House Republican appropriators are running into headwinds in their attempt to move fiscal 2026 spending bills before the August break, struggling both with a tight schedule and intraparty differences on funding levels that threaten House passage.
House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., conceded Tuesday that his panel won’t meet its target of marking up all dozen bills before recess, with the final two — Labor-HHS-Education and Financial Services — likely punted until September.
And getting any more bills through the floor before August, beyond the $831.5 billion Defense measure that the House is taking up this week, may be a tall order as well — though action on that measure may be postponed for unrelated reasons.
Conservatives are starting to notice that bills being reported out of the Appropriations Committee are well over President Donald Trump’s request, which sought deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending — $163 billion, a nearly 23 percent reduction — while holding defense funding flat. Total cuts would net out at around 10 percent below final fiscal 2025 levels.
Instead, Cole unveiled updated subcommittee allocations Tuesday that would cut discretionary spending by only $45 billion from this year’s levels, according to a summary.
Nondefense programs would be cut by nearly 6 percent, for a topline of $705.6 billion. Including defense funding, the total discretionary topline would amount to nearly $1.6 trillion.
Within the totals are $8 billion worth of earmarks, across over 5,000 individual projects for members of both parties.
GOP appropriator Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., who has been a reliable vote to advance bills out of committee thus far, has said he is “not happy” with the committee’s overall spending levels.
“I like the president’s budget, I think he did a good job with it,” Clyde, a Freedom Caucus member, said Tuesday. “I think we should hold to those levels.”
Cole prefers to focus on the fact that he and his colleagues are proposing reductions below current spending levels, which is hard enough to do and especially at the levels Trump has requested.
“[House bills] are coming in quite a bit lower than last year, I think that’s the point,” Cole said. “They all cut spending, and the only place they increase spending are places the president asked, so we’re pretty pleased with them.”
So far House Republicans have reported five bills out of committee, with two additional bills set to be considered this week.
But with the annual spending process returning to the forefront after Congress passed Trump’s budget reconciliation package earlier this month, harder-right House Republicans are starting to make their concerns known.
“I still think we need to cut some more, honestly,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said. Burchett said he is “leaning no” on even the relatively flat-funded Defense measure this week, which he believes still spends too much.
“These guys are talking about aircraft carriers, mainly because the componentry is built in their district, when we have been told by most experts that aircraft carriers are kind of on their way out,” he said.
Burchett voted for last year’s version of the Defense appropriations bill in the House.
Cole and GOP leaders can’t count on much Democratic support for the fiscal 2026 spending bills, though they may get a couple red-district Democrats here and there. For instance, Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine voted for the first appropriations bill to reach the floor this year, the Military Construction-VA measure.
House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., on Tuesday criticized Republicans for delaying the release of the full slate of subcommittee allocations, known as 302(b)s. Typically, all of the allocations are revealed before or during the first markup.
“We cannot make sound decisions on investments without having the full picture from the start,” DeLauro said in a statement. “Only now can we see the devastating, destructive, and draconian funding levels they plan to impose on programs and services that help the middle class, the working class, and vulnerable Americans make ends meet.”
Big disparities
The most dramatic differences thus far between the president’s budget and House Republicans have been the National Security-State and Transportation-HUD bills.
The National Security-State bill, formerly known as State-Foreign Operations, would spend $37 billion above Trump’s request, though still $13 billion below current levels, according to panel summaries.
And while the $89.9 billion Transportation-HUD bill features a $4.5 billion cut from the current level, or almost 5 percent, the bill would provide nearly $26 billion above Trump’s request, rejecting the president’s dramatic restructuring of housing programs while still cutting deeply into agency staffing levels.
The “T-HUD” measure also would fund $3.7 billion in earmarks spread across 382 member districts, a GOP summary said.
Other bills with hefty increases over the president’s request include the $79 billion Commerce-Justice-Science measure, with $13.5 billion above Trump’s request but $2 billion below current levels, and the $38 billion Interior-Environment bill, with $9.2 billion above the White House but nearly $3 billion below fiscal 2025.
The largest nondefense spending bill, Labor-HHS-Education, is yet to be released. But those cuts are also likely to be less severe than Trump requested, Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations Chairman Robert B. Aderholt, R-Ala., said Tuesday.
“I think the goal is trying to get what the president wants, but also, it will pass the House,” Aderholt said. “That’s the, thread the needle. So I think getting as close to the president’s numbers as possible, but obviously, the president wants it to pass the House.”
The Labor-HHS-Education bill has always been one of the hardest for House Republicans, as severe cuts that conservatives want tend to alienate moderates.
“I’ve got to pick a number that I think, number one, reflects clearly the fiscal cuts the president wants, but also that I can move through committee and that we have some chance of moving across the floor,” Cole said.
Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who wears dual hats as the Freedom Caucus chair as well as the Agriculture Appropriations subcommittee “cardinal,” said he backs Cole’s approach, though he said was too soon to tell how the rest of the Freedom Caucus would vote.
“I think it’s a decrease from last year, I think that’s what we need to do,” Harris said. “And I think the Senate is probably taking the opposite direction.”
Schedule shifts
Speaker Mike Johnson’s, R-La., decision to give members last week off after interrupting their July 4th recess to pass the reconciliation bill is threatening Cole’s goal of getting all 12 bills out of committee by August recess. That break is set to start July 24.
Cole said he would like Johnson to cancel the first week of August recess to allow the House to make more progress on their bills, though there is no indication yet that move is under consideration.
“I would love to do that, because they took a week away from us. I understand why, I’m not critical of that decision,” Cole said. “But that week, and then not having the last week of July, really limits what we can do.”
Cole said it is “likely” that the two bills yet to be released, the Financial Services and Labor-HHS-Education measures, would slip to September if the current schedule holds.
“Right now … our schedule will take us into early September, which is something we wanted to try to avoid, but I think that is where we are at,” he said.
And lawmakers are all but certain to be trying to negotiate a continuing resolution to keep the government running past the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30 that month. Cole said he is “always” worried about a government shutdown.
“I think the Democrats have a very hard time bargaining with Donald Trump,” he said.
Peter Cohn and David Lerman contributed to this report.
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