Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Wednesday called the House Budget Committee to his office for an impromptu closed-door meeting to plan the must-pass Reconciliation 3.0.
With their deadline approaching, this could be the GOP’s last chance to eliminate fraud and wasteful spending, permanently defund Planned Parenthood, and pass the SAVE America Act.
Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., described the Budget Committee’s meeting with Johnson as “a listening session.” He expressed the group’s overall “frustration” with the Senate regarding the SAVE America Act.
Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, told the Daily Signal there were a lot of ideas thrown around. While “nothing was nailed down,” he said, “fraud is kind of the core of our thinking right now.”
If leadership and the Budget Committee continue to work through Reconciliation 3.0—which President Donald Trump has also called for—this will be a smaller version of the One Big, Beautiful Bill that Republicans passed last July. They say their goal is to make life more affordable and eliminate fraud.
“We’re still analytically working through the details [and] what, precisely, that would mean,” Gill said. “But, again, [fraud] is going to be the backbone, and I think most people agree on that.”
He confirmed their goal is to pass the affordability bill before their upcoming August recess.
Defunding Planned Parenthood
Stutzman told the Daily Signal he brought up continuing to defund abortion providers. While Planned Parenthood was federally defunded for a year through the OBBB, that year is up on July 4, and hundreds of millions of dollars could be sent to fund Planned Parenthood once again.
According to the organization, 38% of its revenue came from “government health services reimbursements and grants.”
“There wasn’t further conversation on that, but I did bring that up because we did do that in the Big, Beautiful Bill,” Stutzman said.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, another member of the Budget Committee present at the meeting, told the Daily Signal that he agrees they “ought to do it.”
“Obviously, there are a number of folks that believe that, with the Planned Parenthood funding restriction [next week], we ought to do it. [It] ought to be a part of the conversation, and there’s a lot of people who feel that way.”
While the GOP tried to defund the organization for 10 years in the OBBB, the Senate parliamentarian—the arbiter of what is allowed to be included in a reconciliation bill—determined they were only allowed to defund it one year at a time.
Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., told the Daily Signal he remembers this rule making “no sense whatsoever.”
“Some of us spoke to the president [and] vice president directly after the One Big, Beautiful Bill and said that parliamentarian is … biased and needs to be replaced,” he said.
According to Brecheen, if Senate Majority Leader John Thune were to replace the parliamentarian, they would be able to include a lot more in Reconciliation 3.0, including the SAVE America Act.
SAVE America Act Options
As it stands, with the current parliamentarian, the full SAVE America Act would not pass the Byrd rule under Senate standards. The rules state that every line of a reconciliation bill must be budgetary in nature.
An option brought up more recently by Johnson is organizing a grant program to establish election integrity. Roy, an author of the bill, told the Daily Signal “that’s not the same as the SAVE America Act.”
“Grant programs are what they are,” Roy continued. “They’re incentives. States who want to do it take the incentives.”
“I am not saying I’m opposed to putting something like that on if there is a moving vehicle that’s otherwise moving in order to get some elements of election integrity done, but let’s not kid ourselves that it would be full SAVE,” Roy said.
