Trump open to two-step budget plan despite earlier comments

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump on Monday softened his push for “one powerful bill” to pass much of his agenda through the budget reconciliation process, saying he remained open to a two-bill strategy favored by Senate Republicans “as long as we get something passed as quickly as possible.”

Trump told conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt that he would prefer a single reconciliation bill sought by House GOP leadership, a plan he publicly endorsed Sunday night in a post on his Truth Social platform. But he made clear in a Monday morning interview that he was not yet wedded to that approach.

“While I favor one bill, I also want to get everything passed,” Trump said. He acknowledged a desire by Senate Majority Leader John Thune for a more piecemeal approach, with an early bill focused on border security, energy production and defense, and a later bill devoted to tax cuts.

“We have a lot of respect for Sen. Thune, as you know,” Trump said. “He may have a little bit of a different view of it. ….They prefer it the other way. So I’m open to either way as long as we get something passed as quickly as possible.”

Trump’s speedy clarification underscored the ongoing divisions among Republicans over the best strategy for passing his agenda with razor-thin GOP majorities in both chambers. While Republicans will rely on the reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster, their narrow partisan advantage leaves almost no room for error or defections on legislation that lacks bipartisan support.

The walkback also comes a day after Speaker Mike Johnson made a forceful, public case for passing all the major components of Trump’s agenda in a single, mammoth reconciliation bill as soon as April or “certainly by May.”

While no one will like every element of the package, he said in a Fox interview Sunday, “there will be enough elements in there to pull everyone along. So I think keeping it together is how we’ll actually get it done.”

Johnson also pointed to the political imperative of passing as much of Trump’s agenda as possible in short order. “That’s why we’re going to be so aggressive about getting this through in the first 100 days, because we’ll begin to see the effects of the economy very quickly and that will be important for the midterm elections in two years,” he said.

Speaking to reporters Monday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., was emphatic about the single-bill reconciliation strategy.

“We’re going to do one. … I’ve been an advocate of one from the beginning,” Scalise said. “We’ve been having the committees work on all the different reconciliation components, so we’re ready to get to work.”

‘Russian roulette’

But Senate Republicans — and at least a handful of hard-line House conservatives — have resisted that strategy for weeks. They warned that extending expiring tax cuts and passing new tax breaks Trump promised on the campaign trail would take time to sort out. Thune and others said they were better off passing a bill narrowly tailored to border security and defense to give Trump an early win before turning to tax legislation.

Incoming Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., made that case as recently as Sunday, citing national security concerns.”To the tax-cut wing of the party, I am with you,” Graham said on Fox. “But if you hold border security hostage to get tax cuts, you’re playing Russian roulette with our national security.”

Trump said Monday that he favors a single bill partly because “it’s cleaner, it’s nicer.” While he acknowledged that it “takes longer” because of its size, he said he didn’t mind waiting an extra few months.

He said work on the southern border could begin “with trillions of dollars we’re going to be clawing back” without waiting for new legislation. “We have money. We don’t need it desperately, immediately, if two months is going to make a difference,” he said.

But enacting a sweeping reconciliation package by May, as Johnson envisions, would be a huge undertaking. Once two GOP lawmakers resign in the coming weeks to join Trump’s administration, Johnson will have zero votes to spare to pass party-line bills until April 1, when Florida special elections will likely send two more Republicans to Washington. Then his buffer will be just one GOP vote.

And it will take considerable time to negotiate additional spending cuts in a divided GOP conference that will be required to get enough support to raise the debt limit — which Republicans want to enact in reconciliation before a summer deadline — without any Democratic help.

Still, he says a House vote could occur by the end of that first week in April, even though leadership will also be trying to wrangle votes for final fiscal 2025 spending bills before current funding expires on March 14.

And then the Senate would need to act by the end of April under Johnson’s timeline, which he acknowledges could slip a little, though that would risk pushing final action outside of Trump’s first 100 days — an important symbolic marker.

“I wish the speaker luck, we know he’s got a thin margin,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said on Fox’s “Brian Kilmeade Show” Monday. “The more things you put in a bill, the more complex it gets … but there are also some countervailing considerations because there may be some things that people consider sweeteners or incentives to vote for a package that includes things that they maybe aren’t too wild about.”

‘Serious risk’

Scalise, a veteran of tough votes in his chamber, said the history of trying to do two reconciliation bills in one year isn’t promising.

He said he discussed the 2017 process with Trump, when the House barely jammed through separate health care and tax overhaul measures despite a much larger majority with around 20 votes to spare. And of course the health care package ultimately couldn’t get through the narrowly divided Senate.

“And when I shared that with the president, you could tell he understood. I mean, there’s serious risk to having multiple bills that have to pass to get your agenda through,” Scalise said. “When you know you got a lot of people that want this first package, if you only put certain things in the first package they can vote no on the second, and you lose the whole second package. That would be devastating.”

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(Mary Ellen McIntire contributed to this report.)

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