House passes reconciliation framework for Pentagon boost, voting restrictions
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House Republicans on Wednesday approved a $95 billion framework for a third budget reconciliation package that would boost funding for the Pentagon, provide agriculture aid and provide money to encourage states to adopt voting restrictions.
The vote is a victory for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), as he had to win over lawmakers in his razor-thin majority who were concerned about the lack of spending offsets in the package.
“Republicans support our troops, our farmers, and election security. We’re the only team in Washington that does,” Johnson said in a statement to reporters after the budget resolution vote. “Many of you doubted our success.”
But it’s only the first vote in a long, multistep budget reconciliation process — and the budget blueprint faces an uncertain future in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he would “hold” reconciliation as a backup until the chamber works out a plan to avoid a government shutdown later this year, and other Senate Republicans have expressed resistance to the budget framework as-is.
The lower chamber voted 216-214 to approve the budget blueprint.
Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Kevin Kiley (Calif.), an independent who caucuses with Republicans, joined all Democrats in voting against the measure.
Davidson voted “no” over the lack of spending offsets, while Kiley bemoaned the use of the reconciliation process for the Iran funding in the bill.
“I made it very clear that number one, I think that funding for the supplemental should be bipartisan. This is going down reconciliation, which is designed to avoid any bipartisan consensus. Number two, that Congress needs to be much more centrally involved in defining the scope of this conflict going forward and how we can end it,” he said.
“And this resolution is not going to set any sort of process like that in place, and then I also think it’s wrong to have extraneous, you know, items in there along with defense funding. I think it should be considered in its own right. So those are my three biggest objectives.”
The framework outlines $73 billion in defense and intelligence funding amid the ongoing conflict with Iran, $12 billion for agriculture aid and $10 billion for a fund aimed at incentivizing states to adopt Trump-backed voting restrictions, for a total of $95 billion.
That is considerably scaled back from a $350 billion Pentagon boost that President Trump had wanted to combine with cuts styled as antifraud measures, which Republicans had pitched for months, disappointing conservatives. And the framework’s complete lack of cuts to balance out the new spending had concerned budget hawks.
House GOP leaders have cast the scaled-back framework as the best chance that Congress has at quickly getting a much-needed boost to Pentagon spending as munitions have been depleted amid the war in Iran.
The special budget reconciliation process would allow Republicans to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, enabling them to pass budget priorities along party lines without needing buy-in from Democrats in the Senate — provided they get enough agreement in their own slim majorities to do so. Republicans used the reconciliation process for the tax cut and spending megabill last year, and they used it again this year to fund immigration enforcement and Border Patrol after Democrats refused to fund the agencies without policy changes.
Leaders also argue that the reconciliation process offers the best chance at delivering something in the vein of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, a Trump-pushed bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and presentation of an ID to cast a ballot. While the framework does not spell out the details of how such a program would work, the idea is to create a grant program to encourage states to adopt such voting restrictions.
Conservative hard-liners have been pushing hard for the SAVE America Act, but many of them note that the budget reconciliation process — which requires that its provisions be strictly budgetary and not policy changes, per the Senate’s Byrd Rule — cannot force Democratic states to change their voting laws as the full SAVE America Act would.
Still, many Republicans think doing something on the election-security front is better than nothing.
“The most important thing is the SAVE America Act. Full SAVE America. I’m willing to eat some spending in order to get the most important bill we will pass this year, the SAVE America Act, across the finish line,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said.
Johnson called a third budget reconciliation bill “Republicans’ best shot to get as much of the SAVE America Act into law as possible.”
Trump urged House Republicans to unify around the budget resolution in a Truth Social post Monday, arguing that it is “an important first step towards getting a Budget Bill” and that they must “fight for THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”
“We need Voter Photo ID (Identification!), Proof of Citizenship and, hopefully, No Corrupt Mail In Ballots (except for illness, disability, Military, or travel),” Trump wrote in the post.
After House passage, the Senate will need to adopt the budget resolution. If the upper chamber changes the framework, the House will have to revote on the budget resolution. At that point, relevant committees would be tasked with hashing out budgetary details for their policy areas, before each chamber tried again with another vote.
