Four hurdles facing Republicans as they shift focus to a bill to pass Trump’s agenda

WASHINGTON — The Republican-led Congress returns Monday after a weeklong recess with plans to shift focus to the party-line bill to pass President Donald Trump’s multitrillion-dollar agenda after having dispensed with a separate government funding deadline.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has set a target of passing the legislation through the House in April before the Easter recess, which leaves Republicans in the House with three weeks — and a lot of work. And then the bill would go to the Senate, which has a different idea of how to proceed.

Republicans control a narrow House majority of 218-213 and a Senate majority of 53-47. They are using the budget “reconciliation” process, which allows them to bypass a 60-vote threshold in the Senate and remove Democrats from the equation.

Here are four hurdles they face.

Medicaid cuts

Republicans say they want to find trillions of dollars in spending cuts to pay for at least some of the bill. The budget resolution the House adopted last month requires the Energy and Commerce Committee to find $880 billion in deficit reduction. And that’s where things get tricky.

The Congressional Budget Office, the official nonpartisan scorekeeper, found that the panel oversees a total of $581 billion in funds if Medicare and Medicaid are excluded.

In other words, it’s mathematically impossible for Republicans to meet their own budget targets without cutting Medicare or Medicaid. GOP leaders and rank-and-file members have said some Medicaid cuts are on the table, and Johnson frames it as an effort to cut waste and fraud in the program.

The specter of Medicaid cuts has fueled intense opposition from Democrats, who warn that it would harm low-income people and seniors in the program, as well as hospitals that rely on its funding. Pursuing hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts would put swing-district Republicans in a politically precarious position. But abandoning those cuts would anger hard-line conservatives who voted for the budget blueprint to begin the process because they were promised steep spending reductions.

A $4.6 trillion asterisk?

Perhaps the biggest hurdle looming over the package is its trillions of dollars in red ink. Extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And that’s before tackling Trump’s other pursuits, like ending taxes on tips and overtime pay.

To get around the problem, Republicans are considering a far-reaching accounting change to hide the deficit impact, known as “current policy baseline,” instead of “current law baseline,” which would treat the cost of making Trump’s tax cuts permanent as $0. Democrats are preparing to fight that with the parliamentarian, the in-house referee overseeing the reconciliation process.

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, called it a “magical asterisk” that amounts to “wishing away deficits in trillions.”

“They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They realize that cutting Medicaid is going to be politically fatal, but they are also trying to make these numbers work,” he said in an interview. “And so the only way to make these numbers work without cutting Medicaid is to bulls— your way through.”

House-Senate divide

Zooming out, Republicans in the House and the Senate are also split over the way forward to advance Trump’s policy agenda.

The two chambers adopted conflicting budget resolutions before Trump sided with the House version. So Republican senators are waiting to see what the House can pass. But despite their paper-thin House majority, Senate Republicans are in no mood to let the House dictate the outcome.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said it will probably require the two chambers to pass different bills and resolve them later.

“Look, the House has to do what the House has to do to get their baseline vote. The Senate has to do what the Senate has to do to get a baseline vote,” Tillis said. “And then we’re going have to go into either conference or some semblance of a conference and figure out how we get both chambers to agree on something.”

Debt limit

Another major issue is the upcoming deadline to lift the U.S. debt ceiling or risk default on the debt.

The “X date” for Congress to act is expected sometime this year, but the Treasury Department may not know when until after Tax Day, which is April 15.

House lawmakers’ budget plan called for a $4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, but they need to pass the reconciliation bill to make it official. That means they’ll have to send the legislation to Trump’s desk before the deadline or risk economic calamity. And if they don’t have enough time, the debt limit may need to be axed and passed separately — and through the Senate’s 60-vote rule, giving Democrats leverage.

But if they keep it in the bill as part of an effort to avoid negotiating with Democrats, they may need to deliver significant spending cuts to persuade GOP hard-liners — many of whom have never voted to hike the debt limit — to provide make-or-break votes for the bill.