Senate

Tillis urges GOP colleagues to hold budget bill over White House ballroom funding

by Alexander Bolton - 05/18/26 10:11 PM ET

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by Alexander Bolton - 05/18/26 10:11 PM ET

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Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is urging his Senate Republican colleagues to delay action on a budget reconciliation package to fund immigration enforcement operations through 2029, in part because he said a proposal to spend $1 billion on the White House ballroom is “a major policy problem.”

He threatened to vote no on the budget reconciliation bill, which would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, citing the ballroom funding provision in its current form. And he vowed to oppose any reconciliation package that comes to the floor this week.

In an email memo circulated to Republican senators, Tillis expressed his disappointment in Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-La.) loss in Saturday’s Louisiana Senate Republican primary and voiced his concerns that it would be a bad idea to rush the budget reconciliation bill to the floor this week, according to a copy of the message reviewed by The Hill.

Axios first reported that Tillis voiced his reservations in a message to colleagues about moving forward with the budget reconciliation bill this week and that he threatened to oppose the high-priority package.

Tillis said he was worried about forcing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) to miss time on the campaign trail by spending hours debating the budget reconciliation bill later this week.

Cornyn has a primary runoff against challenger Ken Paxton on Tuesday.

And then Tillis argued that the White House is pressuring the Senate to pass the budget reconciliation package, which includes funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, by setting an “arbitrary” June 1 deadline for passing the bill.

He argued that the White House pressure was putting Republicans in an uncomfortable position by pressing them to move forward with the package despite reluctance among GOP senators to vote for up to $1 billion in taxpayer funding to help build the White House ballroom.

And he asserted that the White House’s rush to pass the bill revealed that senior administration officials don’t care about the elections of incumbent GOP senators or the Senate’s political timelines.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised senators over the weekend that the provision authorizing and funding the ballroom could not be included in the reconciliation package and passed at a simple-majority threshold.

But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) says he’s not giving up on the ballroom provision and will continue to revise it until it passes muster with the parliamentarian.

Tillis, in his message to colleagues, warned that it would be rash to move quickly to the budget reconciliation debate while the prospective language funding the ballroom poses a “major policy problem” and compared the “airdrop” of the ballroom language into the bill to the last-minute insertion of healthcare funding cuts and policy changes in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

He warned that poorly planned legislation would provide “fodder” to Democratic candidates in the midterm election, and he declared he would not vote for any reconciliation bill that comes to the floor this week.

Thune, asked about Tillis’s opposition on Monday afternoon, said he thinks the Senate should move the budget reconciliation bill this week and strike “while the iron’s hot.”

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