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5 GOP battles that will drive the summer in Congress

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by Emily Brooks and Mike Lillis - 05/10/26 5:00 PM ET

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by Emily Brooks and Mike Lillis - 05/10/26 5:00 PM ET

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While congressional Republicans have coalesced around a plan to fund immigration enforcement, there are plenty more intraparty battles that will make for rocky legislating for the summer.

At the crux of many of the disputes is anxiety about the looming midterm elections that threaten to erase the GOP’s majority. That’s driving some Republicans to argue they should be as aggressive as possible while they have unified control of power, but it’s causing those in purple districts to worry about backlash from swing voters.

Here are five GOP battles that will drive the House this summer.

Fiscal hawks vs. purple district members

The biggest item on Republicans’ wish list this year is Reconciliation 3.0 — a way to advance partisan priorities through the special budget reconciliation process that bypasses the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. That mechanism, however, can be used a limited number of times.

The process was used to advance the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of President Trump’s tax cuts last year and is in the process of being used on a “skinny” reconciliation package to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, which Democrats had refused to fund without reforms.

But Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other Republicans are hoping to use their third and final shot at reconciliation to combine supplemental funding toward the Pentagon for the Iran war with cost-cutting measures that they say will take aim at rooting out fraud in federal programs. Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is working with House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), a major fiscal hawk, to craft such a proposal.

Moving such a big package through the narrow majority, though, is a tall order as swing-district Republicans see risks in pursuing big spending cuts as they aim to woo voters — leading to pessimism that such a package will get across the finish line.

Privacy hawks vs. Intel Republicans

Battles over reforms to the nation’s spy powers that have been brewing for months are far from settled and are set to come up again in the coming weeks.

Privacy hawks defied GOP leaders and the White House by preventing an 18-month “clean” extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which authorizes the government to surveil foreign targets on foreign soil.

Those privacy hawks are demanding more reforms to prevent any Americans’ communications swept up in the surveillance from being accessed without a warrant. Intel-minded Republicans, meanwhile, say such a requirement would tie the hands of law enforcement.

The House in April passed a package with some modest reforms while extending the authorization for three years — while tacking on an unrelated measure to ban the Federal Reserve from creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC), another measure of concern to privacy hawks.

Senate Republican Leader John Thune (S.D.) has said the CBDC measure is “dead on arrival” in the upper chamber, and Congress passed a 45-day extension as the Senate grapples with the House package and is likely to return it to the lower chamber with changes.

That means more chances for the privacy hawks to demand changes before the FISA authorization expires June 12.

MAHA vs. deregulation advocates

For decades, the Republican Party has built its brand around a pro-business agenda that’s largely rejected government regulations — particularly those related to environmental protection — that might hurt corporate bottom lines. The arrival of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, however, is challenging those conventions, as a small but powerful group of populist Republicans — influencers and lawmakers alike — press for tougher rules on corporations and their toxic products in the name of protecting public health.

Trump won the favor of many in the healthy living movement when he tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a MAHA standard-bearer, to lead his Health and Human Services Department.

The clash has turned the politics of deregulation on its head, aligning conservative MAHA activists and liberal environmentalists, who want tougher rules, against traditional, pro-business Republicans who are warning of the economic harm of government encroachment on free markets.

That squabble was front and center during the recent farm bill debate in the House, where Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and other MAHA-friendly Republicans pushed hard to amend the initial package by removing a provision that would have shielded pesticide makers from lawsuits related to the labeling of their products. Writing in The W