we have some challenges, and that’s been the holdup for SAVE America from the beginning,” Scalise said in an interview Wednesday. “And the real focus of this is getting SAVE America to the Senate and then ultimately to the president’s desk.”
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) had a message for dissatisfied holdouts.
“That play’s been called,” he said of GOP leadership’s decision to forge ahead with a narrow reconciliation measure. “It’s time to put up or shut up.“
Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.
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