What to know about Donald Trump's legislative agenda

WASHINGTON – Congressional Republicans fought hard for total control on Capitol Hill. Now that they have it, they’re scrambling to prove to President Donald Trump they can use it to deliver on his campaign promises.

GOP senators will attend a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, the day after House Republicans had a marathon meeting in the White House to try to hash out a plan to get Trump’s agenda moving on Capitol Hill. On Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson will attend the Super Bowl with the president.

The meetings come as congressional Republicans butt heads over the best path forward to fulfill Trump’s campaign promises on immigration, domestic energy production, defense and taxes, demonstrating how challenging it will be to deliver with tight margins in both houses.

House Republicans have been struggling to come to an agreement on a framework bill that would tell lawmakers how much they can spend and how much to cut. It would be just the first step: Both the House and Senate must pass the same bill to unlock the budget reconciliation process, which would allow them to later pass a bill with just 51 votes in the Senate, avoiding the threat of a Democratic filibuster.

House Republicans’ razor-thin majority makes it easy for any single member to derail progress. Despite a three-day retreat in Miami last week and a promise to start considering their framework bill this week, they still have been unable to agree on the budget details.

As precious time ticks away under the GOP trifecta, Senate Budget Chair Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Wednesday he would move ahead with the Senate’s plan, which would tackle immigration, energy, and defense in one bill and taxes in another – a plan House Republicans have argued would eventually kill the tax bill, because the politically-complicated tax bill couldn’t get through their chamber without the border and energy policies that would encourage members to compromise and vote for the package.

“The House has unique dynamics and we’ve got to move based on what the House can come to agreement on,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La. “President Trump really liked that idea of getting all of his priorities taken care of in a relatively short period of time.”

Here’s what to know about where Trump’s agenda stands on Capitol Hill.

Can Congress pass Trump’s agenda?

After the 2024 elections, Republicans have total control of Washington. Regardless of which party holds power, that usually only lasts two years.

In the Senate, Republicans control the chamber – a comfortable margin for simple-majority votes to approve Cabinet nominees, but not enough to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to get around the filibuster for most legislation.

In the House, Republicans’ five-person majority is already one of the smallest margins of power in modern history. The reality is even tighter: House Republicans already have two vacancies, created by former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who resigned at the end of last year, and former Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., who joined the Trump administration as national security advisor. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., will also soon resign when she is confirmed as ambassador to the United Nations. That would leave an even smaller 217-215 majority for a few months – so House Republicans can’t lose a single vote and still pass bills.

House leaders have argued that the only way to pass Trump’s priorities are to roll everything into one “big, beautiful bill,” as Trump has dubbed it, to get every Republican on board.

The bill would use a process called “reconciliation,” which allows lawmakers to bypass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate that would otherwise require compromise with Democrats. Former President Joe Biden also used the strategy when passing his agenda through the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan. Reconciliation bills can only include measures related to spending.

What the White House wants

As House Republicans’ White House meeting stretched on Thursday, Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the president laid out his tax priorities for the policy bill.

Those include no taxes on tips, as the president repeatedly called for on the campaign trail, no taxes on Social Security benefits, and no taxes on overtime pay, she said. It also includes extending the tax changes implemented during his first term, adjusting certain tax deductions that mostly affect residents in higher-tax states like New York and California, eliminating “all the special tax breaks for billionaire sports team owners” and closing the “carried interest loophole.”

“This will be the largest tax cut in history for middle class working Americans,” Leavitt said. “The president is committed to working with Congress to get this done.”

Republicans want to beef up border security technology, staffing and detention facilities, and to dismantle portions of Biden’s climate law and promote domestic energy production including oil and gas.

However, Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t care how Congress manages to pass his agenda, as long as it gets done. That’s left wiggle room for squabbling between the two sides of the Capitol, as the House and Senate’s approaches differ.

What the House has done so far

House Republicans spent three days at a Trump resort in Miami late last month in an effort to come up with topline numbers that could help them pass a budget blueprint.

The main sticking point is the likely cost of the package: Trump’s tax proposals, extending tax cuts and creating new ones, could cost trillions of dollars. Several House Freedom Caucus members and other conservatives want deep spending cuts to make up for that, which could create political challenges for moderates in the conference as cuts impact their constituents.

“If you’re going to have tax cuts you’ve got to have spending cuts,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a Freedom Caucus member who has been a part of the discussions with leadership over the last few days. “I’m not going to sit there and go through dollar for dollar, but you stir it all in the pot, it’s got to reduce the deficit.”

Johnson said Friday that raising the debt ceiling will also “probably” be included in the package. The federal government is expected to hit the debt ceiling this year, requiring legislation to raise it in order to pay for already-approved expenses and avoid a default.

Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., told USA TODAY last week that it’s important to include the debt ceiling increase in the reconciliation bill: “We think that if you go to Democrats for the debt ceiling increase it’s going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years in terms of the concessions the Democrats are going to want in order to do that.”

The Senate moves ahead as House stalls

Senate leaders have said they’ll give the House some time to figure out their plan, but if the one-bill strategy fails, they’ll move ahead with their two-bill plan. But on Wednesday, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the time as come and he’ll forge ahead on a budget blueprint next week without the House.

“It’s time for the Senate to move,” Graham said. “I appreciate what the House is trying to do, but I think it’s very important that we get to (border czar) Tom Holman the money he needs to complete the plan that President Trump promised.”

Friday, he released a plan that would appropriate $150 billion for national defense and $175 billion for border security, including new technology, bedspace and personnel. The new spending would be offset by an equal amount of cuts. The Senate Budget Committee plans to start working on Graham’s proposal next Wednesday.

If Graham and his committee complete the process of passing a budget blueprint before the House does, the House will have to either accept the Senate’s version and move ahead or insist on their own version.

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chair of the House Appropriations Committee, suggested on Wednesday that he’s not worried about the differences between the two chambers yet. Passing the budget blueprint is just the first step, he said.

But “if you don’t get that reconciliation package you’re going to have the largest tax increase in American history,” Cole said, because Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire this year. If that happens, he said, GOP members are likely to be punished by their constituents at the ballot box in 2026.