Trump faces pressure to break GOP impasse over agenda

President-elect Trump is facing calls from House Republicans to settle a disagreement between the chambers on how the GOP should start tackling its agenda.

As some top House Republicans dig in on starting with a reconciliation bill focused on taxes, members of the conference are looking to Trump to set the course.

“Ultimately and pretty immanently, the President is going to call the question on this and call the play to say we either got to do two or one. There’s not really a whole lot more being said about [it] from Smith,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) said, referring to Ways and Means Committee chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.).

Smith has pushed back against a plan from the incoming Senate leadership to split the GOP legislative agenda into two different reconciliation bills: the first on border policy —where Republicans are largely in lockstep — followed by a tax package later in 2025.

The tax reforms already contain some contentious issues within the conference, such as the state and local income tax (SALT) deduction cap and which parts of the Biden administration’s climate law to scrap. The process has been made even more complicated by Trump's promises of further individual tax cuts.

Moving a border and energy bill first could allow Republicans to show early policy accomplishments to voters ahead of the midterm elections. But doing so could also force Republicans to scale back their tax-cut ambitions in order to pass a deal before key parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expires.

Now House Republicans are saying they want some guidance on how to push ahead.

“[We] are looking forward to seeing what Trump has to say about it, because that’s what we’ll do ... whether it’s one bill or two. Bottom line, I believe that whichever route the president believes is going to be the quickest path to success is the one we’re going to do,” Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) said Wednesday.

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Penn.), a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, also turned the spotlight on Trump.

“An awful lot about what happens [next] is conversations with the next president of the United States,” he said.

Trump signaled earlier this week that he was interested in moving on the tax bill during his first hundred days in office, but hasn’t specified whether he wants one bill or two.

“I have tax cuts,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “You know, we’ll be submitting in either the first or second package to Congress the extension of the tax cuts. So that might very well be in there. Or, or it’ll come sometime after that.”

Meanwhile, some House Republicans are digging their heels in about doing the tax bill first, breaking with the plan from soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), who wanted to focus on a border security and energy production bill.

“I would love to see everything combined, because the Trump tax cuts were so beneficial to my constituents,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said Wednesday evening.

Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said he was observing differences in approach from tax writers in the House and Senate.

“It’s a tactical difference between the leadership of Ways and Means in the House and my friends over on the Senate side — Senate Finance or the leadership over there,” he said.

Tax writers on the powerful Ways and Means Committee in the House are especially keen to do the tax cuts, which center on extensions of the individual provisions of the TCJA. The bill's cuts to personal income tax rates expire at the end of 2025, which means Americans could see higher tax bills in the lead up to the midterm elections without an extension.

“Ideally, I’d like to do the tax thing first, because it doesn’t allow the sunsetting,” Ways and Means member Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) said. “[Chairman Smith] would like to see it all done up front — the tax stuff.”

“You might not get to number two,” he added.

Asked if the GOP legislative agenda was better delivered across two separate laws, Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.) told The Hill he wasn’t convinced.

“I’m not there yet,” he said, “but I want to keep an open mind on how we can be most productive. I would prefer the single one, but I’m confident that we can ultimately unite around it either way.”

And not all House Republicans are on board with the Ways and Means panel.

The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus said Friday the GOP should start with a bill focused on border security before moving to a tax and energy package later in the year.

While Republicans are largely united on extending the 2017 tax cuts, the large number of additional cuts that Trump proposed on the campaign trail is making the process more complicated.

Trump proposed modifying the SALT cap, exempting social security benefits from tax, doing away with taxes on tips and overtime, doing away with double taxation for Americans living abroad, creating a deduction for interest on auto loans, as well as creating a credit for family caregivers.

“I will support a tax credit for family caregivers who take care of a parent or a loved one. It's about time that they were recognized, right?” Trump said in a speech at Madison Square Garden in October.

He’s also proposed levying huge new tariffs, which, if enacted administratively, wouldn’t count toward any deficit reduction. 

The expirations in the 2017 cuts involve most personal income tax rates, the standard deduction, personal exemptions, the child tax credit, the charitable contributions deduction, the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, the mortgage interest deduction and the alternative minimum tax, among others.

All told, the tax cuts could add as much as $15 trillion to the deficit, according to one estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.