Republicans’ beachside budget battles

House Republicans are snowbirding from Washington, DC, to Florida’s Miami area this week for their annual policy retreat where they have to figure out how to fund a laundry list of legislative promises before the 2026 midterms.

“The goal is going to be to try to forge a consensus among the Republican factions – with the complication that [Speaker Mike] Johnson basically can't lose any Republican votes,” says Eurasia Group’s US expert Noah Daponte-Smith. Both House and Senate Republicans will need to agree on an identical funding package for it to sidestep a Democratic filibuster and be passed with a simple Republican majority.

But before they can do that, House Republicans need to figure out what’s going to be in the budget and what will be cut, a process that is expected to deepen the divides within the GOP.

Right now, Donald Trump has laid out a list of priorities costing $10 trillion over 10 years. Some of these issues could go in a separate, harder-to-pass bipartisan funding bill that will be negotiated with Democrats over the next two months. The highest priorities for the reconciliation bill will be energy, border security, and tax policy.

What are the sticking points? The far-right Freedom Caucus is expected to demand deep spending cuts, especially with the necessary debt ceiling increase looming. But determining which mandatory and discretionary programs to slash is contentious. Policy-wise, legislators differ on whether to raise or eliminate state and local tax deductions – an issue that Daponte-Smith says blue-state Republicans could end up holding the funding bill hostage over.