House Republicans held a three-day retreat at President Donald Trump’s crappy resort in Doral, Florida, where they were supposed to nail down a plan for how to pass his tax cuts for the rich. But according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Republicans are leaving the event with no plan for how to move forward, keeping the party in its state of disarray.
“After two days at our House Republican winter retreat, we still do not have a plan on budget reconciliation and our Speaker and his team have not offered one. Not even if we are in a one bill or two bill framework, even though President Trump (who prefers one big beautiful bill) literally told us here at the start of our conference that he now does not care if it’s one or two,” Greene wrote in a lengthy post on X.
Republicans want to use a process called budget reconciliation to pass Trump’s agenda of cutting taxes for the rich and deporting part of the country’s workforce. Budget reconciliation allows the Senate to bypass the filibuster (which requires 60 votes) and advance legislation with a simple majority, thereby letting the GOP pass Trump’s agenda without having to earn a single Democratic vote.
But budget reconciliation has a major caveat: Bills passed through this procedural method cannot add to the deficit past a 10-year cutoff. (That is why much of the legislation that passes this way sunsets after 10 years.) That means Republicans have to find a way to pay for the massive tax cuts for the rich and Trump’s expensive deportation plans.
In order to do that—and line the pockets of the wealthy—Republicans have proposed making cuts to programs that help working-class Americans.
Some of the GOP’s proposed cuts have leaked, and they include cutting food stamps and school lunch programs for needy children, imposing work requirements to receive Medicaid, taxing scholarship money, eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction (which would make it more expensive to own a home), ending tax credits for child and dependent care, and making work commutes more expensive by allowing for employer transportation benefits to be taxable, among other things.
Agreeing on what cuts to make should be the hard part for the GOP and its extremely narrow majority.
So the fact that Republicans can’t agree on the basic idea of whether to split the tax cuts and deportation plan into two bills is a bad sign for the party’s ability to pass the legislation down the road.
At a news conference Wednesday morning, as Republicans were set to leave the retreat, House Speaker Mike Johnson told people not to worry, he’s got things under control, saying Republicans are “right on schedule.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson
But even Greene isn’t buying that.
“I very much want House Republicans to be successful, all of us, with our razor thin majority. Next time we meet, I hope to know a framework of our plan and I hope this doesn’t turn into another bill with thousands of pages dumped on us with less than 72 hours to read it all before we have to vote on the eve of another government shutdown,” she wrote in her post. “But why would I expect different?”
Ultimately, it appears the only thing Republicans accomplished at their three-day retreat is lining Trump’s pockets. By holding the three-day event at his resort in Doral, Florida, Trump personally profited—a disgusting violation of ethics. (Just six years ago, The Washington Post reported that the resort was in “steep decline.”)
But for Greene, throwing money at Trump was the one benefit of the getaway.
“I would normally complain about spending money that didn’t accomplish anything, but we stayed at Trump Doral, which is a phenomenal resort, and the weather was sunny and in the 70’s,” Greene wrote, giving a nice little plug for Trump’s shitty resort near the Miami airport.
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