Republican leaders from both sides of the Capitol will on Wednesday endeavor to settle on a unified GOP plan for approaching government funding negotiations with Democrats ahead of the March government shutdown deadline.

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said in an interview late Tuesday night that he and Speaker Mike Johnson are hoping to land an agreement with their Senate counterparts on “a path forward” on how to fund government programs. “The best-case scenario is that we walk out united about what we need to do,” the Oklahoma Republican said about the planned Wednesday confab with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine).

While Cole said the government funding talks are “not a competition between the Senate and House,” he touted the House Republican victory in approving their budget resolution on Tuesday as bolstering Johnson’s stance in discussions with Collins and Thune.

“The speaker pulled off a big win tonight, so I think he’s in a much stronger position as we sit down tomorrow,” he said. “This is no disrespect to the Senate: I think we’re the decisive chamber.”

With federal funding set to run out in 17 days, top lawmakers in both parties have started to preemptively lay blame for a potential government shutdown. While Republicans and Democrats say they are close to a “topline” deal to set overall totals for military and non-defense programs, Democrats continue to demand conditions to restrict President Donald Trump’s ability to withhold funding Congress has appropriated — an ultimatum House GOP leaders say is a nonstarter that could spur a funding lapse come March 14 if the other party holds firm to that stipulation.

“If you want a numbers deal, we can get there. If you want us to try and bind the president of the United States, we’re not going to do that,” Cole said.

The Oklahoma Republican said Democrats have “bargained in good faith,” however, and that he and Collins “still very much want to negotiate a deal with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.”

Cole and the dozen Republican “cardinals” who chair the funding panels on his committee met earlier Tuesday night with Johnson, ahead of the vote on the budget resolution.

“The speaker left all options on the table,” Cole said. “He explained where we’re at.”

If top lawmakers can’t hatch a bipartisan deal to fund the government in the next two and a half weeks, Cole warns that lawmakers will be forced to clear a “full-year” stopgap that keeps federal cash flowing at current levels through September. And even if an overall funding agreement is reached soon, Congress is likely to need at least a short-term funding patch to wrap up more granular negotiations on each of the dozen funding bills.

President Donald Trump is “playing both sides” in getting his legislative agenda through Congress, according to two people familiar with his conversations about what’s happening on Capitol Hill — and he is growing increasingly ambivalent about whether it happens via competing House or Senate approaches.

Trump last week appeared to endorse Speaker Mike Johnson’s bid for “one big, beautiful bill,” then later in the week praised Senate Majority Leader John Thune as he advanced an alternative plan that would split Trump’s agenda into two pieces.

In fact, the two people said Trump just wants to see some movement. He said as much Tuesday afternoon as House leaders scrambled to win GOP votes to advance their plan.

“So the House has a bill and the Senate has a bill, and I’m looking at them both, and I’ll make decisions,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “I know the Senate is doing very well and the House is doing very well. But each one of them has things that I like. So we’ll see if we can come together.”

Earlier in the day he had placed a call to one of the Republican holdouts in the House, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee. Burchett said afterward it was a “nice conversation” but he remained undecided about the House plan backed by Johnson.

One of the people familiar with Trump’s conversations said the president wasn’t planning to make calls to whip votes for the House budget, but the chamber’s GOP leaders pushed him to get on the phone with some holdouts Tuesday afternoon. That person also said that the White House team is split on which approach to take, with policy chief Stephen Miller and budget czar Russell Vought advocating for Senate’s two-bill approach.

Trump is also increasingly wary of the Medicaid cuts that could be teed up as part of the House plan, fearing the wrath of his base. MAGA influencers, including his former chief strategist Steve Bannon, have been regularly railing against the idea.

President Donald Trump is speaking with some House Republican holdouts ahead of an imperiled vote on the GOP’s budget Tuesday evening.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Trump had been “tremendously” helpful ahead of the critical vote. Speaker Mike Johnson likewise told reporters several House Republicans had called the president as they weighed their votes.

Several House Republicans are holding out for a commitment to deeper spending cuts, while others fear that the eventual legislation will cut Medicaid too deeply. Johnson can lose only one vote if all Republicans are present.

When asked at a press conference whether Trump is actively whipping votes for the House budget, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president is keeping an eye on both the House budget and the Senate budget. Senate Republicans’ plan would implement energy and border policies but leave an extension of expiring tax cuts for a second party-line bill.

“I am not aware of any calls that he has made,” said Leavitt. “He’s made it very clear to the Hill what his priorities for a budget are. He’s said it to the speaker of the House. He’s said it to [Senate Majority] Leader [John] Thune. The Senate and the House know what President Trump wants.”

Trump said in a Truth Social post last week that he would like all of his legislative priorities advanced in “one big beautiful bill.”

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) spoke to the president using what appeared to be Johnson’s phone as the two men walked to the House floor for a key procedural vote Tuesday afternoon. Johnson appeared to have called Trump and put him on the phone with Burchett.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, also reported that Trump was speaking to some members Tuesday afternoon ahead of a possible evening vote.

