The budget plan that Republicans pushed through the Senate early Friday was a necessary first step toward enacting President Trump’s ambitious domestic goals, but it punted the most difficult and divisive questions about how Congress will do so for another day.
On a largely party-line vote, 52-48, Senate Republicans won adoption of a blueprint that calls for a $150 billion increase in military spending and $175 billion more for border security over the next decade.
How will they pay for it? That’s a question for another day. What about the huge tax cuts they and Mr. Trump have promised? We’ll figure that out later, senators say.
Over in the House, Republicans have been agonizing to come up with at least $2 trillion in spending cuts to pay for Mr. Trump’s fiscal agenda and placate their most conservative members. Their plan, which G.O.P. leaders hope to put to a vote as early as next week, loads vast tax cuts and policy changes into one huge package and calls for slashing government programs deeply to finance it all. But it faces a perilous road through the closely divided House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.
Republicans in the Senate have essentially delayed any decision on those thorny details, focusing instead on delivering an early win to Mr. Trump in the form of money for his hard-line anti-immigration agenda. They said they would address questions of spending and tax cuts later in a separate bill.
“We’ve decided to front-end load security,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chairman of the Budget Committee. “We want to make the tax cuts permanent. We’re going to work with our House colleagues to do that. They expire at the end of the year, but we have time to do that. It is the view of the Republican Senate that when it comes to border security, we need not fail. We should have the money now to keep that momentum going.”