President Donald Trump is ready to sign a punishing Russia sanctions bill that GOP hawks have pushed for months. But only if it changes to give him more control.

A senior administration official granted anonymity to discuss the president’s view said that “conceptually there’s an openness” to the bill from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), but the person suggested that the legislation needs to preserve what the White House sees as the president’s sole authority to oversee U.S. foreign policy.

The current draft of the bill allows the president to waive a 500 percent tariff on countries that buy Russian oil and uranium for up to 180 days, and Graham said Tuesday he has agreed to revise the bill to allow for a second waiver, subject to congressional oversight.

The administration’s desired changes would solidify the president’s waiver authority, ensuring that Congress has no power to question Trump should he decide to end the sanctions.

“The current version would subject the president’s foreign policy decisions to micromanagement by Congress through a joint resolution of disapproval process. … That’s a nonstarter for us,” said the official. “The administration is not going to be micromanaged by the Congress on the president’s foreign policy. The bill needs a waiver authority that is complete.”

Trump’s new willingness to engage with Congress on a sanctions bill underscores his growing frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he says has rebuffed efforts to negotiate an end to the bloodshed in Ukraine.

“For the president now, he has invested his own reputation of being able to negotiate anything anywhere, and Putin has made him look foolish,” said one Republican operative close to the White House.

Trump said Tuesday that Putin was throwing “a lot of bullshit” at him and that he was “looking very strongly” at the sanctions bill. On Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson threw his support behind the sanctions push. 

“Vladimir Putin has shown an unwillingness to be reasonable and to talk seriously about brokering a peace, and I think we have to send him a message,” he said.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been more circumspect, citing both “substantial progress” in working with the White House on the bill but also making clear his desire to get Trump fully onboard. He said in a floor speech Wednesday it was possible the measure could come to the Senate floor this month but offered no guarantee.

But the president’s comments, emphasizing that any additional Russia sanctions would be “at my option,” underlined what aides said is a top priority: maintaining maximum flexibility and total control over U.S. policy toward the Kremlin.

Two people granted anonymity to describe private discussions on Capitol Hill acknowledged that while the White House might broadly be supportive of the sanctions bill, they hadn’t yet reached an agreement with lawmakers on the scope of the waiver authority.

Thune acknowledged in a brief interview that the waiver language remains subject to negotiation.

“We’re still working with them,” he said, adding that they were “trying” to get everyone on the same page.

The White House, asked for comment on the state of play, pointed to Trump’s remarks.

So far, the GOP-controlled Congress has been remarkably pliant in the face of Trump’s pressure, delivering the president’s massive tax and spending package last week and backing the White House’s actions on trade, immigration and war powers — all areas where Congress has constitutionally granted authority.

Given that pattern, the administration expects lawmakers will craft the Russia sanctions bill in a way that satisfies Trump, even if that means giving up their role administering its provisions. That’s a shift from Trump’s first term, when a broad sanctions bill targeting Russia included language creating a former congressional review process.

Aside from his desire to curtail Congress’ ability to check him on foreign policy matters, Trump’s insistence on flexibility has just as much to do with keeping the door open for a potential breakthrough with Putin, according to the two White House officials.

Graham reiterated Wednesday that he believes Trump is on board with his legislation, saying that the president “wants a waiver, he’s got a waiver. He’s in control of how you implement the sanctions.”

“He told me he thought it would be helpful,” Graham said about his conversations with Trump about the bill. “We want to be a team. We want to help the president. This is an effort to give the president leverage he doesn’t have today.”

Even with the bill’s broad and bipartisan backing in the Senate — with more than 80 co-sponsors, it could theoretically survive a Trump veto — many Republicans are loath to take it up until there’s a clear and unequivocal statement of support from the president.

“The desire to move up here is real, but the risk is moving a bill that the president ultimately decides he doesn’t want,” said one GOP Hill official granted anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.

While Republicans are tentatively eyeing the week of July 21 to put the bill on the floor, some GOP lawmakers have been privately skeptical of Graham’s claims this week that everyone is on the same page. They want to hear Trump say it himself.

That’s particularly true for a handful of lawmakers in the “America First” faction of the GOP who have typically been at odds with Graham’s more traditional hawkish stances. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), for instance, said he would be calling Trump this week to hear his thoughts on the bill directly.

“I know Lindsey has said now he’s in favor of it … [but] I just want to get clued into what his thinking on it,” Hawley said. “I just prefer to hear it from him.”

Said another GOP senator who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, “If the president’s in favor of sanctions, then I’m in favor of sanctions, but I defer to the president.”

“He’s the one in the middle of all the negotiations,” the senator continued. “He’s frustrated with Putin today. He’s been frustrated with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy before. And he’s the only leader in the world that can bring both sides together.”

Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.

As congressional Republicans advanced their megabill in recent months, many fiscal hawks in the party figured they had a powerful force on their side: wary titans of finance who had started sending powerful signals that their appetite for purchasing U.S. debt was not, in fact, endless.

Turns out Wall Street was barely a bump in the road.

In passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last week, GOP leaders blew past a host of warnings to potentially add several trillion dollars of additional borrowing — brushing off concerns that they were missing a late opportunity to put the nation on a more sustainable fiscal trajectory in favor of piling on expensive new tax cuts.

The whole episode was a stark display of how short-term rewards and Trump’s demands outweighed any anxieties about long-term calamity — even from a constituency as powerful as Wall Street, whose major players are reliable financiers for politicians of both parties.

Some heavyweights like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and billionaire investor Ray Dalio emerged as clarion voices for fiscal rectitude. Many others kept quiet on macroeconomic issues and advocated instead for the extension of tax cuts to promote economic growth — and, frequently, their own personal welfare.

Rather than send a big, beautiful signal to the bond markets that discipline would finally be restored, Republicans appear to have done the opposite: Yields on 10-year Treasuries have crept up around 18 basis points over the past week as market watchers ingested tariff news, but also openly wondered if either party is capable of reigning in the roughly $36 trillion national debt.

“If one of the goals was to calm the bond market down, I wouldn’t take much comfort from the past couple of days,” said economist Ed Yardeni, who coined the term “bond vigilantes” to describe investors who undertook massive selloffs of bonds to protest Fed policies in the 1980s.

“The act is not designed as a deficit reduction act. It’s designed as, ‘Let’s cross our fingers and hope that lower taxes boost economic growth again fast enough to bring in revenues,’” he added.

“Growth” was the word repeatedly invoked by President Donald Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill, who relied on rosy economic projections developed inside the White House to argue that the bill’s tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves.

Outside observers saw an entirely different kind of growth: Independent forecasters — including the nonpartisan in-house scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office — predicted the added debt created by the bill would increase federal borrowing costs, swamping any economic gains reaped through the tax cuts.

It’s a version of the “debt spiral” that many fiscal doomsayers have warned the U.S. might be entering after spending decades as the world’s safest investment. Lawmakers heard those calls loud and clear at various points recently.

In May, Moody’s Ratings downgraded Treasuries from their prior top rating, citing “persistent, large fiscal deficits [that] will drive the government’s debt and interest burden higher.” In late March, a group of House Republicans heard directly from Dalio, who urged them in a private briefing to start bringing annual deficits down to 3 percent of GDP. Deficits are currently running more than twice that.

Members were already spooked by the spike in Treasury yields after Trump rolled out his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. Dalio told them that an even steeper selloff could occur if they didn’t get the nation’s fiscal house in order. The concern seemed to be confirmed when yields for 20 and 30-year Treasuries closed out above 5 percent the day that the House passed the sweeping legislation. 

Still, the GOP did not end up heeding Dalio’s warning, and last week he said on X that he now expects sizable increases of government debt relative to GDP. That, in turn, would lead to “unimaginable” tax increases or spending cuts — or, perhaps more likely, inflationary money-printing.

He said that “big, painful disruptions will likely occur” if lawmakers can’t bring the deficit down to 3 percent of GDP.

Earlier on, GOP lawmakers on the House Budget Committee Republicans had taken Dalio’s message to heart, and his March briefing was part of what led House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) and Budget Vice Chair Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) to craft a provision in the House bill linking the amount of tax cuts to spending cuts in the domestic policy legislation.

But when the Senate took up the House products, Senate Republicans added hundreds of billions in tax cuts to the legislation while jettisoning north of $200 billion in spending cuts because they didn’t adhere to Senate budget rules. With pressure from the White House, Senate Republicans forced their product down the throats of fiscal hawks in the House.

As a result, the bill ended up missing the mark on the House framework by around $600 billion dollars, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“The one piece that I wish was stronger coming out of the Senate was the offset provision, the deficit-neutral principle that was hard-wired into our budget resolution,” Arrington said in an interview after the House passed the final legislation.

Arrington, who authored an austere balanced budget he dubbed “Reverse the Curse” before ultimately supporting Trump’s deficit-busting bill, said he was “not sure either party is unilaterally” capable of changing the nation’s fiscal path. He suggested Congress would have to turn to a bipartisan commission, similar to one established in 2010 under former President Barack Obama, to address the issue.

Outsourcing the hard trade-offs necessary for deficit reduction is one thing; mustering the political will to enact them is another. The megabill drama showed that the issue is hard to crack for even the most powerful lobbies, said Andrew Moylan of Arnold Ventures, a think tank endowed by billionaire investor John Arnold that advocated an array of policies to help close the fiscal gaps in the GOP’s megabill.

“I think that it’s going to be difficult for any actor, whether it’s a Wall Street person or a policy organization or grassroots group or whatever, to have an impact on this debate that helps us reduce deficits unless constituents are feeling pain that they feel like Congress needs to help address.”

Some in the House GOP are hoping that they’ll have a chance to enact additional spending cuts in further party-line bills this year as well as through the appropriations process. Many conservatives said they were reassured by 11th-hour conversations they had with White House budget chief Russ Vought before the final vote.

