WASHINGTON -- Back on track, Senate Republicans pushed ahead Wednesday with their $340 billion budget bill focused on funding the White House's mass deportations and border security agenda after Vice President JD Vance gave a green light to proceed despite a morning dust-up caused by President Donald Trump.
The package was in jeopardy after Trump publicly bashed the approach from the Senate Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Trump said he favored the "big beautiful bill" from House Republicans, a more politically fraught package that includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts but slashes government programs and services. Senators want to address those priorities later, in a second package.
"We are moving forward," said Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the GOP whip, after a lunch meeting with Vance at the Capitol. "Foot on the gas, moving forward."
The start-stop process is complicating what's already a heavy legislative lift for Republicans, who have a rare sweep of power with majority control of Congress, but face big hurdles enacting Trump's agenda as Democrats prepare to counter with steep objections at every step.
Ongoing GOP divisions over whether to do one package or two -- the House thinks they can only muscle one package to passage, while the Senate believes two will be easier -- has created a push-pull dynamic that Trump is leveraging as he goads the two chambers of Congress to compete with each other.
Trump, in his own private talks with the senators, including last weekend at Mar-a-Lago, has essentially told them just to "get the result."
It all comes as Democrats, without the votes to stop Trump's plans, are warning Americans what's at stake -- particularly as the administration's Department of Government Efficiency effort is slashing across government departments, leaving a trail of fired federal workers and dismantling programs on which many Americans depend.
"These bills that they have have one purpose -- and that is they're trying to give a tax break to their billionaire buddies and have you, the average American person, pay for it," Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer of New York told The Associated Press.
Schumer convened a private call over the weekend with Democratic senators and agreed on a strategy to challenge Republicans for prioritizing tax cuts that primarily flow to the wealthy at the expense of program and service reductions in health care, scientific research, veterans services and elsewhere.
"This is going to be a long, drawn-out fight," Schumer said later.
With a party line vote, 50-47, the Senate launched the cumbersome budget process late Tuesday and by Wednesday was slogging through an initial 50 hours of debate. That all leads up to an expected all-night session Thursday with rapid-fire attempts to amend the package in what's typically called a "vote-a-rama."
Both of Arkansas' Republican senators, Tom Cotton and John Boozman, voted in favor of the budget bill.
The Republican package would allow $175 billion to be spent on border security, including money for mass deportation operations and building the U.S.-Mexico border wall, in addition to a $150 billion boost to the Pentagon and $20 billion for the Coast Guard.
Trump border czar Tom Homan and top aide Stephen Miller told senators privately last week that they are running short of cash to accomplish the president's immigration and deportation priorities, spurring Republicans to move swiftly.
Eyeing ways to pay for it, Republican senators are considering a rollback of the Biden administration's methane emissions fee, which was approved by Democrats as part of climate change strategies in the Inflation Reduction Act, and hoping to draw new revenue from energy leases as they aim to spur domestic energy production.
But all that was in jeopardy when Trump said early Wednesday he wanted the House's version passed as a way to "kickstart" the process and "move all of our priorities to the concept of, 'ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL.'"
Trump said, "Unlike the Lindsey Graham version of the very important Legislation currently being discussed, the House Resolution implements my FULL America First Agenda, EVERYTHING, not just parts of it!"
The Senate's Republican leadership was blindsided by the post.
"As they say, I did not see that one coming," said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.
Thune had engineered the two-bill approach as a way to deliver an early victory for the White House and had pushed the Senate forward while the House is away on recess this week, saying it was time to act.
By lunchtime, after Vance met with the senators, his message was for them to simply carry on.
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said afterward that Vance told them: "The president wants whatever you guys want. Just do whatever you want. He's going to support it."
Cramer said Trump enjoys watching the House and Senate compete over his agenda.
The House GOP bill is multiple times larger, with $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $1.5 trillion in spending reductions over the decade across Medicaid health care programs, food stamps and other services used by large swaths of the country. The cuts could ultimately grow to $2 trillion to appease hard-right conservatives.
The budget plans are being considered under what's called the reconciliation process, which allows passage on a simple majority vote without many of the procedural hurdles that stall legislation. Once rare, reconciliation is increasingly being used in the House and Senate to pass big packages on party-line votes when one party controls the White House and Congress.
REPUBLICANS AND SPENDING CUTS
Republicans in Congress have responded to Trump's unilateral moves to freeze federal spending, dismantle programs and fire civil servants with a collective shrug, staying mostly silent and even praising him as he circumvents the legislative branch.
But in recent days, as his slash-and-burn campaign to remake the government has begun to affect their states and districts, some Republicans have tried to push back in subtle ways. They have sought carve-outs and special consideration for agriculture programs, scientific research and more, even as they cheered on Trump's overall approach.
Their swift and quiet moves to protect their own federal spending without critiquing Trump are an early indication of the political realities that could pose obstacles to the president's push. Many programs he has targeted for cost-cutting have entrenched constituencies in Congress built up by Republicans over many years. It is one reason that shrinking the size of the federal government will be a mammoth task, despite the GOP's posture of maximum deference to Trump.
Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama was one of the first Republicans to raise concerns at home soon after the Trump administration directed the National Institutes of Health to slash $4 billion in overhead costs for medical research grantees, a move that has since been paused by a federal judge. Britt, whose state has received more than $518 million in NIH grants, told a local news outlet she would press administration officials to take a "smart, targeted approach" to cuts so as to "not hinder lifesaving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions" such as the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
In the House, a group of Republicans from farm states and districts introduced legislation this week that aims to salvage a foreign aid program targeted for extinction by Trump as part of his effort to wipe out the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The bill would transfer oversight of the Food for Peace program, which purchases crops at market price from U.S. farmers and distributes them to hungry people abroad, from USAID to the Agriculture Department. The lawmakers argued their legislation fulfills the spirit of what Trump calls his "mandate" to slim down the federal bureaucracy and make it more efficient.
"By moving Food for Peace to USDA, the program can continue to equip American producers to serve hungry people while providing more transparency and efficiency as to how taxpayer dollars are stewarded," Rep. Tracey Mann, R-Kan., the lead sponsor of the House bill, said in a statement Tuesday.
After Trump ordered a 90-day freeze of foreign aid shipments, Sen. Jerry Moran, also of Kansas, was among the only Republicans who publicly urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to quickly resume foreign food aid shipments abroad so U.S. growers, including sorghum farmers in his state, would not lose out on a major market for their surplus product. U.S. growers sold about $713 million of goods to the Food for Peace program in the 2023 fiscal year.
In a letter last week to the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the chair of the Indian Affairs Committee, asked the Trump administration to direct federal agencies not to apply any funding restrictions from Trump's executive order targeting diversity programs to Native American tribes.
Not all Republicans are pushing back on Trump's efforts to slash federal spending, even when those cuts hit programs in their states.
Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, whose state has received more than $1 billion in NIH research grants, said he supported the move to cut overhead costs, arguing that taxpayer money should not be used to cover expenses like lighting, heating and building maintenance.
"If you ask the average American, 'We're spending a billion dollars to cure childhood cancer; how much of a billion dollars should go toward curing childhood cancer?' they'd probably say a billion," Moreno said. "The idea that 60% goes toward indirect costs, overhead, is insane."
The NIH said less than half of that, about 26% of grant dollars it distributed last year, went to such costs.
Information for this article was contributed by Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking of The Associated Press and by Maya C. Miller and Catie Edmondson of The New York Times.
The Capitol is seen framed through a window in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)