The fate of a budget blueprint to unlock President Trump’s spending and tax cuts was in doubt in the House on Tuesday as conservative Republicans lined up in opposition to the measure, arguing it would add too much to the nation’s debt.
House Republican leaders pressed for a vote as early as Wednesday to move their party’s budget resolution past its next hurdle, after the Senate pushed through the measure in an overnight weekend session.
The action would clear the way for the G.O.P. to craft legislation carrying out Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda and move it through Congress over unified Democratic opposition. A defeat or failure to move it would imperil his priorities, sending Republicans back to the drawing board to come up with an entirely new plan.
But even after Mr. Trump met for roughly two hours on Tuesday afternoon with a group of conservative hard-liners who have refused to back the resolution, it was not clear whether he had persuaded enough of them to guarantee passage, given the party’s slim majority. At the meeting, the president “expressed his commitment to making sure we get the job done, that we find real savings to change the debt trajectory for the country, but also protect the essential programs,” Speaker Mike Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson has leaned heavily on Mr. Trump in recent months to persuade G.O.P. skeptics to fall in line on key votes. Even the staunchest holdouts have shown the president extraordinary deference, giving in at critical moments. After meeting with Mr. Trump on Tuesday, at least a handful of Republicans who had expressed concerns about the budget measure said that they would support the resolution.
“We have House issues, and we have Senate issues to deal with,” said Representative Ron Estes of Kansas. “But at the end of the day, I think we’re all working for the same goals.”
But some were unmoved. Representative Chip Roy of Texas told CNN that he was still opposed to the resolution. And some of the most determined holdouts did not even attend the meeting with Mr. Trump, either because they were not invited or because they refused to go.
Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said that he had been invited to the meeting with Mr. Trump but had declined to attend.
“No matter what the president tells anybody, the votes just aren’t there,” Mr. Harris said, adding that there were “at least a dozen” Republicans who would refuse to vote for the resolution.
“He’s just not going to change my mind,” Mr. Harris said of Mr. Trump.
Representative Jodey Arrington of Texas, the chairman of the Budget Committee, who has called the resolution “unserious and disappointing,” also did not attend. He said that he was “going to be doing other things.”
If all Democrats vote, Mr. Johnson can afford to lose no more than three Republicans on the resolution. Many more than that have said that they are opposed.
The conservative holdouts are unhappy with the level of spending reductions in the Senate resolution: roughly $4 billion over a decade, or a fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that the House had approved.
Republican leaders have said that number is a minimum intended to give them more flexibility to comply with strict procedural rules in the Senate. They must follow those rules in order to take advantage of a process called reconciliation that allows them to push the tax and budget measure through the Senate, shielding it from a filibuster.
But first, the Senate and the House must agree on the same budget blueprint.
Many House Republicans are also unhappy with the Senate’s insistence that extending the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing, because such a move simply maintains the status quo. Senate Republicans adopted that approach so that they could extend the tax cuts indefinitely without appearing to balloon the deficit. But fiscal hawks in the House have rejected that strategy, describing it as a gimmick.
“No serious individual would suggest that this is going to possibly reduce the deficits,” said Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri. “This is going to only accelerate our deficit.”
Their resistance poses a familiar problem for Mr. Johnson, who must again try to deliver the votes on budget-related legislation that is deeply unpopular with hard-liners.
Mr. Johnson on Tuesday argued that House Republicans needed to approve the legislation so that lawmakers could get to work writing the bill with the tax and spending cuts favored by Mr. Trump.
“This amendment just allows us to get off the sidelines, to get on the field and start this game,” Mr. Johnson said. “We’ve got to get this done.”
He added: “We have no luxury of complacency, and we really don’t have time to dither on this thing.”
