House Republicans advance budget plan, opening fight in Senate

House Republicans advanced a budget resolution in March 2025 that opened a third reconciliation package for fiscal 2025, a roughly $95 billion plan that tied Iran-related war funding, farm aid and election legislation into one partisan vehicle. The House Budget Committee resolution set budgetary levels for fiscal 2025 and for 2026 through 2034, but the real test was never the House vote. It was whether the Senate would let any of it survive.

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington and Speaker Mike Johnson pushed the framework forward after House Republicans had already passed a stopgap government funding bill on March 11, 2025, underscoring how GOP leaders were working two budget tracks at once. Democrats and some Republicans objected to the partisan shape of the deal, the search for offsets and the timing, all of which made the measure more a signal of priorities than a finished governing package. By folding defense and Iran-related spending, farm aid and election rules into the same reconciliation process, House Republicans linked foreign policy and domestic politics to the same budget math.

The election piece centered on the SAVE Act, H.R. 22, which requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. The Brennan Center for Justice, Campaign Legal Center, the League of Women Voters and Nonprofit VOTE said the bill would burden eligible voters and could disenfranchise millions. The Brennan Center later urged the Senate to reject the measure outright.

The House’s later actions showed how persistent that push remained, even as the upper chamber stayed inert. Nonprofit VOTE said the House passed the SAVE Act on Feb. 11, 2026, by 218-213. Campaign Legal Center said the House had already advanced the SAVE Act in April 2025 and then voted again on the SAVE America Act in February 2026, while the Senate had not acted as of May 12, 2026.

That makes the House vote a useful measure of Republican priorities, but not a reliable predictor of enactment. Reconciliation gives the majority a simple-majority route in the Senate, yet it still depends on whether lawmakers can keep the spending, war-funding and election provisions stitched together long enough to clear the chamber.