The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., is pictured on Feb. 25, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans, in the early morning hours Saturday, approved their budget resolution that will aid the party in maintaining the 2017 tax cuts but also paves the way for them to add nearly $6 trillion to the deficit under an outside analysis.

The 51-48 vote sends the compromise measure to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., hopes to adopt the tax-and-spending blueprint within the next week. No Democrats backed the bill and no Democratic amendments were accepted during an overnight marathon voting session.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul were the only two Republicans who voted against the resolution, which needed only a majority vote under the complicated process being used in the Senate.

The lengthy voting session, known as the vote-a-rama, included debate on 28 amendments, with one adopted.

Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan was the only member of either party to have their change agreed to, following a 51-48 vote. His amendment addressed Medicaid, which has become a flash point in the battle over the budget this year, as well as Medicare.

Sullivan said his proposal would strengthen Medicaid, the state-federal health program for lower-income people that House GOP lawmakers are looking at as one place to cut spending, and Medicare, the health insurance program for seniors and some people with disabilities.

“We should all want to weed out waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid and Medicare, and we must keep these programs going. We should do both,” Sullivan said.

Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden spoke against the amendment, saying it didn’t clearly define which “vulnerable people” would have their access to Medicare and Medicaid protected.

“By not defining the vulnerable, the Sullivan amendment is code for states to cut benefits or kick people off their coverage altogether,” Wyden said. “To me, the Sullivan amendment basically says if somebody thinks you’re not poor enough, you’re not sick enough, or you’re not disabled enough, we’re not going to be there for you.”

Democrats unsuccessfully offered messaging amendments dealing with everything from Social Security phone service to the minimum wage to contracts with farmers.

‘Start the game’

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said during a floor speech Friday the budget resolution will clear the way for lawmakers to extend the 2017 tax cuts permanently, bolster federal spending on border security and defense, rewrite energy policy and cut spending.

“The resolution opens up that process that will be done by the House and Senate authorizing committees,” Graham said. “So this doesn’t do anything other than start the game and it’s time this game started.”

Wyden, ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, vehemently opposed the budget resolution, saying the tax cuts it sets up would predominantly help the wealthy.

Wyden argued the tariffs that President Donald Trump has instituted would negate any potential positive impacts of the upcoming GOP tax cuts. The tariffs sent markets diving on Friday for a second day in a row.

“People following along at home are going to hear a lot of sweet-sounding promises from Republicans about what they’re trying to accomplish,” Wyden said. “They claim their tax bill is just all unicorns and rainbows. They’ll say everybody is going to benefit from a tax cut and typical families will get the help they need. They’ll promise rising wages and a booming economy.

“It’s just not true. The reality is, unless you’re way out at the upper end of the income scale, any benefit you get from this Republican bill is going to get blown out of the water as the Trump tariffs continue to hike inflation.”

Paul said during floor debate that he was “concerned” about how his colleagues had written the measure.

“What worries me is that so many things in Washington are smoke and mirrors,” Paul said. “On the one hand, it appears as if all of this great savings is happening. But on the other hand, the resolution before us will increase the debt by $5 trillion.”

Paul offered an amendment that would have changed those instructions to set up a three-month debt limit extension, but it was not agreed to following a vote of 5-94.

Framework for tax hikes and policy bill

Congress’ budget isn’t a bill but a concurrent resolution, meaning it never goes to the president for a signature. Its various provisions take effect once both chambers vote to adopt the same version.

The budget resolution also doesn’t include any real money, just plans for the next decade.

But it does lay the groundwork for the GOP to use the complex reconciliation process to extend the 2017 tax law, much of which was set to expire at the end of this year.

Republicans plan to use that reconciliation bill to boost spending on border security and defense by hundreds of billions of dollars and make changes to energy policy.

The budget resolution also includes instructions to raise the debt limit by between $4 and $5 trillion later this year.

The reconciliation instructions give a dozen House committees and 10 Senate committees targets for how much they can increase the deficit or how much they need to cut spending when they draft their pieces of the package.

All of those panels are supposed to send their bills to the Budget committees before May 9, so they can be bundled together in one package and sent to the floor.

The House GOP set a minimum of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, while Republicans in the Senate set a floor of $4 billion in funding reductions. Those vast differences foreshadow an internal GOP struggle to achieve a final deal.

Nearly $6 trillion deficit increase

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office will ultimately calculate the deficit impact of the reconciliation bill once it’s written, but several outside organizations have said they disagree with how Republicans are moving forward. 

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released an analysis Friday showing the reconciliation bill would increase deficits during the next decade by nearly $6 trillion.

“A $5.8 trillion deficit-increasing bill would be unprecedented,” CRFB’s analysis states. “It would add 14 times as much to the deficit than the bipartisan infrastructure law ($400 billion), more than three times as much as American Rescue Plan ($1.8 trillion), three times the 2020 CARES Act ($1.7 trillion), and nearly four times the original score of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ($1.5 trillion). In fact, it would add more to the deficit than all four of these major laws combined.”

Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, wrote in a statement “the tax cuts called for in the budget plan are so expensive that deficits will rise substantially, raising economic risks associated with higher debt in service to expensive tax cuts skewed to the wealthy.”

