President Donald Trump isn’t sweating the timeline of the reconciliation bill, telling reporters Monday that if lawmakers go “a little longer” than their self-imposed deadline of July 4, “that’s OK.”
Congressional Republicans are sweating it, however, and they’re speeding ahead with a measure that, at this point, isn’t written and is hardly negotiated.
“We’re rapidly approaching floor consideration of our reconciliation bill,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday.
Speaker Mike Johnson is also urging a full-speed-ahead mentality, saying at a roundtable with Trump on Monday that Republicans “certainly hope” and “believe” they can meet their target of passing a final bill before lawmakers leave for the Fourth of July recess.
Trending
“It’s up to the Senate,” Johnson said. “The bill’s in the Senate’s hands now. But I spoke with Leader Thune as recently as last night, he’s feeling very optimistic.”
It’s an ambitious timeline, especially considering the Senate has to draft its measure, get it reviewed by the Senate parliamentarian, pass it, and then the House could reject it or amend it. Anything but simply accepting the Senate’s legislation would take even more time — and senators are currently haggling over basic provisions in the bill.
But the pressure to get the bill through is emblematic of the congressional GOP’s desire to give Trump a legislative win, with hardly any to speak of at this point in his presidency.
(It may also be a sign that congressional Republicans have no desire for legislative work to take over their scheduled summer breaks.)
There are just three legislative weeks left in the Senate before the chamber is slated to leave town for the Fourth of July break, and there are only seven legislative weeks left ahead of a month-long August recess.
But as much as Republicans want to get the bill done, actually doing so is a much different challenge.
Mandatory spending cuts remain a question mark, as a contingent of conservatives are lobbying against the numbers in the House-passed legislation, while more moderate senators have expressed support for scaling back the cuts. By how much and how to cut Medicaid remains a hotly contested issue in the Senate. And senators are still debating tax provisions in the bill. The Senate parliamentarian is also expected to nix a number of policy proposals in the bill, which could endanger it given the fragile majority in the House, where individual Republicans were won over by the inclusion of policies like ending a federal requirement for suppressors to be registered as part of the National Firearms Act.
House Republican leaders continue to urge Senate Republicans to tread lightly when making changes to the bill. The package only narrowly passed the House, and any substantive changes could complicate it passing again. Johnson said he hopes the Senate uses a “light touch” when working through the bill.
Others, meanwhile, are encouraging the Senate to chop it up.
The House Freedom Caucus is also now calling for the Senate to make changes to specific areas of the bill they voted for, per a document obtained by NOTUS and first reported by Punchbowl News. One of the Freedom Caucus’ key asks is for the new bill to “go much further on spending reductions.”
To do so, House conservatives are spotlighting Medicaid and clean energy tax credits, two major sticking points with Senate moderates.
In their letter, the Freedom Caucus requested a further reduction of Medicaid provider taxes, a reduction in the amount the federal government matches state funding for able-bodied adults without children on Medicaid, stronger work requirements for Medicaid and stronger barriers for noncitizens to receive Medicaid benefits.
They also request that the Senate not change the House bill’s phase out of clean energy tax credits, which some Senate Republicans are nervous about.
On top of all that, the House conservatives also want a menu of smaller reforms, including ending taxpayer benefits for immigrants, loosening rules for more guns and, notably, scaling back the House’s precariously negotiated increase in the state and local tax deduction.
Changes in the Senate to any of those items would almost certainly slow the process in one or both chambers, casting doubt on the July 4 deadline.
Republicans so far have said the deadline is tied to the debt limit, which is expected to be hit some time in August. They’re hoping to avoid working with Democrats on a debt limit increase by including the largest increase ever — $4 trillion — in the reconciliation bill.
The Congressional Budget Office in a press release Monday said the current debt limit “would probably be exhausted between mid-August and the end of September 2025,” adding that “estimated range begins about two weeks later than the agency estimated in March 2025.”
That updated date doesn’t appear to be sparking much talk about taking a step back on the timeline.
Sen. Rand Paul, who’s against increasing the debt limit in the first place, told NOTUS he thinks leaders “still want July 4.”
“I think they’re going to still keep working on that,” Paul said.
Paul previously noted that, while he says he won’t vote for the bill with the debt limit included, “there’s always a possibility that negotiations break down and it languishes, and they don’t get their deadline of July 4, or the debt ceiling becomes more of an imminent need to raise it.”
“And I would be happy with that if they separated it out and did it,” Paul said.
Still, not everyone is so sure it’ll work out.
Sen. Josh Hawley, who’s opposed to proposed Medicaid cuts in the House-passed bill, told NOTUS he’s not sure if negotiating past the July 4 deadline would be necessary.
But he thinks this week’s work will be a good indicator.
“We’ll have a better sense of this towards the end of this week,” Hawley said. “I think this week is kind of a, I don’t wanna say ‘make or break,’ but I think in terms of maintaining the pace, we’ll really know a lot more.”
—
Ursula Perano is a reporter at NOTUS. Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Authors