“House Republicans, we almost always get our work done,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) said. “It’s not always a pretty journey, but we do get our work done.”
In response to concerns about a lack of spending offsets, some optimistic House GOP leaders have emphasized that the budget resolution is only the first step in the process.
“I think it behooves us as House Republicans to let the newly elected appointed chair of the Senate [Budget Committee], Ron Johnson, and his colleagues in the Senate figure out how best to navigate that so that we can have offsets, so I’m not giving up on offsets,” House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told The Hill on Tuesday.
“I’m for offsets for any reason and any time as Budget chair. But those things will have to be worked through and litigated in the Senate, where the reconciliation process is most relevant. We really don’t have the reconciliation process, the parameters, including the Byrd Rule. All those procedural considerations are a feature of the Senate, not the House,” Arrington said.
Democrats, meanwhile, railed against the budget resolution on Wednesday.
“Donald Trump, of course, promised that he was elected not to start endless wars in the Middle East, but to stop them, and then turned around and has gotten us involved in a potentially endless war in Iran … a stronger Iran now than they were before Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice. So I stand in strong opposition to this America-last, reckless Republican budget, this effort to waste tens of billions of dollars more on ‘Operation Epic Failure’ in the Middle East,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in remarks on the House floor.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at Axios ↗ · Axios ↗ · The Hill ↗
House Republicans on Wednesday approved a $95 billion framework for a third budget reconciliation package that would boost funding for the Pentagon, provide agriculture aid and…
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
Skip to content
House Republicans on Wednesday approved a $95 billion framework for a third budget reconciliation package that would boost funding for the Pentagon, provide agriculture aid and provide money to encourage states to adopt voting restrictions.
The vote is a victory for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), as he had to win over lawmakers in his razor-thin majority who were concerned about the lack of spending offsets in the package.
“Republicans support our troops, our farmers, and election security. We’re the only team in Washington that does,” Johnson said in a statement to reporters after the budget resolution vote. “Many of you doubted our success.”
But it’s only the first vote in a long, multistep budget reconciliation process — and the budget blueprint faces an uncertain future in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he would “hold” reconciliation as a backup until the chamber works out a plan to avoid a government shutdown later this year, and other Senate Republicans have expressed resistance to the budget framework as-is.
The lower chamber voted 216-214 to approve the budget blueprint.
Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Kevin Kiley (Calif.), an independent who caucuses with Republicans, joined all Democrats in voting against the measure.
Davidson voted “no” over the lack of spending offsets, while Kiley bemoaned the use of the reconciliation process for the Iran funding in the bill.
“I made it very clear that number one, I think that funding for the supplemental should be bipartisan. This is going down reconciliation, which is designed to avoid any bipartisan consensus. Number two, that Congress needs to be much more centrally involved in defining the scope of this conflict going forward and how we can end it,” he said.
“And this resolution is not going to set any sort of process like that in place, and then I also think it’s wrong to have extraneous, you know, items in there along with defense funding. I think it should be considered in its own right. So those are my three biggest objectives.”
The framework outlines $73 billion in defense and intelligence funding amid the ongoing conflict with Iran, $12 billion for agriculture aid and $10 billion for a fund aimed at incentivizing states to adopt Trump-backed voting restrictions, for a total of $95 billion.
That is considerably scaled back from a $350 billion Pentagon boost that President Trump had wanted to combine with cuts styled as antifraud measures, which Republicans had pitched for months, disappointing conservatives. And the framework’s complete lack of cuts to balance out the new spending had concerned budget hawks.
House GOP leaders have cast the scaled-back framework as the best chance that Congress has at quickly getting a much-needed boost to Pentagon spending as munitions have been depleted amid the war in Iran.
The special budget reconciliation process would allow Republicans to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, enabling them to pass budget priorities along party lines without needing buy-in from Democrats in the Senate — provided they get enough agreement in their own slim majorities to do so. Republicans used the reconciliation process for the tax cut and spending megabill last year, and they used it again this year to fund immigration enforcement and Border Patrol after Democrats refused to fund the agencies without policy changes.
