DORAL, Fla. — The House GOP’s three-day annual retreat has ended without public progress on Republicans’ budget reconciliation plans, and some lawmakers are getting nervous about falling behind schedule.
“After two days at our House Republican winter retreat, we still do not have a plan on budget reconciliation and our Speaker and his team have not offered one,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wrote on X Wednesday morning.
“Basically, just get started doing something. We have only been presented with the same policy and budget cut proposals that we have been presented with for a month now at all our meetings and at a full Saturday conference meeting earlier this month.”
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters on Tuesday that an initial “blueprint” would be “prepared by tomorrow, by the time we leave.”
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The budget reconciliation process allows the majority party in the House and Senate, in this case Republicans, to pass a broad-ranging conservative policy overhaul, provided the contents are relevant to the budget and other fiscal matters. It does so by lowering the threshold for passage in the Senate from 60 votes to 51.
It starts with a budget resolution that includes instructions for specific committees to work toward changes to fiscal policy law under their respective jurisdictions, including topline numbers.
When asked by reporters about whether he expects those broad toplines to emerge on Wednesday morning, Johnson said, “We’ll be getting to that final number. What we’ve emphasized, with our group, is that we want to have some flexibility in the how the instructions are given to the committees.”
“Stay tuned for the number. It will be substantial, because it has to be. I mean, we have a $36 trillion federal debt, and we’re committing that in this process. Anything we do is going to be deficit neutral at least or deficit-reducing,” he said.
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Johnson said later in the press conference, “The objective is to, by the time we leave here today, to have a blueprint that will inform the budget committee for when they work on that budget resolution.”
The details and parameters of that blueprint are not immediately clear.
By Wednesday afternoon, however, a majority of lawmakers who were staying at President Donald Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida left without a sense of their next steps.
“I think the general feeling is leadership needs to make a play call and start executing on it,” one House GOP lawmaker told Fox News Digital.
Asked if they were optimistic about leaders making that call soon, the lawmaker said, “They better if they want to get this done.”
Another House Republican said the meetings were “productive” but with a caveat — “as long as leadership takes our input, ideas and concerns seriously.”
Other GOP lawmakers signaled they were exasperated by weeks of “listening sessions” among Republicans that have not led to specific directives from House leaders.
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But Johnson was confident that the House Budget Committee would have its “blueprint” to work from when Congress is back “when we return to the hill” – which is next week.
“That’s going to happen, and we’ll get it through the whole chamber, and we’ll be voting on that by late February,” he said.
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