House Freedom Caucus (HFC) chair Andy Harris is warning that Senate GOP leadership is making a losing bet if they try to force House conservatives to swallow the upper chamber’s version of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.
Harris, who leads the conservative flank of the House Republican Conference, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a Wednesday interview that he is prepared to tank the Senate’s proposal — arguing the upper chamber’s budget package would increase budget deficits while reducing House-passed spending cuts. The HFC chairman is not alone in pledging to vote against the current Senate bill and predicted it would fail to pass in the House if Speaker Mike Johnson moves to put the Senate proposal on the floor. (RELATED: Ron Johnson Has Defiant Response To Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill Warning)
“They will lose the bet,” Harris told the DCNF regarding whether he would bend to pressure to support the current Senate bill. The HFC chairman was the lone GOP lawmaker to vote “present” on the House-passed bill in May, citing the legislation’s failure to significantly reduce deficit spending and root out “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid.
Harris’ warning shot that he will not accept Senate changes that roll back House-passed reforms or increase deficit spending comes as Senate Majority John Thune is racing to pass his chamber’s budget bill by the end of the week. A diverse cohort of holdouts threaten to delay the Senate bill’s passage with some fiscal hawks arguing the current proposal is not aggressive enough in slashing spending. Trump has demanded his landmark bill incorporating vast swaths of his legislative agenda reach his desk by July 4, but it’s currently unclear if Congress will meet that deadline.
The House will have to give the Senate bill its stamp of approval before Trump can sign the measure into law. Harris told the DCNF that the Senate proposal’s failure thus far to adhere to the House budget framework requiring additional tax cuts to be offset with dollar-for-dollar spending reductions makes the bill a nonstarter in his view.
“It’s so far away from the [House] budget framework that I can’t support it,” Harris told the DCNF. “I think it’s broadly accepted in the House that if that measure comes over as it is currently proposed, it will fail.”
Harris estimated that the upper chamber’s current proposal — which has yet to be finalized — could increase the deficit by $1 trillion over a ten-year period. The Maryland Republican said the Senate GOP conference will have to identify another $1 trillion in spending cuts to offset the deficit impact of their current proposal if they hope to earn his vote.
The easiest route, according to Harris, would be to make additional reforms to Medicaid. Though Senate Republicans made more aggressive policy changes to the entitlement program than the House-passed version, Harris is urging the upper chamber to go even further. He floated reducing the share of federal Medicaid spending, known as the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP), for the Obamacare expansion population, which GOP moderates have thus far balked at.
“They’re going to have to make decisions they either get serious about eliminating all the waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid by dealing with the FMAP discrepancy between young, healthy people and the disabled, elderly, pregnant [women] and children who the program was designed for — or they’re going to have to scale back some of their tax relief,” Harris said.
The federal government notably pays 90% of coverage costs for able-bodied adults covered under Medicaid expansion while contributing a much lower percentage for traditional enrollees — such as pregnant women and the disabled — the entitlement program was originally intended to serve.
The HFC chairman is also calling on the Senate to follow Trump’s lead by committing to immediately terminate green energy tax breaks enacted under former President Joe Biden.
“I HATE ‘GREEN TAX CREDITS’ IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL,” the president wrote in all capital letters on the social platform Truth Social Saturday. “They are largely a giant SCAM.”
“[It] puts us in a better state of play,” Harris told the DCNF.
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