Short Takes and Updates—February 25, 2025
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1. Never Lose the Whip Count
Today (or this week’s) House vote on the reconciliation budget is likely to be one of the most momentous votes in my lifetime in DC[1]….and also one of the most interesting.
When you are the majority legislative party, you are never supposed to lose floor or committee votes. Some of the reasons: party loyalty, shared ideology, and common approach to policymaking. However, the most important reason is that you control when votes occur and you never schedule one until you know you have the votes to win.
The Speaker of the House has a network of “whips” whose job is to find out whether their Members intend to vote the party line. The axiom: the speaker should always know the whip count[2].
Going into the budget vote, the Speaker has a narrow margin for victory. If Democrats are in full attendance and all vote “no,” then he can lose only one vote[3]. Depending on what pundit you read, the Speaker is probably 8 to 12 Republican votes short.
The politics of the situation are more interesting than his merely “not having the votes.” One to four of the possible no-votes are budget hardliners who want a commitment to more spending cuts than even the dramatic levels already contained in the reconciliation resolution before the House.
Most of the potential no-votes are the opposite: Republican centrists whose Congressional districts contain large Medicaid and SNAP populations that also voted for Trump[4].
This is the interesting part for the centrists: if they vote against the reconciliation resolution, they will probably be “primaried” in 2025 and lose their seats even before the general election. If they vote for the reconciliation resolution, they will face an angry electorate of former Medicaid patients and SNAP recipients and probably not be re-elected.
As of mid-morning, I am hearing that Speaker Johnson’s posture (“no changes”) may be softening as they attempt to find compromises on types of Medicaid changes that would be in play. There also appears to be talk of finding additional revenue (from tariffs?) to lessen the dollars that would need to come from Medicaid. It is unclear where this would leave the hardliners who are also potential no votes.
If you are a student of politics, it does not get more interesting than the hard squeeze from competing forces being felt by these centrist Republican Members.
Post-script: Tuesday night, February 25, the House voted 217-215 to adopt the House budget resolution that starts the reconciliation process. According to this breaking story from Roll Call (here):
Conservative Republicans: They wanted to ensure that “cuts to discretionary spending are made as part of the likely upcoming stopgap appropriations bill needed by March 14.” Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio said that he had “received ‘assurances’ that cuts would be part of that deal and future spending bills.”
Centrist Republicans: “won reassurances from House leaders….that cost-cutting would focus on Medicaid fraud, while not touching benefits for those eligible for the program.”
Presumptively, the Conservatives will get the spending cuts (which are likely to hurt public health agency funding) and the Centrists will discover that Medicaid access and funding are just as important as benefits.
2. The Disconcerting Consequences of Lay-Offs By Fiat.
Several readers asked about the reported return of some laid-off CDRH employees and I pointed to the serious harm regardless of the number of employees recalled.
Probationary employees were the target of the lay-offs, presumably because they have less job protection. This includes employees in their first couple of years of government service, many recruited because of their expertise in innovative areas, such as AI. Employees promoted in a competitive recruitment within the last year or two are also considered probationary. These are competitively-determined winners, highly valuable to the agency and being punished for their ambition.
My response, repeated by several publications: “It is good that some are being called back, but that does not undo the harm of lay-offs done by fiat rather than performance reviews.”
3. User Fees and Lay-Offs at FDA
My February 23 column concluded that:
yes, FDA employees can be laid-off, regardless of funding source;
yes, the FDA lay-offs saves the government money; and
no, the lay-offs does not affect the user fee agreements, although it may affect whether certain milestones are reached on time.
The details and explanation are at: https://www.fdamatters.com/fdamatters/special-edition-fda-rifs-and-user-fees-explained.
Note: Since the original column was published, I have become aware that the lay-offs should not be referred to as a reduction-in-force because that term triggers certain procedures and protections that employees might not have in the case of lay-offs.
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The stakes are fully described in my recent column, https://www.fdamatters.com/fdamatters/fda-and-budget-reconciliation-2025-a-primer. Future expenditures (one to two trillion dollars over the next decade) may shift from Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other human services programs to defense, border security, and sustaining tax cuts from nearly a decade ago. In that context, discretionary programs, such as FDA, are certain to be hit harder than might otherwise be the case.
The margin is so tight that Represent Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for UN Ambassador cannot yet resign her congressional seat to take the position.
This is a reminder of the story of the senior citizen loudly decrying government-run medicine, while also arguing against any cuts in his Medicare benefits.
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