This week on Facing the Future, we discussed the budgetary priorities and procedural hurdles facing Republicans in Congress as they try to quickly enact an ambitious agenda. Our guest was Rohit Kumar, Co-Leader of the National Tax Office at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a former senior advisor to Senate Republican leaders. Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson joined the conversation.
The 119th Congress kicked-off last week with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate. The narrow size of those majorities, however, will make for some challenging dynamics in the coming months as lawmakers try to accomplish basic tasks such as passing appropriation bills and raising the statutory debt limit, let alone enacting major legislation on taxes, immigration, and healthcare.
One item of unfinished business is the Fiscal Year 2025 appropriation bills. None of them have passed both the House and Senate, leaving agency funding operating on a “continuing resolution” that expires on March 14.
“This is one that can’t be done on a party line vote, at least not in the Senate,” Kumar said. “Everything in the House can be done on a party line vote. It’s a majoritarian body. But in the Senate, an appropriations bill is not amenable to a simple majority mechanism. So this is going to require 60 votes in the Senate and if you’re getting a minimum of seven Democrats in the Senate the odds are you’re going to end up getting some Democrats in the House and losing some Republicans in the House as a part of that transaction.”
“Where the magic happens,” Kumar continued, is “a bill that President Trump will sign that can get 60 votes in the Senate and that means in the main you’ve got the Administration negotiating with Senator Schumer, and Representative Jeffries. Not every Republican will vote for it. There will be 30, 40, 50, maybe, or more in the House that wouldn’t. But you’d be getting enough Democrats with Jeffries and Schumer signing off to overwhelm whatever defections you have amongst House and Senate Republicans.”
Looking at broader issues such as extending the 2017 tax cuts, Kumar foresees challenges in keeping Republicans together on the number, contents, and magnitude of any reconciliation bills they assemble to get around a filibuster by Senate Democrats.
“There will certainly be things that fall out because they can’t get unanimity of support amongst House and Senate Republicans,” he said. “You’re going to have places where the House Republican appetite for a particular set of policy choices, I’m thinking about spending cuts in particular, may outstrip the Senate Republican appetite for the same policies. So you might be able to get 218 House Republicans for a set of spending reductions that exceed that for which you can get 50 in the Senate.”
We ended with a discussion of Kumar’s expectations for President-elect Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“It’s not an official government agency,” Kumar noted. “It’s more of a blue ribbon commission than anything else. But it’s a blue ribbon commission with a huge megaphone.”
“In terms of substantive results, I view this as one of two pathways,” he said. “One is, they identify spending that everyone decides is not something we should be spending money on. And Congress says, ‘Okay, we’re going to stop spending on that’ and they pass a statute that changes the law. The other path, and I think this is probably where this is headed, is to say, ‘Okay, here’s some spending that we think doesn’t make sense, and then the president asserts the authority to impound funds, using what they will argue, is some constitutionally vested impoundment authority.”
Kumar said that the assertion of presidential impoundment authority would likely result in litigation. He declined to predict what the results of such litigation would be but he noted, “remember, these precedents apply to both sides. So if it turns out, the president does have impoundment authority and doesn’t have to spend on whatever Congress has said that Congress should spend on, that’s an authority that’ll be vested with presidents until we amend the Constitution, which seems unlikely.”
Hear more on Facing the Future. Concord Coalition Executive Director Bob Bixby hosts the program each week on WKXL in Concord N.H., and it is also available via podcast. Join us as The Concord Coalition team discusses issues relating to national fiscal policy with budget experts, industry leaders, and elected officials. Past broadcasts are available here. You can subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or with an RSS feed. Follow Facing the Future on Facebook, and watch videos from past episodes on The Concord Coalition YouTube channel.
