The Trump administration is threatening to veto a bipartisan Senate bill to give Congress the ability to review new tariffs, protecting President Donald Trump’s claim of unfettered power in the early stages of a trade war that is sinking financial markets.

Trump’s veto threat comes as a handful of Senate Republicans have signed onto a bill from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that would require the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of issuing any new tariffs and that Congress explicitly approve any tariffs within 60 days. The bill also would allow Congress to end any tariff at any time.

The White House — in a statement of administration policy sent to congressional offices on Monday — argued that the bill would “severely constrain” Trump’s tariff powers and “eliminates” Trump’s ability to have leverage over foreign countries.

“If passed, this bill would dangerously hamper the president’s authority and duty to determine our foreign policy and protect our national security,” the White House added in the statement reviewed by POLITICO, warning that if the bill makes it to Trump’s desk “he would veto the bill.”

The bill faces an uphill climb to Trump’s desk. Senate GOP leadership hasn’t backed it yet and has not committed to allowing it on the floor. And while GOP Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) is introducing the bill in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson is publicly sticking by Trump’s tariff strategy.

A majority of people who voted for Donald Trump oppose potential moves from congressional Republicans to cut Medicaid funding, according to new polling from the firm of Tony Fabrizio, the president’s 2024 campaign pollster.

Two-thirds of swing voters also said they disapproved of slashing the safety-net health program as part of the GOP’s larger effort to pass a party-line package of tax cuts, beefed up border security and increased defense spending.

These findings from Fabrizio Ward, the firm that conducted the survey, come as some Republicans say they oppose cuts to Medicaid to finance that package — but could have few other options than to do just that, given the massive deficit reduction targets lawmakers are facing.

“There’s really not a political appetite out there to go after Medicaid to pay for tax cuts,” said Bob Ward, partner with Fabrizio Ward, in an interview. “Medicaid has touched so many families that people have made up their minds about what they don’t want to see cut.”

House Republicans in particular are weighing substantial changes to Medicaid to help meet an $880 billion savings target as part of the filibuster-skirting reconciliation process. Democrats cite data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to argue that savings to reach that lofty goal would need to come from Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program on which more than 75 million low-income Americans rely.

The polling of 1,000 registered voters between March 20 and March 24 suggests that Democrats’ messaging on the issue — which has centered around accusations that the GOP is raiding health care for poor people to finance tax cuts for the wealthy — could be effective in swaying key constituencies. The polling was conducted on behalf of the Modern Medicaid Alliance, of which groups representing insurers, patients, doctors and hospitals are members.

The survey results also could provide ammunition to the handful of Republicans across both chambers of Congress who remain skeptical about the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s ability to find spending cuts in programs under its jurisdiction without gutting Medicaid.

Trump has promised repeatedly not to sign a bill containing a “cut to Medicaid benefits” — most recently in a direct pledge to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who needed those assurances to vote for the Senate budget resolution last week. Republicans are also considering energy and tech policy moves that could yield substantial savings.

There’s talk, too, of reducing the federal share of payments for states that have expanded Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act — a way to recoup savings without kicking the neediest recipients off the program. Democrats contend it will still result in cuts to Medicaid benefits, as states could respond to the changes by reducing services or raising taxes.

And then there’s discussion about rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicaid system to cut costs, but it’s not clear how much money that would actually save.

“I think you’d find support for getting rid of waste and fraud,” Ward said. “But the whole idea that we’re going to take away people’s health insurance and that’s not going to be a political problem for us, I don’t know where that comes from.”

President Donald Trump is doubling down on his trade war as global financial markets melt down and economic calamity looms. It’s going to be a brutal week ahead for Republican lawmakers who are already on edge about owning the policy and are struggling to unify behind Trump’s legislative agenda.

A growing number of Republicans are signing onto bills that would rebuke Trump’s tariff strategy, and some are anxious about the lack of direction from the administration.

Look for the rift to grow in the coming days.

Republican Rep. Don Bacon is set to introduce legislation today that would wrest back Congress’ authority to approve tariffs. Rep. David Valadao, a California Republican, is signaling he’ll support it. In the Senate, six Republicans have signed onto the companion bill led by Sen. Chuck Grassley.

House Ways and Means Republicans held a private call Friday with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who is set to testify before Senate Finance Tuesday and Ways and Means on Wednesday. Other Republicans are stressed over not having enough information from the White House, and Speaker Mike Johnson is committing to arranging a briefing from the administration.