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

The Senate began its public vetting on Tuesday of President Donald Trump’s pick for the No. 2 post at the White House budget office, a position key to carrying out the president’s funding freeze.

Dan Bishop, a former congressmember from North Carolina, testified before senators in his first confirmation hearing to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Pledging to follow the orders of Trump and White House budget director Russell Vought, the OMB nominee vowed to “fix” a federal bureaucracy he characterized as “self-absorbed, inefficient, unaccountable and mal-administered.”

Bishop skirted a direct question about whether he would follow the law, or Trump, if the president directed him to take action that would break the law.

“I’m confident that President Trump will issue lawful orders. It would not be up to me, as serving in a non-lawyer capacity, to decide what is lawful and not lawful,” Bishop, a lawyer who lost his bid in November to be the attorney general of North Carolina, told senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Already, Bishop is serving as a senior adviser to OMB as the budget office leads the Trump administration in freezing billions of dollars in foreign aid and federal grant money, prompting federal judges throughout the country to temporarily halt many of those actions amid lawsuits challenging their constitutionality.

During his five years in Congress, Bishop introduced bills he touted as a way to “drain the swamp” by making it easier to fire federal workers and blocking them from doing union work while on the clock. On Tuesday, he told senators he doesn’t think the Trump administration “is proceeding in an indiscriminate way to terminate employees” amid the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers.

Despite telling senators that he won’t be judging the legality of the president’s demands, Bishop laid out an argument for historical precedent supporting Trump’s power to freeze funding, telling senators that former President Harry Truman canceled a squadron of bombers that Congress approved despite his veto.

“These things have happened across history by presidents,” he said.

Bishop also noted that Trump “has run on the issue of impoundment.” On the campaign trail, Trump argued that the more than 50-year-old Impoundment Control Act, which blocks presidents from withholding money without Congress’ approval, is unconstitutional.

Democrats were not impressed. “I will skip the irony,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said, “of a congressman who ran for office and was deeply involved in appropriating dollars — and voting on those things for years and years and years — now being seemingly willing to give up that authority. It’s a fundamental principle.”

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans gushed over Bishop.

Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), who has known Bishop since he was a county commissioner in Charlotte about two decades ago, praised the OMB deputy nominee for “his care for people,” as well as “his commitment to stopping runaway spending and getting the federal budget under control.”

Bishop is likely to be confirmed with the same unanimous Republican support Vought received earlier this month. Like Bishop, Vought also would not promise senators that he would not circumvent impoundment law, after famously freezing aid to Ukraine during Trump’s first presidency.

Vought is now leading the charge to carry out Trump’s executive orders demanding the freeze of foreign aid, as well as funding from the Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure package enacted in 2021.

Bishop told senators on Tuesday that he is “thrilled” with Vought’s work.

“And I can assure you, he is the man to get the management of the federal government back on track,” Bishop said. “If confirmed, I look forward to serving as his deputy.”

Bipartisan talks to add judges to the federal judiciary are over — at least for now.

At a Tuesday morning hearing of the House Judiciary Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet Subcommittee, Republicans and Democrats blamed the other for the demise of a deal last year to add dozens of new judgeships to U.S. courts.

House Republicans failed to bring the agreement, in the form of legislation, up for a vote until after President Donald Trump’s election victory. Following its passage on the House floor, then-President Joe Biden vetoed the legislation in a bid to block Trump from being able to add a host of new conservative judges to the bench.

“In my 24-plus years here in Washington, it was the first time I ever saw a bipartisan, bicameral bill vetoed by a President,” said subcommittee Chair Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). “It didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t have happened.”

Both sides conceded that the federal courts are severely understaffed, but it appears that lingering bad feelings will pose an insurmountable obstacle.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the full House Judiciary Committee, proposed that lawmakers vote on the same bill that passed last Congress — except the judicial appointments would begin during the next president’s term.

“Itching to appoint loyal MAGA judges to the bench to uphold the lawlessness of Elon Musk and Donald Trump … they are very happy to talk about creating new seats on the federal bench,” Raskin said at the hearing. “Our friends seem to believe today only in, ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’”

That compromise isn’t likely to fly with Republicans who are eager to expand their influence across the judiciary now.

The House Republican approach to President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda moved a step closer to approval after Republicans stayed united on a test vote, setting up a possible final floor vote Tuesday evening.

The Trump-backed fiscal blueprint still faces tough odds on final adoption, with a handful of conservative hard-liners demanding it get rewritten to guarantee deeper spending cuts. Speaker Mike Johnson can only afford one GOP defection on a party-line vote if all members are voting.

But clearing the procedural hurdle was still a victory for Johnson, who made public and private appeals to holdouts with concerns about the underlying budget measure. The final vote was 217-211; one Republican, Dan Crenshaw of Texas, and four Democrats — Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, Kevin Mullin of California, Brittany Pettersen of Colorado and Frederica Wilson of California — did not vote.

The whipping for the final budget vote was underway as lawmakers voted Tuesday afternoon — an effort that included the president.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) walked into the chamber while talking on the phone with Trump, continuing a conversation that appeared to begin in Johnson’s office. “Thank you, Mr. President,” he was overheard saying; he confirmed to a reporter that it was Trump. When the call wrapped, Burchett handed the phone back to Johnson in the back of the House chamber.

