House GOP cancels budget vote

House Republican leaders canceled a vote on the Senate’s budget resolution Wednesday night, as Speaker Mike Johnson came to terms with what had been clear for many hours: Too many Republicans would vote in opposition and the measure was bound to fail.

The outcome is a brutal blow for House GOP leaders and President Donald Trump, who have spent days trying to wrangle the votes for the fiscal blueprint. Adoption of identical budget resolutions in both the House and Senate is an essential step to allowing committees to start drafting and passing a party-line package of tax cuts, military spending, energy policy and border security investments.

The evening roll call on the budget was delayed as House hard-liners back-channeled with a group of Senate Republicans to sketch out deeper spending cuts. Then a parade of more than a dozen fiscal hawks streamed off the House floor to meet with Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise while the vote on another measure was held open. But those eleventh-hour talks were not enough.

Fiscal hawks are miffed that the Senate’s fiscal blueprint does not require the deep spending cuts they baked into the House’s version, prompting the group of Trump loyalists to ignore the president’s pleas to vote for the measure.

After a group of House fiscal hawks met before the vote with Senate GOP leaders, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said, “Republicans in the Senate, Republicans in the House, are all on the same page — we are all committed to serious and significant savings.”

But many House Republicans are not pleased with alterations made in the Senate, where GOP leaders are calling for a total of at least $4 billion in savings in a final package, while the House set a mandate of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in spending cuts to balance out tax cuts.

“We just don’t trust the Senate,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, said in a brief interview this week. “It just seems very unserious that they want to control the deficits in this country.”

Trump’s whip operation involved multiple social media posts Wednesday morning urging House Republicans to back the Senate budget, but not enough were swayed.

“I think we’ll be able to get the votes tonight,” Johnson had told reporters when he headed into the chamber. Just 90 minutes later, he pulled the measure from consideration and cancelled the budget vote.

Lawmakers are slated to head back to their districts Thursday for a two-week recess, meaning that the president could have to wait to see any forward motion on his “big, beautiful bill” if a compromise can’t be reached soon.

Johnson said Wednesday night that House leadership will now explore either amending the Senate-adopted budget or going straight to conference with the Senate and working out differences there.

“We’re going to make that decision,” he told reporters just after the resolution was pulled.

One off-ramp is the solution Rep. LLoyd Smucker (R-Pa.) has been pushing: An amendment tying tax cuts to spending cuts. That would require lawmakers to go back to the House Rules Committee to restart the process for teeing up floor debate on the underlying resolution, but leaders are exploring ways to expedite that process.

 Jordain Carney contributed to this report.