Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our budget. With a continuing resolution set to expire Thursday, a full-year CR seems likely at this point. For the latest on this and everything else going on in Congress, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to WTOP Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller.
Interview transcript:
Mitchell Miller This is going to be another big test for House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), since Republicans can only afford to lose a couple of votes, depending on attendance. The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), has indicated that Democrats will not help out with this vote, as they have in the past. Democrats are upset, as you know, with the sweeping cuts to the federal workforce, and Jeffries, as well as other Democrats, have said that it’s the Republicans who need to stick with their original agreement, which is to essentially sustain funding levels. Now, Johnson wants to extend the CR passed in December to the end of the fiscal year. That normally prompts loud complaints from GOP conservatives with the House Freedom Caucus. But President Trump has sent a message he wants to get this done, and they have been fairly muted up to this point. Even Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas.), who often complains about this, has indicated he could go along with this approach. President Trump met with House conservatives last week at the White House to let them know he wants to get this done. Still, you have the top appropriators, such as Susan Collins (R-Maine.) on the Republican side, Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) on the Democratic side. They really don’t want a stopgap measure, but they also don’t really have time to try to do anything like a very short extension and then try to pass all 12 appropriations bills. So we’ll have to see if the House GOP can get this done on a vote this week.
Tom Temin And then there’s the issue of the Congressional Budget Office saying, well, they’re going to have to cut Medicare, but they can’t really just cut Medicare benefits. That’s also statutory.
Mitchell Miller This is going to be a big battle. Actually, the Democrats have been raising the alarms about Medicaid, saying that if this is going to get through, the Republicans, essentially, according to the CBO report have really no other choice than they would have to cut into the marrow of Medicare and Medicaid. Democrats are using this as a talking point, saying that essentially that the Republicans have set themselves up by the desire to extend the Trump tax cuts from the first term to a need to cut $880 billion. And they point out, as well as the CBO, which is nonpartisan, points out, that if they try to cut it from all these other different programs, it just doesn’t add up. And therefore the reconciliation could really not work. So it’s going to be interesting to see how Republicans are going to try to navigate this. Up to this point, they have really tried to say they’re not going to touch Medicaid, that everything that the Democrats are saying is exaggerated, but they’ve also tried to say that they’re going to try to dig into more fraud and waste that’s within the Medicaid program. But it really at this point, just doesn’t seem like the numbers add up.
Tom Temin Will they do anything about the debt ceiling process? I think there are calls for that to be moved in conjunction with the annual budgeting, instead of something that happens on its own.
Mitchell Miller And there’s all kinds of things related to the debt ceiling, as well as what essentially some people think of is a bit of budget gimmickry on the Senate side, where they would actually try to essentially say that all of this tax cut is an extension, and therefore it doesn’t really need to be added in the lines of adding up to what our costs. But of course, it comes with a $4.5 trillion price tag. So that probably won’t fly. And then the debt ceiling, the Democrats are still trying to figure out how to utilize leverage. It’s usually been the Republicans, as you know, who have been trying to utilize leverage to make the Democrats be put in a bad situation. But in this case, the Republicans want to tie it, as you mentioned, to the budgeting process, because they know they have this numbers problem.
Tom Temin We’re speaking with Mitchell Miller, Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. And in matters that Congress seems to not be able to do anything about, there is the ongoing DOGE work, but a tiny shift in maybe the emphasis on DOGE and Musk coming from the president just the other day saying maybe the cabinet members should do the scalpel wielding in their agencies.
Mitchell Miller Imagine that. Not having an unelected person making these cuts. So that was a very important, subtle shift, I think. Elon Musk met with House and Senate Republicans, particularly the senators, have really been a little bit antsy about what Musk has been doing. Not that they oppose the fact that cuts are being made, but just how they’re being made and how they’re not really they haven’t really been in the loop on a lot of them. And so they have quietly complained that they’re finding out about these cuts just when the public does, when they come out and reports in the media or elsewhere. So they tried to tighten that process. They came out of these meetings saying, the lawmakers saying that they feel better about what their contacts with Musk are. And in fact, Musk actually gave senators his cell phone number so that they can call him directly. He did not do that on the House side. The House is just so big. But nonetheless, they’ve opened up the communication a lot more. And then I think to your point, this is a very, very important shift in connection with the cabinet heads, because I think the administration, both politically and legally, is looking at this and saying, well, wait a second. We need to make sure that the agencies themselves are actually implementing these cuts and reductions and all of that, because they’ve obviously lost several lower court skirmishes early on here as DOGE tries to move forward with all these reductions.
Tom Temin So we might be moving from shock and awe to trench warfare at this point.
Mitchell Miller Exactly.
Tom Temin And do you think there will be a little bit more, I don’t know, dignity to the proceedings as Congress gets set to do whatever it does on the budget. You have a latter day Preston Brooks in Al Green (D-Texas.) Wielding his shillelagh there.
Mitchell Miller Yeah. That whole incident with him interrupting President Trump during the address to the joint session of Congress really upset a lot of people, in fact, not just Republicans. And, of course, he was censured, which, by the way, is happening more and more in recent years. And, of course, Democrats would point to the fact that you had Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) And Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) yelling, liar a few years ago against former President Biden. There’s this feeling among many lawmakers, particularly longtime lawmakers, that this has just got to stop at some point, or at least be tamped down a bit. It was interesting. I was walking out late that night after the address, and I happened to get in an elevator with a longtime California Republican lawmaker, and I said, wow, that was quite a night. And he kind of shook his head and said, yeah, I’ve just never seen anything quite like this. And it wasn’t just that he was pointing it at Al Green (D-Texas). I think he was just kind of resigned about the whole way that this is turned into such a spectacle.
Tom Temin And then Congress members have been hearing from their constituents who are federal employees, and to some degree, contractors are getting hit by a lot of this. But they can listen, they can talk in bullhorns and so forth, but there’s not really much they feel they can do, is there?
Mitchell Miller No. I think you hear a lot from Democrats saying they basically have a two tiered approach. One is the legal efforts that I mentioned earlier, and then also just publicly getting out and talking about what happened to all these people. And of course, many Democrats brought fired federal workers to the President’s address last week trying to highlight this. At one point, I sat down with longtime Maryland Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) he has seen a lot in his more than four decades here in Congress. And but he said he’s never seen a reaction like this. From federal workers.
Steny Hoyer Our telephone calls to our office communications to our office town meetings that we’re having are geometrically greater than they’ve ever been. Why? Because they’ve caused chaos and crisis. And as a result rate apprehension. And people don’t know where they’re going to have a job. They don’t know where they’re going to be able to pay their bills, pay their mortgage.
Mitchell Miller So you’re seeing a lot of the Democrats, particularly around here in the Washington area, having a lot of public meetings, news conferences. There’s a lot of things going on, particularly in those districts where there are literally tens of thousands of federal workers.
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