A group of senior House Republicans gathered at the Pentagon on Thursday morning to discuss the military funding portion of another party-line reconciliation bill with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to four people granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington, Republican Study Committee Chair August Pfluger and others also attended the meeting.
It’s a sign conversations around “Reconciliation 3.0” are heating up after President Donald Trump signed the GOP-only immigration enforcement funding measure earlier this week.
It also comes after Trump on Wednesday night called for the GOP to approve $350 billion in Pentagon spending amid the ongoing conflict with Iran — alongside a partisan election bill known as the SAVE America Act, which has been stalled in the Senate for weeks.
“Well, the President tweeted and presented a budget consistent with his tweet on what they are looking for,” Arrington said in an interview following the meeting. “Part of that is to replenish the resources that have been utilized in the current conflict, so it’s, I would call it, supplementing the resources for our troops in conflict. And then the larger portion of it is, you know, future readiness. It’s future readiness. It’s modernizing our military, and it’s kind of a one-time capital infusion to accomplish that.”
Arrington said lawmakers and Hegseth also discussed how “reconciliation was going to provide an opportunity to codify a lot of what the president and his administration [are] doing in the war on fraud and that savings can be used to offset the spending on the military, so that we’re not increasing the deficit. So that was a big part of the conversation.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, in response to Trump’s latest demands, separately noted Thursday even some of the election measure’s most vocal Senate GOP advocates have said it can’t fit within the strict contours governing the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process. And he didn’t commit to ultimately pursuing a third partisan package, either.
“We’re, as I’ve said before, open to using reconciliation if we make the calculation that we can achieve an outcome that [it’s] something we can get 50 votes for and 218 for,” Thune said, adding, “I’ve said before, at the moment I’m not sure what that is.”