WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled Senate began a series of votes Thursday on a party-line vehicle to pass a $340 billion budget blueprint designed to boost funding for President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts, energy production and the military.
They planned to grind it out in a “vote-a-rama” that’s expected to continue into the early hours of Friday morning. Eventually, they expect to approve the measure along party lines. Republicans have 53 senators and just one of them, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., voted against proceeding to the budget, along with all Democrats.
“Without this bill passing,” said Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., “there is no hope of getting money for the border.”
The Senate plan conflicts with a budget plan making its way through the Republican-controlled House, which also includes a $4.5 trillion tax cut and a $4 trillion debt limit hike. Trump has endorsed the House version, but GOP senators have indicated that their version could be a fallback plan if the House blueprint fails.
“To my House colleagues: We will all get there together. If you can pass the one big, beautiful bill that makes the tax cuts permanent — not four or five years — then we’ll all cheer over here. Nothing would please me more than Speaker [Mike] Johnson being able to put together the bill that President Trump wants. I want that to happen, but I cannot sit on the sidelines and not have a plan B,” Graham said on the Senate floor Thursday, before voting began.
Paul said the budget contradicts GOP rhetoric about reducing spending.
“If we were fiscally conservative, why wouldn’t we take the savings from Elon Musk and DOGE and move it over here and help with the border?” Paul said on the Senate floor. “Why would we be doing a brand new bill to increase spending by $340 billion?”
Under the process, Senate rules allow for members to propose an unlimited number of amendments.
Democrats sought to force Republicans to take difficult votes through amendments, which the majority party voted down one by one. Many were aimed at protecting benefits and programs they say the GOP is targeting for cuts. One amendment proposed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., would have prohibited the bill from cutting taxes for the wealthy if even $1 is cut from Medicaid, a health care program for low-income Americans.
It was rejected 49-51, with just two Republicans joining Democrats in favor of it: Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
If the Senate passes the budget resolution, it would instruct committees to craft legislation that satisfies its goals, which can be fast-tracked to the floor and passed by a simple majority.
The measure seeks $175 billion for immigration and border enforcement, on the request of the Trump administration’s border czar Tom Homan. And it calls for expanding the military by $150 billion, even as Trump and Elon Musk say they want to cut costs at the Pentagon.
The “budget reconciliation” process allows members to bypass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, but it limits provisions to spending and taxes. Democrats can challenge policies that run afoul of the “Byrd rule” constraints and call on the Senate parliamentarian to strip them out.
For months, Republicans in the House and Senate have clashed over whether the party should try to pass Trump’s legislative priorities in one reconciliation bill or two.
But on Wednesday, Trump gave a full-throated endorsement to the House’s strategy, taking to Truth Social to say he wanted “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL” and urging the Senate to pump the brakes on their two-bill reconciliation push. The House plan calls for a sweeping package that includes border enforcement, expanding energy production, and renewing the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts.
The Senate plan would be narrower and would not include renewing the tax cuts that were a signature accomplishment of Trump’s first term. Instead, those tax cuts would come in a second reconciliation package later this year, senators have said.
If the House and Senate can get on the same page and pass an identical budget resolution, that would only be the start of a very long and complicated legislative process. In the House, conservatives are demanding steep spending cuts while more moderate Republicans are getting skittish due to potential cuts to Medicaid.
“The budget resolution is just patty cake. The real work begins when you start putting together the bill and the pay-fors,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., a member of both the Budget and Appropriations committees. “The only prediction I’ll make is that a reconciliation bill will not pass either the House or the Senate without substantial spending reductions.”
Vice President JD Vance, who met with senators this week, said he believed Congress is “on track” to pass a reconciliation package in May or June, while acknowledging that was an ambitious timeline.
“I think the president has learned a lot about how D.C. works. And I actually talked to the president about this yesterday, and he said to me, ‘Look, it’s very rare that you can get two reconciliation bills done in one Congress,’ which is why he thinks we’ve got to do a lot with that one big beautiful bill,” Vance said during an appearance Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“It’s early, right? This stuff takes time to put together,” he continued. “I think if you had a record-pace reconciliation bill, we would get this thing done in May or in June. I think we’re on track to do that.”