“Policymakers need to course-correct and remember their campaign pledges to help ease families’ strained budgets, not contort the budget to the desires of the very wealthy,” Parrott wrote. “That would mean crafting a budget bill that doesn’t raise families’ health and grocery costs but instead invests in making health care more affordable and expands the Child Tax Credit to support families who face challenges affording the basics. These investments and lower deficits can be achieved by a sounder tax policy that requires corporations and the wealthy — who benefit enormously from public investments — to pay their fair share.”

An analysis from The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, called the GOP budget resolution a “fiscal train wreck.”

Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy, and Dominik Lett, a budget and entitlement policy analyst, wrote that Republicans need to start over.

“This budget isn’t just a missed opportunity; it actively worsens our nation’s debt trajectory,” they wrote. “The resolution abandons the House’s concrete spending reductions desperately needed in today’s high-debt environment, sets a dangerous precedent by adopting a so-called current policy baseline that hides the very real deficit impact of extending tax cuts, and adds hundreds of billions in new deficit spending. The Senate should go back to the drawing b

The U.S. Capitol. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans released an updated budget resolution Wednesday that sets a May 9 deadline for more than a dozen committees to approve their slice of the massive package that will permanently extend the GOP tax cuts and make significant reductions in spending.

The 70-page budget resolution, however, includes different guidelines for the House and Senate committees, allowing GOP leaders to sidestep their differences on policy for the moment, but not the long haul.

The budget resolution also sets the stage for the House to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion and the Senate to lift it by not more than $5 trillion in the reconciliation package.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wrote in a statement that final approval of the budget resolution would “unlock the ability for the appropriate Senate committees to fully fund our border needs for four years, provide much-needed financial relief to our military at a time of great danger, make the 2017 tax cuts permanent to energize the economy, and do what has been promised for decades: go through every line item of the budget to cut wasteful and unnecessary spending — hopefully by the trillions.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., released a statement of his own, saying the “parliamentarian has reviewed the Budget Committee’s substitute amendment and deemed it appropriate for consideration under the Budget Act.”

“It is now time for the Senate to move forward with this budget resolution in order to further advance our shared Republican agenda in Congress,” Thune wrote.

The Senate parliamentarian is the nonpartisan scorekeeper who ensures everything included in a reconciliation bill meets the chamber’s strict rules.

Here comes the vote-a-rama

The complicated reconciliation process will allow the GOP to approve its core policy goals without needing support from Democrats in the Senate, where 60 votes are usually needed to advance legislation. Reconciliation does, however, come with several hoops to jump through.

One of those hurdles will come later this week when the Senate endures the dreaded vote-a-rama; a marathon amendment voting session that typically lasts overnight. After that, senators will be able to send the budget resolution to the House for final approval.

The tax-and-spending blueprint released Wednesday will send a dozen House committees instructions on how to draft their pieces of the package, while 10 Senate committees will write bills.

Typically, the committee instructions, which just include a budget target, are similar, if not identical, for the House and Senate. But differences of opinion between Republican leaders about how much to cut federal spending, as well as other disagreements, led to differing instructions.

The House has a significantly higher threshold for cutting government spending than the Senate.

The Agriculture Committee needs to slice at least $230 billion; Education and Workforce must reduce spending by a minimum of $330 billion; Energy and Commerce needs to cut no less than $880 billion; Financial Services must find at least $1 billion in savings; Natural Resources has a minimum of $1 billion; Oversight and Government Reform has a floor of $50 billion; and the Transportation Committee needs to reduce deficits by $10 billion or more.

House committees that can increase the federal deficit include the Armed Services Committee with a cap of $100 billion in new spending, Homeland Security with a $90 billion ceiling for new funding for programs it oversees, Judiciary with a maximum of $110 billion and Ways and Means, which can increase deficits up to $4.5 trillion for tax cuts.

Spending cuts in Senate

Senators set a much lower bar for themselves in terms of spending cuts, though the way the reconciliation instructions are written, as a floor and not a ceiling, will give leeway for those committees to cut much more.

Four Senate committees — Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; Energy and Natural Resources; and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP — must each find at least $1 billion in spending cuts over the 10-year budget window.

Senate committees also got instructions for increasing the deficit, which will allow them to spend up to the dollar amount outlined in the budget resolution. Those committees include Armed Services at $150 billion; Commerce, Science and Transportation with $20 billion; Environment and Public Works at $1 billion; Finance with $1.5 trillion in new deficits, likely for tax cuts; Homeland Security at $175 billion and Judiciary with $175 billion.

Once the House and Senate both vote to adopt the same budget resolution, the committees can formally begin drafting and marking up their bills.

Those bills, according to the instructions, must be sent to the Budget committees before May 9. That panel will then bundle all of the various pieces together into one reconciliation package and send it to the floor.

The House and Senate must vote to approve the same reconciliation package before it can go to President Donald Trump for his signature and become law.

Republicans have a paper-thin majority in the House and will need to ensure that lawmakers from across the party support all of the elements going into the reconciliation package. Even a few defectors in that chamber could block the bill from moving forward.

Senate GOP leaders have a bit more wiggle room, but cannot lose more than three of their members and pass a reconciliation bill.