Leaders also argue that the reconciliation process offers the best chance at delivering something in the vein of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, a Trump-pushed bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and presentation of an ID to cast a ballot. While the framework does not spell out the details of how such a program would work, the idea is to create a grant program to encourage states to adopt such voting restrictions.
Conservative hard-liners have been pushing hard for the SAVE America Act, but many of them note that the budget reconciliation process — which requires that its provisions be strictly budgetary and not policy changes, per the Senate’s Byrd Rule — cannot force Democratic states to change their voting laws as the full SAVE America Act would.
Still, many Republicans think doing something on the election-security front is better than nothing.
“The most important thing is the SAVE America Act. Full SAVE America. I’m willing to eat some spending in order to get the most important bill we will pass this year, the SAVE America Act, across the finish line,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said.
Johnson called a third budget reconciliation bill “Republicans’ best shot to get as much of the SAVE America Act into law as possible.”
Trump urged House Republicans to unify around the budget resolution in a Truth Social post Monday, arguing that it is “an important first step towards getting a Budget Bill” and that they must “fight for THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”
“We need Voter Photo ID (Identification!), Proof of Citizenship and, hopefully, No Corrupt Mail In Ballots (except for illness, disability, Military, or travel),” Trump wrote in the post.
After House passage, the Senate will need to adopt the budget resolution. If the upper chamber changes the framework, the House will have to revote on the budget resolution. At that point, relevant committees would be tasked with hashing out budgetary details for their policy areas, before each chamber tried again with another vote.
“House Republicans, we almost always get our work done,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) said. “It’s not always a pretty journey, but we do get our work done.”
In response to concerns about a lack of spending offsets, some optimistic House GOP leaders have emphasized that the budget resolution is only the first step in the process.
“I think it behooves us as House Republicans to let the newly elected appointed chair of the Senate [Budget Committee], Ron Johnson, and his colleagues in the Senate figure out how best to navigate that so that we can have offsets, so I’m not giving up on offsets,” House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told The Hill on Tuesday.
“I’m for offsets for any reason and any time as Budget chair. But those things will have to be worked through and litigated in the Senate, where the reconciliation process is most relevant. We really don’t have the reconciliation process, the parameters, including the Byrd Rule. All those procedural considerations are a feature of the Senate, not the House,” Arrington said.
Democrats, meanwhile, railed against the budget resolution on Wednesday.
“Donald Trump, of course, promised that he was elected not to start endless wars in the Middle East, but to stop them, and then turned around and has gotten us involved in a potentially endless war in Iran … a stronger Iran now than they were before Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice. So I stand in strong opposition to this America-last, reckless Republican budget, this effort to waste tens of billions of dollars more on ‘Operation Epic Failure’ in the Middle East,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in remarks on the House floor.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at Axios ↗ · Axios ↗ · The Hill ↗
Skip to content
House Republicans on Wednesday approved a $95 billion framework for a third budget reconciliation package that would boost funding for the Pentagon, provide agriculture aid and provide money to encourage states to adopt voting restrictions.
The vote is a victory for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), as he had to win over lawmakers in his razor-thin majority who were concerned about the lack of spending offsets in the package.
“Republicans support our troops, our farmers, and election security. We’re the only team in Washington that does,” Johnson said in a statement to reporters after the budget resolution vote. “Many of you doubted our success.”
But it’s only the first vote in a long, multistep budget reconciliation process — and the budget blueprint faces an uncertain future in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he would “hold” reconciliation as a backup until the chamber works out a plan to avoid a government shutdown later this year, and other Senate Republicans have expressed resistance to the budget framework as-is.
The lower chamber voted 216-214 to approve the budget blueprint.
Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Kevin Kiley (Calif.), an independent who caucuses with Republicans, joined all Democrats in voting against the measure.
Davidson voted “no” over the lack of spending offsets, while Kiley bemoaned the use of the reconciliation process for the Iran funding in the bill.
“I made it very clear that number one, I think that funding for the supplemental should be bipartisan. This is going down reconciliation, which is designed to avoid any bipartisan consensus. Number two, that Congress needs to be much more centrally involved in defining the scope of this conflict going forward and how we can end it,” he said.