The rising economic pressure is making it even more urgent for Republicans to show progress behind Trump’s sweeping plans for tax cuts and other legislative priorities.

Johnson on Sunday vowed to push through the budget plan that the Senate adopted last week, even as he faces a growing backlash from fiscal hawks in the House over what they see as insufficient spending cuts. In a private call with Republican lawmakers Sunday, Johnson cited the market upheaval as a reason the House needs to act and not try to revise the Senate plan.

Senior Republicans are already discussing fallback plans, including whether to make changes to the budget and send it back to the Senate or having GOP leaders and committee chairs from both chambers hammer out an agreement in a conference meeting.

What else we’re watching:

— Proxy voting agreement: Johnson and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna found a solution to their standoff over allowing new mothers to vote by proxy, the Florida representative said in a post on X Sunday — opening up the House floor to take up the budget resolution later in the week.

— Coming in House Rules: The committee will have a meeting today at 4 p.m. to tee up floor consideration of bills that would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, restrict district court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions and undo Biden-era CFPB rules after the bills were held up from a failed rule vote last week.

— More Trump picks: The Senate will continue working through Trump’s nominations later this week, including George Glass’ nomination to be ambassador to Japan and Mike Huckabee’s nomination to be ambassador to Israel.

Meredith Lee Hill and Benjamin Guggenheim contributed to this report.

House Democrats have submitted the names of their appointees to serve on the board of a key congressional ethics office, according to a person granted anonymity to share the development.

It’s an important step in the process of getting the Office of Congressional Conduct, formerly known as the Office of Congressional Ethics, up and running.

The nonpartisan independent entity — established in 2008 to receive outside referrals of ethics allegations against House members and staff, investigate the charges and pass along credible complaints to lawmakers — has been lapsed since the start of the new Congress. The board of the office needs to be populated by six members, evenly divided between the two parties, though it can operate with as few as four members, as stipulated by official rules.

Speaker Mike Johnson also must formally approve all board picks to reconstitute the office for the 119th Congress — but so far, he hasn’t selected his people, said another person granted anonymity to speak freely.

Johnson’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about his intentions, though Republicans have, since the office’s founding, been deeply critical of its function and numerous times have sought to cut its funding through the appropriations process.

In a sign of how the GOP might be looking for new ways to hamstring the entity, House Republicans under Johnson’s leadership took steps at the beginning of this Congress to change the operations of the office, with the rules package resulting in a name change for the body and requiring the board to come together before the professional staff could be formally appointed. Previously, the staff could operate immediately after the House adopted its rules.

In the meantime, the Office of Congressional Conduct has not been able to launch any new investigations, which is troubling to former Rep. David Skaggs, a Colorado Democrat who for years held leadership roles with the office.

“The internal House Ethics Committee needed to be, if you will, prompted to do its work,” recalled Skaggs, of the reason for forming the office. “So OCE — OCC — serves as that necessary prompt.”

The nonpartisan office has taken on sensitive investigations into Hill ethics issues as of late; notably, its report on Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) recently became public and revealed potential contracts Mills held with the federal government while serving as a member of Congress.

The House has been slow in constituting its internal Ethics Committee, too. Members were only formally appointed in mid-March, and the evenly divided panel is still straining to get out from under the saga that erupted at the end of the last Congress over its handling of an investigation into then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon said he plans to introduce a companion bill to the bipartisan Senate legislation aimed at reclaiming Congress’ authority over tariffs, becoming the first House Republican to openly challenge the powers President Donald Trump is using to launch a massive global trade war.

Bacon confirmed his plans to POLITICO on Friday as market losses continued to pile up and rattle Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The Senate bill introduced Thursday by Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) would limit a president’s power to impose tariffs, including allowing Congress to vote to end any tariff at any time. It would also require the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of imposing any duty and for Congress to explicitly approve any new tariffs within 60 days. Four additional Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors to that bill.

Bacon’s move is a rare step in the deeply Trump-loyal House Republican conference. Speaker Mike Johnson has no plans to bring any legislation limiting Trump’s tariff authority to the House floor, and House Republicans voted for a measure several weeks ago that effectively barred any lawmaker from trying to force a vote to end the president’s emergency declaration he’s used to implement tariffs.

