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FIRST ON FOX: House Republicans are already discussing contours for a potential second “big, beautiful bill” advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The Republican Study Committee (RSC), the 189-member-strong group that acts as a de facto “think tank” for the House GOP, is launching a working group to look at what a second budget reconciliation bill would look like, Fox News Digital has learned.
It’s the largest organized effort so far by congressional Republicans to follow through on GOP leaders’ hopes for a second massive agenda bill.
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“We must capitalize on the momentum we’ve generated in the first 6 months of a Republican trifecta in Washington,” RSC Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital. “To fulfill the promises we made to the American people, conservatives must begin laying the groundwork for the second reconciliation bill to ensure we continue to drive down the cost of living and restore America’s promise for future generations.”
House Republicans left Washington on Wednesday to kick off a five-week recess period, where they’re readying to sell the benefits of their first massive agenda bill to their constituents.
Meanwhile, Pfluger also directed lawmakers part of the new working group to begin reaching out to colleagues, conservative senators, and GOP organizations about potential policy proposals for a new bill, Fox News Digital was told.
The goal of the new group is to create a framework for what a second “big, beautiful bill” could look like, and to recommend that framework to GOP leaders.
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The first bill was a massive piece of legislation advancing Trump’s agenda on taxes, the border, immigration, defense, and energy.
It made much of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) permanent, while imposing new work requirements on Medicaid and food stamps, among other measures.
After passing the House and Senate, Trump signed it into law during a celebratory event on the Fourth of July.
But the political fight to get just one reconciliation bill took Herculean political efforts across both the House and Senate, with debates and even heated arguments ongoing for months before the bill passed.
Notably, however, Republicans did get the legislation to Trump’s desk by July 4 – meeting a goal that many in the media and even within GOP circles thought impossible.
The budget reconciliation process allows the party controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress to pass massive partisan policy overhauls, while completely sidelining the other side – in this case, Democrats.
Reconciliation bills can pass the Senate with a simple majority rather than 60 votes, lining up with the House’s own passage threshold. But the legislation must adhere to a specific set of rules and only involve measures related to fiscal policy.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told “Sunday Morning Futures” earlier this month that he was eyeing multiple reconciliation bills.
“With President Trump coming back to the White House, and us having the responsibility for fixing every metric of public policy that Biden and Harris and the Democrats destroyed over the previous four years – so the big beautiful bill was the first big step in that,” he told host Maria Bartiromo.
“But we have multiple steps ahead of us. We have long planned for at least two, possibly three, reconciliation bills, one in the fall and one next spring.”
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