President Donald Trump indicated to GOP senators during a White House meeting Thursday that he supports using an accounting method that would treat trillions of dollars in tax cuts in a massive GOP package as costing nothing, according to three senators who attended the meeting and three other people familiar with the conversation.
“If you are going to make the tax code permanent, by definition it’s going to be with current policy,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who affirmed that Trump is on board with the accounting tactic. “The aperture is opened up a bit in thinking more broadly around how we continue to find additional reductions in federal spending.”
House and Senate Republicans are split on the controversial accounting tactic, though Speaker Mike Johnson is increasingly open to using it. The move would make it easier for GOP lawmakers to make the math work on their costly plan.
But many hard-liners are suspicious of the tactic and want to stick with Congress’s traditional accounting method, which would show that extending the tax cuts, and adding other provisions Trump wants, would cost trillions of dollars.
Settling the matter will be key as the House and Senate try to reconcile vast differences in their approaches to the massive Trump agenda bill spanning border, energy, taxes and defense spending. But it is likely to run into trouble with deficit hawks, especially in the House, who insist that tax cuts must be accompanied by spending reductions.
Trump also reiterated he wants the 2017 tax cuts he presided over to be extended permanently. And, he raised his Gold Visa card concept as a way to pay for the vast package, along with tariffs and other options.
The GOP senators in the room also discussed the politically complex issue of raising the debt ceiling, which Trump has pushed to be in the package because he doesn’t want to negotiate a separate deal with Democrats.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he made clear in the meeting he still wants incredibly steep spending cuts in order to back a debt limit increase, adding Trump was receptive to his pitch to pare back a vast swath of federal spending to pre-COVID levels.
“I don’t know that we solved anything. We got what we needed — just some kind of direction and feel for where the president wants all this to land,” Senate GOP leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters when he returned to the Capitol.
The Republicans who met with Trump on Thursday are all members of the Senate Finance Committee who are trying to work through a host of complex and arduous tax talks in order to decide what they can fit into their party-line bill.
“It’s kind of along the lines of what we’ve been talking about for some time,” Thune said.
Sen. Thom Tillis said the conversation with the president helped to act as “a funnel” for the vast list of tax policies that GOP senators are trying to squeeze into the package.
But some senators in the meeting appeared less enthusiastic that they had made any major progress.
“Talk, talk, talk, talk,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said. “Just like the last 10 weeks.”
House and Senate Republicans are stuck in an increasingly bitter impasse over how to advance Trump’s vast legislative agenda and how quickly to move.
Many House Republicans were livid earlier this week when Tillis emerged from a meeting of Senate Finance Republicans on Monday evening and suggested August was the real timeline for passing a budget reconciliation bill, citing the tax talks.
Heading to the White House meeting on Thursday, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo again declined to predict any timeline for the Congress to advance or pass the package and its many tax provisions.
Other members of his panel hoped the meeting with Trump and his advisers would help start to bridge the divide between the two chambers — something Trump has struggled to do.
“I’m not even going to joke about it,” the normally soft-spoken Crapo said, with a smile.
Thune has been organizing meetings all week with small groups of his conference as he and GOP leaders try to hear from a cross-section of GOP senators about what they want to see in a reconciliation bill, which would allow Republicans to short-circuit a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
Those meetings, according to senators in attendance, have focused on the tax provisions — including measuring support for using the current policy baseline accounting method to make the extension of the Trump-era tax cuts appear to cost nothing.
Senate Republicans are also using the meetings to discuss how big they should go on spending cuts and outline the challenges of the major task ahead.