Senate Republicans haven't looked at their colleagues in the house to cut spending to pay Trump's tax cut extension in 2017.
GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee met with President Trump on Thursday to try to reach the same page on tax and spending issues after the House passed a budget resolution after it outlined spending cuts of $4.5 trillion and $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in tax cuts at the end of February.
The resolution forces the House Energy and Commerce Committee to come up with nearly $900 billion in spending cuts. Popular Medicaid Healthcare programs.
Trump says he hopes that even if Senate Republicans laid the foundation for two separate bills, his agenda (tax cuts, border security and expanding fossil fuel extraction) will be passed in “one big beautiful bill.”
After meeting with Trump, some Senate Republicans criticized the House resolution. House and Senate Republicans must pass joint budget resolutions before moving forward with specific tax and spending bills through the settlement process.
“Their bills aren't beautiful yet,” said Steve Daines (R-Mont.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee. “We need to match first and foremost. The first step is to pass budgetary resolutions in a more closely positioned position where the House is.”
Daines said Senate Republicans tend to be less interested in adding deficits than the rooms below, but coinciding with the $1.5 trillion cuts that homes are seeking, and perhaps exceeding that to make their resolution viable.
“What numbers do you put into budget resolution, basically, when it comes to reducing the deficit?” he said. “I think we have to be that number in the Senate to accept what we do.”
Senate Finance Committee member Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) delves into the topic of spending reductions and repeats the Republican notion of spending programs “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
“For all of us, what's off the table is reducing the profits of those who need things. But in programs where there is wasted, fraud and abuse, we definitely want to explore that,” he said.
Following the meeting with Trump, Finance Committee Chairman Mike Krapo (R-Idaho) and member James Lankford (R-Okla.) highlighted their desire to make Trump's tax cuts permanent in 2017. Some of the cuts have already expired, and many more are expected to expire at the end of this year.
Persistence can increase the cost of tax cuts over temporary extensions. The 2017 cuts were temporarily made to reduce the impact on their deficit, as Republicans were trying to make their bill's revenue neutral before they first agreed to expand the $1.5 trillion deficit.
The current tax extension bill could add significantly more to the deficit than its pioneer. The cost of simply extending the 2017 expiration cuts would cost $4.7 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That's more than $4.5 trillion that the House budget resolution was allocated.
Without offset, the Republican tax cut could potentially cost $6.8 trillion in federal revenue losses if expired after 2033, according to a recent analysis by the University of Pennsylvania budget modeler. If they become permanent, they would reduce their revenue by $7.7 trillion.
Republicans use accounting methods that ignore legal deadlines to allow nearly $5 trillion of these revenue losses to be ignored.
