Speaker Johnson acknowledges GOP opposition to House budget but confident ‘they’ll get there’

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday he has not yet locked down enough Republican support to advance his chamber’s budget resolution this week but is confident the holdouts will ultimately cooperate.

With his razor-thin majority, Mr. Johnson cannot afford more than one GOP defection if he wants to adopt the party’s budget resolution. This is the first step in moving on President Trump’s legislative agenda.

Rep. Victoria Spartz, Indiana Republican, has said she is opposed to the current version of the budget. At least a handful of other Republicans said they were leaning “no” or undecided on how to vote.

“There may be more than one, but they’ll get there,” said Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican.

Speaking Monday afternoon at an event hosted by Americans for Prosperity, Mr. Johnson cracked jokes about his predicament and suggested he was starting “a prayer request” to get the budget over the finish line.

“I don’t think that anybody wants to be in front of this train,” he said. “They want to be on it.”

He expects the House to approve the budget this week but did not specify which day, although GOP leaders are expected to move as soon as they have enough support locked down. 

The budget resolution includes instructions to House committees asking them to craft a sweeping reconciliation package that will spend up to $300 billion over the next decade on border security, immigration enforcement and the national defense, to cut other spending by at least $1.5 trillion and to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion.

The budget also calls for sweeping tax cuts with a maximum net cost of $4.5 trillion, although that ceiling would be lowered if Republicans don’t achieve $2 trillion in spending cuts, or raised if they exceed that goal.

Budget reconciliation is the process that Republicans are using to advance the party’s legislative agenda without the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

Ms. Spartz and some holdouts like Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, are concerned the budget would not actually help reduce the deficit. But others are concerned about the steep spending cuts it does propose, with many members worried that the figures will require deep cuts to Medicaid in the reconciliation legislation that follows.

Some undecided Republicans, like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York, are asking questions about the details of the planned Medicaid cuts and said depending on the answers from leadership, they could get to yes without changes to the budget. 

But Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, New Jersey Republican, said he wants to see the budget changed to lower the spending-cut instruction for the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, from $880 billion as currently written.

“The only way I vote for it, quite frankly, is literally if the president came to me and … makes another commitment [that] we’re going to change that as we go along,” he said, noting the Senate would still need to agree to the budget resolution before the instructions become official.

Mr. Van Drew said he spoke with Mr. Trump on Monday to warn he may vote against the budget because of his concerns about harming people on Medicaid and that the president did not ask for his vote. 

“He understood my concerns,” he said. 

Mr. Johnson said his challenge is to find “equilibrium” among a diverse conference, with Republicans from deep-red districts that Mr. Trump easily won and members from districts that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried.

“Those Republicans look at an issue set with very different lenses,” he said.

Rep. Tony Gonzales, Texas Republican, led a letter to Mr. Johnson with seven of his Hispanic GOP colleagues — many from swing districts — raising concerns about potential cuts to Medicaid, Pell Grants and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. 

“We need to uphold fiscal responsibility while ensuring that essential programs — programs that have empowered Americans to succeed — are not caught in the crossfire,” they wrote, asking to work with the speaker on “a responsible approach to these budget discussions.” 

But Mr. Johnson is also getting pressure on the other side from deficit hawks like Mr. Massie. 

“If the Republican budget passes, the deficit gets worse, not better,” Mr. Massie said on X.

The Senate late last week adopted its own budget resolution that calls for splitting the president’s agenda into two reconciliation bills, with a first focused on border and defense funding and a second on the tax cuts.

Senate GOP leaders have referred to their budget as “Plan B” in case the House can’t advance its own plan.

“That’s fine, but I said you have to allow the House to lead on this — by necessity,” Mr. Johnson said of his message to his Senate counterparts. “We need to. We have to. I have the more complicated equation to solve.”

Both chambers eventually have to adopt identical budget resolutions to begin the process of writing reconciliation legislation that would flesh out the policy details. 

Mr. Trump has endorsed the House budget plan in his push for “one big, beautiful bill.” Mr. Johnson joked that he tattooed that phrase across his chest. 

The speaker said that Republicans in Mr. Trump’s first term passed their tax cut law so late in 2017 that its full effects were not realized in the 2018 midterm elections. He said they’re trying to avoid that this year with the effort to extend and expand those tax cuts in an effort to provide certainty both to voters and to economic markets.

“If you’re a small-business owner, this is a very challenging time, because you don’t know what to expect,” he said. “The markets don’t know what to expect. The bond market doesn’t know what to expect. So putting that clarity in as early as possible is critical.”

The GOP is not likely to fix everything in one bill and one fell swoop, but can turn the tide, Mr. Johnson said.

“Then we will be able to hold this as a governing majority for years to come,” he said. “This can be a historic moment for our party and our principles, and this is the first step in what would be many steps.”

Mr. Johnson admits he’s laid out a “very aggressive timetable” for Republicans to pass the reconciliation package that would follow the budget’s instructions. 

“My calendar has us passing this by probably the first week of April and getting it to the Senate so they can do their work on it,” he said. 

April 1 is when Florida will hold a special election to fill two congressional seats left vacant by former Reps. Mike Waltz, who resigned to serve as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and Matt Gaetz, who was the president’s first pick for attorney general but lacked enough support to be confirmed in the Senate.

Mr. Johnson is planning to vote on the reconciliation package after that election, because he expects it will send him two more Republicans who support the president’s agenda. 

However, he would still have room for only one GOP defection because of a soon-to-be vacant seat in New York.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, the Republican who currently holds the seat, is Mr. Trump’s pick to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. Senate Republicans have held off advancing her nomination in deference to the House’s slim majority, but Mr. Johnson said he is willing to let Ms. Stefanik go once the budget is approved. 

Under the speaker’s aggressive timeline for advancing the reconciliation package, he wants the House and Senate to agree on a final package to send to the president’s desk by early May.

“That would be enough time for this to become part of the law with the certainty everyone needs and for the American people to begin seeing the benefit of this so that it’s reflected in the election upcoming and all of our lives,” he said.