Senate budget hawks left a meeting at the White House more open to voting for a blueprint that unlocks President Donald Trump’s agenda.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) brought members of the Senate Budget Committee to the White House on Wednesday, giving Trump a chance to assure fiscal conservatives, many of whom sit on the panel, that he is serious about deficit reduction.
The Senate will vote on the budget resolution, which clears the way for Trump’s tax, border, and energy priorities, later this week, but several Republican holdouts wanted commitments that the Senate would not stray too far from the $2 trillion in offsets guaranteed in companion House instructions.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), a Budget Committee member, told reporters that chief of staff Susie Wiles offered to prepare a statement underlining that commitment.
“I heard the president say, ‘I recognize this is a rare and wonderful opportunity to right-size the budget, and I support your efforts to achieve that end, and I’ll say it publicly and repeatedly,’” Kennedy said.
“I always believed he would do that, but I think it was important to a couple of my colleagues to hear him say that,” he added.
Thune declined to predict “for sure” whether the resolution now has the GOP support needed to clear the upper chamber, with a vote expected on Friday or Saturday, but he called the meeting a “good opportunity to get a lot of members’ questions answered.”
Fiscal hawks, meanwhile, expressed optimism that Republicans were on the same page regarding federal spending.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told reporters he believes Trump is serious about returning the budget to $6.5 trillion a year, one of his demands. He has asked leadership for an “ironclad” guarantee that Republicans would convene a bicameral panel to find savings.
“I think he’s embraced that concept and, I think even more importantly, a process to achieving it,” Johnson said.
When asked if he was more inclined to support the budget resolution, Johnson told the Washington Examiner, “I’m certainly far more predisposed to it than I was.”
Other undecided Republicans signaled that the meeting had softened their resistance to the measure.
“We’re making progress, and I think we’re optimistic,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said.
“I believe we’re going to have something that everybody can vote for,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) added.
The meeting represented a last-minute push to breathe new life into a process that has stalled for weeks. Soon after senators returned to the Capitol, the Senate Budget Committee released its blueprint, with the ultimate goal of both chambers approving it before the Easter recess next week.
From there, committees in each body will spend weeks hammering out the finer details of Trump’s legislative agenda.
Kennedy called the budget resolution a “baby step” toward a more contentious fight over federal spending. House fiscal hawks have expressed skepticism that the Senate will live up to the $2 trillion in offsets agreed to by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).
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Kennedy predicted that Trump would continue to be instrumental in tamping down disputes, as he was when a version of the blueprint was adopted in the House in February.
“At some point, President Trump is going to have to step in and say, ‘Let me help you folks and share with you my ideas,’ in order for us to reach a consensus in both the House and the Senate,” Kennedy said. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”