“You’re going to see a lot of fiscal restraint to add to this growth picture,” said Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), a House Financial Services Committee member. “So growth, fiscal restraint — that will ultimately send the virtuous signal to the bond market.”

Barr said he also supports updating leverage requirements for banks to encourage them to purchase more Treasuries, which could help bring yields down.

As for Democrats, Rep. Ro Khanna of California laid out a progressive debt reduction plan in June that would cut the deficit by $12 trillion through reforms to defense contracting, a crackdown on “corporate profiteering” in Medicare and tax hikes for billionaires and companies.

In an interview Monday, Khanna predicted that serious deficit reduction would most likely occur under a Democratic trifecta rather than as part of a bipartisan effort.

Republicans, Khanna said, “have to be willing to raise taxes on the wealthy. That’s a philosophical difference. The math just doesn’t work without raising taxes on the wealthy.”

Senate Republicans are eyeing changes to the White House’s $9.4 billion request to claw back funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting as leadership plans to bring it to the floor next week.

Majority Leader John Thune can only lose three GOP senators and still get the House-passed bill to the floor and ultimately across the finish line — and the South Dakota Republican is openly acknowledging that it’s TBD what the bill looks like when and if it gets there.

That’s because Republican senators are still talking about potential tweaks to slim down the cuts President Donald Trump is seeking for global health programs and AIDS prevention efforts around the world, as well as local radio stations and public TV programming valued back home.

Senate GOP leaders have little time to spare: By the end of the day on July 18, the request Trump sent to Capitol Hill last month will expire, meaning the administration will be forced to spend the money as lawmakers originally intended if Congress doesn’t act.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine, as well as South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, are among the Senate Republicans exploring the idea of amending the package to protect funding for public broadcasting, along with programs to stop the spread of AIDS.

“Whatever form it takes, we can’t lose these small-town radio stations across the country that are literally the only way to get out an emergency message,” Rounds told reporters Tuesday night.

Rounds noted, however, that White House budget director Russ Vought committed to working to protect funding for public radio stations if Congress clears the package clawing back a total of $1.1 billion from public broadcasting.

Alaska Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski have also signaled that they want changes to the bill. Sullivan said Tuesday that he’s still seeking votes on amendments to the package but didn’t detail what those might entail.

Collins already said weeks ago that she would seek changes to the package, but she also is declining to elaborate on how much funding she is aiming to protect.

“I have already made clear I don’t support the cuts to PEPFAR and child and maternal health,” Collins said in a brief interview Tuesday night.

Further complicating any attempt to make changes to a rescissions package in a narrowly divided Republican Senate, any amendments to the president’s request to nix funding would have to be narrowly tailored to comply with chamber rules. So senators are now seeking guidance from the Senate parliamentarian on what tweaks would be allowed.

“I’m trying now to determine what amendments I might be able to vote for,” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) said in a brief interview Tuesday night. “So until I know the scope of the capabilities, I’d rather be in a position of keeping my options open.”

Senate Republicans are also banking on House Republicans swallowing any changes they make to the rescissions package — similar to their strategy on Trump’s megabill — after the lawmakers across the Capitol narrowly passed the president’s clawbacks request last month without changes.

“We’ll see where it goes,” Thune told reporters Tuesday, adding that while he hasn’t done a hard vote count yet he is assuming Republicans will at least be able to get it onto the Senate floor.

Asked if he was worried about Collins or other moderates voting against the bill, Thune demurred, suggesting those conversations were still to come.

“We’ll have a lot of conversations about it, and we’ll get a better sense of where our members are,” Thune said.

Some Republican senators who generally back the package also support attempts to amend it.

“Right now, I’m lean yes,” Sen. Thom Tillis said Tuesday night about passage of the package.

But the retiring North Carolina senator said some of his Republican colleagues have also made persuasive arguments in favor of protecting money for PEPFAR, the global AIDS reduction campaign Trump is seeking to slash by $400 million.

“I’m open to it, if it makes the rescission better,” Tillis said of amending the package.

If Congress rejects the package or doesn’t clear it through both chambers by the July 18 deadline, Trump would be forced to spend the money and prevented from requesting the same cuts again.

But if the package passes, the White House will finally be able to send back to the Treasury a small slice of the billions of dollars in proposed funding cuts made in recent months. That includes reductions Elon Musk dictated as head of the Department of Government Efficiency before leaving his Trump administration role.

White House allies are also predicting a political blowup from Trump if the Senate falls short. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said that if the bill fails, the White House “will go nuts” and that it would be an “embarrassment to the president.”

“I think if the Republicans in the United States Senate do not pass the rescission package, after all the rhetoric about reducing spending, then they should hide their head in the bag, and I think the White House will provide the bag,” Kennedy added.

In 2018, Senate Republicans, who had a slightly narrower majority, rejected an effort during the first Trump administration to revoke congressionally approved spending. Trump officials say they tailored their latest request to make it as politically palatable as possible, but they’ve also flirted with leapfrogging Congress and trying to rescind funding on their own if the Senate falls short.

Cassandra Dumay, Mia McCarthy and Calen Razor contributed to this report.