Speaker Mike Johnson came under mounting pressure on Thursday from House G.O.P. hard-liners to renege on the spending deal he struck with Democrats over the weekend for avoiding a government shutdown, as ultraconservatives demanded he put forward a new plan with deeper cuts.
After meeting privately in his office in the Capitol with Republicans irate about the spending agreement, Mr. Johnson said he was discussing their demand to walk away from the bipartisan agreement but had “made no commitments” to do so.
But Republicans made it clear that they considered the deal the speaker negotiated a nonstarter, and threatened to wreak havoc in the House if he did not advance a different one. They are pressing for deep spending cuts, and many have said they cannot vote for any government funding measure that fails to include a severe crackdown on immigration.
“It’s a bad deal,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said of the plan Mr. Johnson had agreed to with Democrats. “It’s a deal that I don’t support and other conservatives in the conference don’t support. So he’s going to have to go back to the drawing table.”
Mr. Johnson has told critics of his deal that he would consider dropping it, but only if they could come up with an alternative that could appeal to a majority in the House, where the party has just a two-seat edge. Such a plan would need to attract the backing of both the far right and more mainstream Republicans in competitive districts who have balked at the scope of the spending cuts and conservative policy dictates that their colleagues have demanded.
The blowup underscored the treacherous territory Mr. Johnson is facing as he tries to keep the government funded while assuaging the anger of hard-liners in his conference. It came a day after a dozen right-wing lawmakers staged a one-day revolt on the House floor, grinding business to a halt in protest of the spending deal.
What the ultraconservative members are suggesting — abandoning a deal days after it was announced — would amount to a remarkable breach by Mr. Johnson with Senate Democrats, Republicans and the White House just three months into his speakership. Mr. Johnson said on Thursday after the meeting that he would continue to discuss “funding options” with a cross-section of lawmakers, and he denied making any promises.
“While those conversations are going on, I’ve made no commitments,” Mr. Johnson said. “If you hear otherwise, it’s simply not true.”
House Republicans on the Appropriations Committee, which is now working to break down the total dollar amount agreed to into 12 individual spending bills that fund the government, largely panned the suggestion that Mr. Johnson walk back the deal he negotiated, saying it would undermine his credibility in the future.
“He’s our unanimously elected speaker,” said Representative John Rutherford of Florida, an appropriator. “He makes a play call and they don’t want to follow it — I don’t like that.”
The potential backtracking from the deal, which essentially hews to the bargain to suspend the debt ceiling that President Biden struck last year with Kevin McCarthy, the speaker at the time, caught senators by surprise. Democrats said they would proceed with the deal they made with Mr. Johnson, and with a temporary spending patch — known as a continuing resolution, or C.R. — to buy more time past a Jan. 19 deadline to enact it without a partial government shutdown.
“Look, we have a top-line agreement,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader. “Everybody knows to get anything done, it has to be bipartisan. So we’re going to continue to work to pass a C.R. and avoid a shutdown.”
Mr. Schumer on Thursday went ahead with a procedural move to tee up a future vote on a stopgap spending bill, saying it had become “crystal clear that it will take more than a week to finish the appropriations process.”
“We have publicly and clearly and unequivocally reached an agreement on the top-line spending number,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader. “There is nothing more to discuss. To the extent that House Republicans back away from an agreement that was just announced a few days ago, it will make clear that House Republicans are determined to shut down the government, crash the economy and hurt the American people.”
It was evident from the start that Mr. Johnson would need to rely on Democratic votes to pass any spending bill in the House, cobbling together the same coalition that Mr. McCarthy used in September to avert a government shutdown — a move that led to his ouster.
The Freedom Caucus repeatedly revolted during Mr. McCarthy’s tenure over stopgap funding bills that kept government spending essentially flat, and its reaction to a similar plan advanced by Mr. Johnson was no different. Some conservatives are pushing for a one-year funding plan that would lead to cuts across the entire federal government, including both domestic and military spending. It is a plan that Democrats say would gut social programs, and one that politically vulnerable Republicans may be loath to support.
“What I think we ought to do is to fund the government at a level that cuts our spending year over year, that secures our border,” said Representative Bob Good of Virginia, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus.
Mainstream Republicans in the conference, however, said they supported the deal Mr. Johnson had brokered. Representative John Duarte of California, who narrowly won a district that Mr. Biden won in 2020, said it was important that Mr. Johnson, who he noted was a fiscal conservative, “go into these meetings with credibility with his counterparts.”
“We have realities; they’re the same realities that our previous speaker had,” Mr. Duarte said. “If we want deeper spending cuts, if we want to have more control over the constitutional republic, we should do things that win more votes, not things that lose more votes. So I’m going to stay in the governing part of our conference and support the speaker.”