Beyond leadership, most rank-and-file House Republicans have been particularly keen on backing the president, with few voicing much concern about the economic fallout since Wednesday.

Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday that President Donald Trump backs his effort to block proxy voting for new parents, a day after the president scrambled Johnson’s plans and endorsed a move to allow it.

Johnson thanked Trump in the X post for a recent phone call, in which he attributed Trump as saying: “Mike, you have my proxy on proxy voting.”

Johnson is in a serious bind on the matter, with the House floor effectively frozen until he can secure an agreement. Trump added a new wrinkle Thursday by telling reporters he didn’t see what was so “controversial” about Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s push to allow new parents to vote by proxy.

GOP leaders hope Trump’s blessing of Johnson’s position will persuade Luna to back off her plans to force a floor vote on the plan next week. Hard-liners have threatened to block any floor action until Luna’s proxy vote push is snuffed out.

Notably, Trump didn’t post any statement himself after saying Thursday that women having a baby should be able to vote by proxy. Luna told reporters several days ago that she didn’t want to involve Trump, but if he got involved, she was confident he would be supportive of her pro-woman, pro-family effort.

After an hours-long delay and a last-minute rallying of the troops, Senate Republicans took the first step Thursday evening to advance a new budget blueprint that would unlock the “one big, beautiful bill” envisioned by President Donald Trump.

Senators voted 52-48 to proceed to the budget resolution, which they hope can pass muster in the House after their first attempt failed to entice colleagues across the Capitol. A budget plan adopted by both chambers is necessary to allow Republicans to write and pass a sweeping bill later this year to link an overhaul of the tax code to border, energy and defense policies.

Only one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, voted against the resolution. All Democrats opposed it.

The vote kicks off up to 50 hours of debate that will culminate in a marathon voting session of symbolic amendments, known as a vote-a-rama, before a final vote on adopting the budget resolution as late as Saturday.

Yet even as Republicans moved forward with the budget resolution amid confidence from leadership, they are still facing some red flags within their conference.

Senate Budget Committee Republicans and Majority Leader John Thune met with Trump on Wednesday at the White House, which appeared to win over some of the deficit hawks. Trump vowed to conservatives on the panel that he would back efforts to cut spending beyond the minimums laid out in the budget resolution — something he subsequently did at a Rose Garden event and in a Truth Social post.

But Republicans are still facing questions from other corners of the conference over the decision to use an accounting tactic, known as current policy baseline, that would make an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts appear to cost nothing. GOP leaders hope to deploy this strategy in the party-line bill they want to pass through reconciliation to enact Trump’s agenda, for which the budget resolution would pave the way.

Thune, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso and Finance Chair Mike Crapo huddled with a group of senators, including Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Curtis and John Cornyn, shortly before Republicans called up the procedural vote. It marked an attempt by leadership to quell anxieties among the lawmakers that letting Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham decide the baseline could come back to haunt them if it later ends up running aground of budget rules in the final bill.

Republicans across the conference are also worried about adopting a budget that would allow the House to set its own spending cut targets for committees that could result in cuts to Medicaid benefits.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has been outspoken in his concerns about how Medicaid could fare in the reconciliation process given the House instructions, and told reporters Thursday night he was on the fence about how he would vote on the procedural motion to advance the budget resolution. He called Trump just before heading to the floor, where he ultimately voted yes.

“I had a good talk with the president tonight. We talked for a fair bit, and we talked about the Medicaid issue, which was a big concern to me. … And he said, ‘I want to be crystal clear about this. The House will not cut Medicaid benefits under any circumstance. The Senate will not cut Medicaid benefits under any circumstance, and I will not sign a cut to Medicaid benefits,’” Hawley told reporters. “So that’s good, and I hope our leadership will take that cue.”

There is still widespread disagreement about whether it will be possible to reach the ambitious $880 billion in savings prescribed by the House-adopted budget for the House Energy and Commerce Committee without slashing Medicaid benefits, but Republicans continue to talk about other ways to cut costs within the health safety net program, like identifying waste, fraud and abuse in the system.

Collins and Murkowski also said they were paying close attention to how Medicaid is addressed in a final package.

“I’m concerned about the instruction to the House Committee for $880 billion — the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, because I don’t see how you can get to that amount without cutting Medicaid benefits,” said Collins.

Murkowski said she has spoken directly to Thune about her worries.

Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misspelled Sen. John Barrasso’s name.