Johnson separately spoke to two key GOP holdouts on the floor — Reps. Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

The afternoon vote, on a rule setting up floor consideration of the budget measure, was helped along because it also set up votes on two energy-related Congressional Review Act measures that have broad Republican support.

Johnson hopes to push the fiscal blueprint through the House on Tuesday evening. Adopting the budget measure is a key step toward passing the “big, beautiful bill” that Trump and top House Republicans have called for — one that includes border security, tax and energy provisions that the president campaigned on.

Meredith Lee Hill and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report. 

Tensions are boiling over inside the typically bipartisan House Energy and Commerce Committee, with Democrats railing against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the GOP’s plan to extend Trump-era tax cuts.

With little power in GOP-led Washington, Democrats are hijacking a markup to adopt the committee’s oversight plan to advance their message — both by speechifying and forcing votes on more than 50 likely-doomed amendments on thorny issues like preventing spending cuts to Medicaid, condemning President Donald Trump’s firing of inspectors general and disapproving of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine leanings.

At times raising their voices and pounding the dias, Democrats are arguing this isn’t business-as-usual amid what they see as unconstitutional and illegal behavior from the Trump administration, and that the Republican oversight plan for committee business in the 119th Congress does little to hold the president and his people to account.

Lawmakers sparred over one amendment for more than an hour aimed at preventing cuts to Medicaid. House Republicans are looking to ram through a budget resolution later in the day that would set parameters for the major party-line package to enact huge swaths of Trump’s domestic agenda.

It may not have the support to advance amid concerns from many lawmakers — including some who sit on Energy and Commerce — about the likelihood of having to make major reductions to Medicaid in order to finance the bill. The safety net program is directly under the committee’s purview, putting Energy and Commerce members at the tip of the spear of a politically dicey exercise.

Republicans have tried to tamp down opposition by saying those offsets would be secured through more work requirements and taking away benefits from illegal immigrants. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), the chair of the health subcommittee, said Medicaid needs to be preserved to protect vulnerable Americans as unchecked spending growth is putting the program at risk, and that fraud, waste and abuse in the system should be addressed.

“We’re only going to do this in a responsible way,” said full committee chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.). “We’re not going to do this in a way that threatens hospitals.”

But Democrats countered the GOP will not be able to reach its savings target without major disruptions to Medicaid benefits across-the-board.

“We have not heard a single concrete number of the amount of waste and abuse that has been identified. There’s kind of this vague magic wand around waste,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “What’s being suggested is that … people people seeing the doctor is a waste.”

The amendment was not adopted, with no Republican voting in favor.

Republicans are largely defending their oversight plan, saying it closely hews to the agenda roadmap the GOP-led Energy and Commerce Committee advanced in the previous Congress. But speaking in favor of one Democratic amendment that would have the panel investigate the Office of Management and Budget’s recent funding cuts at the National Institute of Health, Ocasio-Cortez said such comparisons were disingenuous.

“DOGE did not exist two years ago. Nineteen-year-olds were not raiding the Treasury two years ago,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Elon Musk is not a scientist. He is not an engineer. He is a billionaire conman with a lot of money. … These are peoples’ lives that are on the line and we cannot laugh them away.”

Carter countered the Trump administration is looking to make the health research agency more efficient and pointed to declining trust in health agencies: “This committee has the broadest jurisdiction of any committee in Congress. It would be virtually impossible for us to include everything we’re going to be looking at.”

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), the ranking member of the panel’s health subcommittee, fired back, saying that such plans are generally inclusive of what the party in power wants.

That amendment was voted down along party lines, alongside another amendment that would have added language to the oversight blueprint instructing the committee to “investigate the constitutionality and legality of the Trump administration’s seizure of congressionally appropriated funds.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) is recovering back in North Dakota after falling on Sunday and suffering a “severe concussion,” he said in a Facebook post.

Cramer, who turned 64 last month, said that he was walking down to his dock earlier this week when he “stepped on ice and evidently fell hard, hitting the back of my head.”

“I do not remember anything from the fall until arriving at Sanford Health emergency room with Kris. After seeing the emergency doctor, taking some tests, including a CT Scan, and seeing a neurologist, I was diagnosed with a severe concussion, a seizure, and a slight brain bleed,” Cramer wrote on Monday.

“I am better today with only a slight brain bleed and pretty bad headaches. Doctors prefer I rest a little longer before returning to DC, so I do not know exactly when that will happen. It will be day to day this week, but I am ready to return quickly if events require it,” Cramer added.

Cramer previously suffered a serious hand injury in 2022, keeping him temporarily away from Washington.

His absence this time will leave the Senate Republican majority temporarily capped at 52 seats, which is still enough for the GOP to confirm nominees without needing help from Democrats so long as they remain mostly united.

Senate Republicans are currently awaiting to see if their House counterparts can adopt a budget resolution this week that would tee up a sweeping tax, border, energy and defense bill.