President Trump laid out an ambitious tax reform plan during his latest run for the White House — a corporate rate cut, making his individual rates permanent, an expanded child tax credit, and an elimination of income taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime work, among other things. Republicans in the House may take a chainsaw to those ambitions, however, as debt hawks unafraid of public criticism and suburban lawmakers fighting for expanded blue state deductions threaten key elements of the plan. 

Trump’s success in the 2024 election relied greatly on Americans’ dour mood about President Biden’s economy, with historic inflation driving many voters to the polls. The president-elect’s tax plan, which he says can offset the inflationary tariff proposals he has kicked around, was aimed at those 75 percent of voters who told exit pollsters last month that inflation in the last three years caused either “moderate or severe hardship” for them and their families. 

House Republicans are already saying that America isn’t able to afford the tax cuts Trump has proposed.

In 2017, it was a different ball game for Trump, when he had a 23-seat GOP majority in the lower chamber. Now, he’ll enter the White House with a zero-seat plurality because the GOP won just 220 districts last month, and three House members — Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Congressman Michael Waltz, and Congressman Matt Gaetz — will not return.

For the first three months of his presidency, the House majority will sit at just 217 seats compared to the Democrats’ 215 seats, meaning Speaker Johnson can afford to lose zero members on a party-line vote. A tie vote in the House means a piece of legislation does not pass. 

Even after the special elections occur in those three deep-red districts in the Spring of 2025, Mr. Johnson’s majority will crawl back up to just 218 members, meaning any party-line legislation — including, presumably, Trump’s tax cuts — can only lose two of his members for the bill to pass. When Speaker Ryan passed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, he lost 12 of his fellow Republican members on the final floor vote. 

Some GOP lawmakers already say they can’t go along with the provisions proposed by Trump in the last year. Congressman Chip Roy told Politico in July that he wants to see the corporate tax rate go up to 25 percent from the current 21 percent — a far cry from Trump’s proposal to cut the rate to 15 percent. 

“There’s a bubbling-up concern that we should not be doing the bidding of corporate America,” Mr. Roy said. “I’d like to see corporations getting with the program and saving America, instead of just looking at their bottom line.”

Congressman Thomas Massie echoed those comments when he also spoke to Politico just before the Christmas recess, saying that it would be “ridiculous” to cut taxes for anyone with America’s national debt nearing $37 trillion. “I honestly don’t know why people up here are talking about tax cuts. There’s really no way to afford them. Like, what the hell? We need to be cutting spending, not taxes,” Mr. Massie said. 

Compare that with three moderate GOP House lawmakers from New York — Congressmen Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, and Andrew Garbarino — who are demanding an increase to the cap on the state and local tax deductions, which would result in a multi-billion dollar relief for homeowners in high-tax blue states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California. 

Messrs. Lawler, LaLota, and Garbarino — along with other New Yorkers who lost re-election last month — nearly shut down the House by killing a debate rule in January because Mr. Johnson refused to give them an up-or-down vote on lifting the cap on the so-called SALT deduction. 

The tax plan could be especially complicated if the incoming majority leader, Senator Thune, moves forward with a border security spending package before a tax bill. According to Semafor, Mr. Thune plans to have what is known as a reconciliation bill — meaning a spending package that cannot be filibustered — on the Senate floor by mid-January. The $100 billion border security package would be paid for with leases to energy companies. 

The war between the Senate — which wants to move the border security reconciliation bill rapidly and then deal with taxes later in the year — and the House, which prefers one large reconciliation bill with border security, energy deregulation, and tax reform, has been brewing for months. 

The chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Congressman Jason Smith, has demanded a large bill that deals with Trump’s agenda in one fell swoop. He says that the narrow House majority demands that all items be included in one reconciliation bill because everyone will be able to say they won something, while separate bills may allow individual members to kill the tax bill and blame the deficit-busting spending that will come about as a result of decreased revenues. 

“So to come up with [the] idea that we will do a small reconciliation at the beginning that does energy and immigration and defense, and a second will be tax, is very foolish,” Mr. Smith told CNBC in early December. “It breeds failure, in my opinion.”