Senate Finance Committee Republicans will meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday to discuss the path forward for crafting legislation to enact broad swaths of the administration’s domestic agenda.
“The president has invited us to join him tomorrow at the White House,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, who sits on the panel, told reporters Wednesday.
One Republican granted anonymity to discuss the agenda for a private meeting said one topic of the conversation will be on whether to use the so-called current policy baseline to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. That accounting method would make it appear as though extending those tax cuts costs nothing. But it’s a controversial tactic among fiscal conservatives who worry that leadership is using it to hide the cost of the party-line bill they want to pass through budget reconciliation — and reduce the need for steep spending cuts to finance that bill.
The meeting also will focus on larger tax policy priorities, the Republican said. Senate Republicans, after initially favoring a two-track approach through reconciliation that would front-load border security, defense and energy policies in one bill before focusing on tax cuts in the next, are now moving towards embracing the House GOP’s approach, which would roll those policies with tax cuts into a single piece of legislation.
Leaders of both chambers are expected to discuss how to resolve differences between their budget resolutions in the coming weeks. The House and Senate each needs to pass the same resolution before the reconciliation process can begin in earnest.
Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee are holding another all-day meeting Wednesday to determine what will go into the tax portion of the reconciliation bill. The tax writers kicked off deliberations on Monday with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.