Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman, Laura Weiss, Andrew Desiderio, and John Bresnahan say they have seen the GOP's blueprint on resolution.

The compromise strategy involves creating two distinctly different sets of budget-cut instructions tailored to each chamber's political realities: a modest minimum of $3 billion in spending cuts for Senate committees alongside a much more ambitious $1.5 trillion floor for cuts from the House. Senate GOP leaders aim to set spending cut targets low enough to make rank-and-file Senate Republicans comfortable while providing necessary flexibility to comply with the procedural constraints of the Byrd Rule in later stages of the reconciliation process. Meanwhile, House instructions need to be aggressive enough to satisfy conservative demands for substantial federal spending reductions.

In the Senate specifically, Republicans plan to instruct the Agriculture, Energy and Natural Resources, and HELP committees to each cut at least $1 billion, totaling the $3 billion minimum. This amount is hundreds of billions less than what House Republicans have specified. The plan also maintains spending instructions from the Senate-passed "skinny budget resolution" for border security and Pentagon funding, including up to $150 billion for defense—exceeding the House's $100 billion maximum to appease Senate defense hawks. GOP leaders are still awaiting a crucial parliamentarian ruling on the "current policy baseline" for scoring tax cuts before finalizing committee instructions, as this could dramatically reduce the calculated cost of extending much of the 2017 tax cuts.

While Senate leadership feels reasonably confident about passage, they face resistance from several members within their slim majority, according to the report. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opposes the inclusion of a debt limit increase (likely to be around $5 trillion). Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) are pushing for deeper spending cuts than the House's $1.5 trillion floor, especially alongside a debt-limit increase. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is leveraging his vote to demand a commitment on passing his radiation compensation program reauthorization bill.

Looks like progress! Of a sort.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Reg — The new FTC has decided to take a look at state occupational licensing requirements, and AAF's Fred Ashton has the goods.

#Trade #Dataviz — Very interesting: Brookings' Hamilton Project has created a tool that allows you to track the impact of the Trump Administration's trade policies on US trade flows.

#Homelessness — The work of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute on the important issue of homelessness has been consistently outstanding. Here is Marvin Olasky explaining why so-called "Housing First" policies are misguided and "'Housing First' one-person apartments are invitations to die alone."

#Econ #Trade — Is a VAT an export subsidy? This abstract economic question suddenly has great importance, given that President Trump seems to strongly believe it is, and accordingly that trade partners that have a VAT (which includes all of the EU, and many other countries besides) should face a blanket tariff of the same amount. And to the contrary, American mercantlists argue that a VAT would help American exporters. Economist Brian Albrecht, however, argues that this isn't true.

#Energy — R Street's outstanding energy analyst Josiah Neeley, who is always worth reading, issues a clarion call: "Energy Policy: Liberty or Death"

#AI — AEI's John Bailey covers a new study on how AI changes labor by being used as a co-worker. A positive spin on AI's impact on jobs.

#AI — An even more positive bit of news: a RAND study finds that AIs give very good responses if you tell them you are having thoughts about suicide.

#Men #PublicHealth — Shocking: more and more men are being hospitalized for eating disorders. "Hospitalization rates for young men with eating disorders increased by an astonishing 416% from 2000 to 2019." What's more, a "2023 study found the highest rise in eating disorders among boys aged 12 to 14."

#Culture — President Trump has issued an EO decolonizing the decolonizers at the Smithsonian.

Friday Essays

This short piece from Ralph Raico at Mises Institute concerns one of our favorite topics: how the free enterprise system arose, not from the Enlightenment, but from Medieval Christendom.

Jonathan Keeperman, the owner of the excellent start-up publishing house Passage Press, has written an outstanding essay, drawn from an important study by Aaron Moulton, detailing how George Soros's NGO machine actually worked, in its original founding days, in post-Cold War Eastern Europe.

In an important essay, Oren Cass writes against YIMBYs' and so-called "Affluence Liberals'" goals of creating megacities.

Many people have shared this important essay by Jacob Savage in Compact magazine on "the vanishing white male writer," chronicling the systematic discrimination against white males in the world of American belles lettres. As he notes, "not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker."

Over at Commonplace, Amber Lapp writes about America's missing men, those men who live lives—and sometimes deaths—of despair.

At the Claremont Review, Daniel J. Mahoney reviews a recently-published collection of speeches by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Essential.

These are the kind of magazine essays we lovee. Essays from a more civilized time, when people weren't addicted to doomscrolling, and they could spend a lazy Sunday splaying out and reading a long piece in some intellectual or literary quarterly. Proustian essays that aren't "about" a thing, particularly, except about the pleasure of reading a talented author's ruminations and stories. Here, at First Things, Valerie Stivers goes in search, not of madeleines, but of Turkish delights.