Congress returns for 3-week sprint session

Niels Lesniewski, CQ-Roll Call on Mar 24, 2025

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WASHINGTON — Both the House and Senate come back from recess this week to begin a busy three-week period that’s expected to focus on Republicans’ budget reconciliation agenda, including extending and expanding tax cuts and tightening immigration policy.

The top items on the House agenda this week, meanwhile, will include more measures to overturn Biden administration rules. And the Senate will continue to vote on more of President Donald Trump’s nominations. The headliners this week are the nominees to lead the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.

With a stopgap spending law now in effect through Sept. 30, the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate can fully turn their attention to their budget reconciliation agenda.

This work period on Capitol has just three weeks, followed by the traditional two-week recess that coincides with Easter and Passover. By then, House and Senate Republicans will want to make progress on resolving differences on how to execute the process that allows them to pass legislation without the risk of filibusters in the Senate.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., spoke about the agenda in a Sunday interview on Fox News.

“We are working in tandem with the White House, with our Senate counterparts, the Republican majority in the Senate, to deliver for the people and get this done. And yeah, we’ve got some big wins on the board, much more hard work ahead of us, but I’m absolutely convinced we’re going to deliver,” Johnson said on the program “Sunday Night in America.”

In the meantime, there are plenty of policies from the Biden administration that Republicans still want to roll back, including energy efficiency regulations related to walk-in coolers and freezers, as well as for commercial refrigerators and freezers more broadly.

The House is scheduled to consider joint resolutions this week to roll back both of those rules, with the Senate likely to follow suit. Republicans argue that the Biden standards are not feasible and that they restrict consumer choices.

The other primary measure for the House, from the Education and Workforce Committee, targets the financial relationships between educational institutions and adversarial foreign governments.

“The DETERRENT Act is designed to expose these foreign influences, hold universities accountable, and ensure clarity in a system that has allowed bad actors to manipulate well-meaning institutions,” Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Wash., said in a statement introducing the bill last month. “We need to ensure that Chinese influences and other foreign powers are not allowed to compromise the integrity of American educational institutions for their own gain.”

Senate confirmations continue

The Senate confirmed all the members of Trump’s Cabinet before recess, except for Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., the nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, who continues to wait to vacate her House seat given the slim majority the GOP has in the chamber.

So Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., is now focusing on the next tier of nominees. Navy secretary nominee John Phelan and deputy secretary of State nominee Christopher Landau are on track to be confirmed Monday evening.

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., filed cloture on the next batch of nominees for Senate floor consideration shortly before last week’s recess. Barrasso set up votes, starting as early as Tuesday, on Trump’s nominations of:

•Michael Kratsios to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

•Jayanta Bhattacharya to be director of the National Institutes of Health.

•Martin Makary to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

•Former Rep. Dan Bishop to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.

•Aaron Reitz to be an assistant attorney general.

Bhattacharya emerged from the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on a party-line vote. Makary picked up some crossover support with a 14-9 committee vote, winning over Democratic Sens. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

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Lia DeGroot and Victor Feldman contributed to this report.