“And this resolution is not going to set any sort of process like that in place, and then I also think it’s wrong to have extraneous, you know, items in there along with defense funding. I think it should be considered in its own right. So those are my three biggest objectives.”
The framework outlines $73 billion in defense and intelligence funding amid the ongoing conflict with Iran, $12 billion for agriculture aid and $10 billion for a fund aimed at incentivizing states to adopt Trump-backed voting restrictions, for a total of $95 billion.
That is considerably scaled back from a $350 billion Pentagon boost that President Trump had wanted to combine with cuts styled as antifraud measures, which Republicans had pitched for months, disappointing conservatives. And the framework’s complete lack of cuts to balance out the new spending had concerned budget hawks.
House GOP leaders have cast the scaled-back framework as the best chance that Congress has at quickly getting a much-needed boost to Pentagon spending as munitions have been depleted amid the war in Iran.
The special budget reconciliation process would allow Republicans to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, enabling them to pass budget priorities along party lines without needing buy-in from Democrats in the Senate — provided they get enough agreement in their own slim majorities to do so. Republicans used the reconciliation process for the tax cut and spending megabill last year, and they used it again this year to fund immigration enforcement and Border Patrol after Democrats refused to fund the agencies without policy changes.
Leaders also argue that the reconciliation process offers the best chance at delivering something in the vein of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, a Trump-pushed bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and presentation of an ID to cast a ballot. While the framework does not spell out the details of how such a program would work, the idea is to create a grant program to encourage states to adopt such voting restrictions.
Conservative hard-liners have been pushing hard for the SAVE America Act, but many of them note that the budget reconciliation process — which requires that its provisions be strictly budgetary and not policy changes, per the Senate’s Byrd Rule — cannot force Democratic states to change their voting laws as the full SAVE America Act would.
Still, many Republicans think doing something on the election-security front is better than nothing.
“The most important thing is the SAVE America Act. Full SAVE America. I’m willing to eat some spending in order to get the most important bill we will pass this year, the SAVE America Act, across the finish line,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said.
Johnson called a third budget reconciliation bill “Republicans’ best shot to get as much of the SAVE America Act into law as possible.”
Trump urged House Republicans to unify around the budget resolution in a Truth Social post Monday, arguing that it is “an important first step towards getting a Budget Bill” and that they must “fight for THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”
“We need Voter Photo ID (Identification!), Proof of Citizenship and, hopefully, No Corrupt Mail In Ballots (except for illness, disability, Military, or travel),” Trump wrote in the post.
After House passage, the Senate will need to adopt the budget resolution. If the upper chamber changes the framework, the House will have to revote on the budget resolution. At that point, relevant committees would be tasked with hashing out budgetary details for their policy areas, before each chamber tried again with another vote.
“House Republicans, we almost always get our work done,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) said. “It’s not always a pretty journey, but we do get our work done.”
In response to concerns about a lack of spending offsets, some optimistic House GOP leaders have emphasized that the budget resolution is only the first step in the process.
“I think it behooves us as House Republicans to let the newly elected appointed chair of the Senate [Budget Committee], Ron Johnson, and his colleagues in the Senate figure out how best to navigate that so that we can have offsets, so I’m not giving up on offsets,” House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) told The Hill on Tuesday.
“I’m for offsets for any reason and any time as Budget chair. But those things will have to be worked through and litigated in the Senate, where the reconciliation process is most relevant. We really don’t have the reconciliation process, the parameters, including the Byrd Rule. All those procedural considerations are a feature of the Senate, not the House,” Arrington said.
Democrats, meanwhile, railed against the budget resolution on Wednesday.
“Donald Trump, of course, promised that he was elected not to start endless wars in the Middle East, but to stop them, and then turned around and has gotten us involved in a potentially endless war in Iran … a stronger Iran now than they were before Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war of choice. So I stand in strong opposition to this America-last, reckless Republican budget, this effort to waste tens of billions of dollars more on ‘Operation Epic Failure’ in the Middle East,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in remarks on the House floor.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at Axios ↗ · Axios ↗ · The Hill ↗
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
- House Republicans on Wednesday approved a $95 billion framework for a third budget reconciliation package that would boost funding for the Pentagon, provide agriculture aid and…