Several House conservatives blasted the latest GOP budget plan just hours after the Senate Republicans approved it early Saturday morning, with at least three saying they will oppose it on the House floor next week.
With Speaker Mike Johnson able to lose no more than three Republicans on a party-line vote with his 220-213 majority, the opposition throws further progress on President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda into doubt. Johnson has said he wants the fiscal blueprint for the megabill done next week.
“If the Senate’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ budget is put on the House floor, I will vote no,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas said on X on Saturday, citing the lack of measures in the Senate plan for spending cuts. “Failure is not an option. And the Senate’s budget is a path to failure.”
Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland posted soon after saying he “can’t support House passage of the Senate changes to our budget resolution until I see the actual spending and deficit reduction plans to enact President Trump’s America First agenda.”
They joined Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania, who said he “certainly can’t support it as written” on X Friday evening.
Several other deficit hawks in the House criticized the plan, including House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), who called it “unserious and disappointing” Saturday morning but did not explicitly say he would oppose it should it be brought up for a vote as planned next week. Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) reposted Arrington’s statement and said the Senate plan offered only “measly” spending cuts.
Other House Republicans have previously characterized the Senate plan as fiscally irresponsible and have been adamant that any budget plan aspire to deficit neutrality and closely tie tax cuts to spending cuts. However, the Senate plan would essentially kick the can down the road on those difficult decisions by providing different targets to critical committees in the House and Senate.
For instance, while the Senate plan sets a modest $4 billion floor for spending reductions, the budget blueprint that House Republicans passed in February calls for $2 trillion in spending cuts.
There are also significant differences in the tax portion of the plan. The House budget provides its tax writing committee $4.5 trillion for spending on tax cuts. Meanwhile, the Senate budget uses an accounting tactic that zeroes out the cost of extending trillions in expiring tax cuts. It allows for potentially up to $800 billion more in tax cuts than the House plan.
Now at least one Republican is suggesting the budget plan could be put on ice while lawmakers draft the “big, beautiful bill” Trump has called for. Harris suggested that approval of the budget resolution — a key prerequisite to launch the party-line reconciliation process in the Senate — could wait until that happens so fiscal hawks can evaluate the bill’s fiscal parameters.
“If the Senate can deliver real deficit reduction in line with or greater than the House goals, I can support the Senate budget resolution,” Harris said, adding that the “Senate is free to put pen to paper to draft its reconciliation bill” in the meantime.
However, it remains to be seen whether the GOP rebellion will be able to stand up to Trump, who previously leaned on key holdouts to muscle through an earlier House budget vote. Trump this week demanded that “[e]very Republican, House and Senate, must UNIFY” behind the Senate plan, and he is now facing even greater pressure to show progress given the dramatic backlash in the financial markets to his new global tariffs.
“Big business is not worried about the Tariffs, because they know they are here to stay, but they are focused on the BIG, BEAUTIFUL DEAL, which will SUPERCHARGE our Economy,” he wrote Friday in an apparent reference to the planned megabill. “Very important.”