When Republicans won in 2024, they promised to use their coveted trifecta to deliver on an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” for President Donald Trump’s agenda. With few legislative days left ahead of midterms, some argue they should have done more. 

It’s left some lawmakers questioning the effectiveness of their red hat-trick and whether the “lame duck,” or a slow legislative season, has instead arrived early this year.

“We’ve got four weeks before the August break. We’ve already wasted one of them,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said last week. “The House, through no fault of the speaker, [looks] like the happy hour at an airport Chili’s. I’m not saying the Senate’s going to do any better.”

“We were elected to deliver what we promised the American people, not to campaign for re-election,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, wrote in a letter to colleagues this month. “Delivering on decisive policy mandates is the best way to grow a majority … we simply have not done enough.”

While some blame Democrats or intraparty disagreements between the chambers, others chalk it up to reality: Even with a GOP majority in both the House and Senate and the help of a Republican White House, or a “trifecta,” legislating isn’t easy. 

“Our founders made it hard, and we’ve embodied that,” said Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who’s retiring at the end of this term. “The founders made it very hard to … pass things unless there’s consensus. Madison would be proud of the work he did.”

Many things have caught both Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., unawares in the past year and a half. Though Republicans have muscled through key priorities via the reconciliation process, variables like slim majorities in both chambers, Freedom Caucus rebellions, the longest partial government shutdown in history and, recently, Trump’s hyperfixation on passing a voter ID bill have complicated the GOP’s blanket control.

Trifecta troubles

Lawmakers still face a laundry list of “must-do” items before the end of the year, including passing a national defense authorization, reauthorizing surface transportation programs, advancing a farm bill and funding the government. 

Leadership is also planning for a third, and even a fourth, reconciliation package. 

However, with just nine weeks of the year left with both chambers scheduled to be in D.C., the odds are stacked against Johnson and Thune to deliver even the basics, let alone more of Trump’s “mandate.” 

Alan Wiseman, a Vanderbilt University professor and co-director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking, compared the current GOP trifecta to that of 2017, the other time Trump enjoyed total control of Washington at the onset of his first term. 

“Trump had been elected with a pretty well articulated laundry list of things that he wanted to push forward on his agenda, most notably was repealing and replacing President Obama’s Affordable Care Act,” Wiseman said. “If you fast forward about 18 months later, we saw a situation in which, for all intents and purposes, with the exception of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, President Trump’s long list of legislative-based campaign promises really hadn’t gone anywhere in Congress.” 

That’s similar to the current situation, he said, where the first reconciliation bill, or the “one big beautiful bill,” delivered on some Trump campaign promises, but didn’t accomplish everything.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., touted the party’s second reconciliation bill, “where we funded border security now for his entire term,” and said there’s more he’d like to do. 

“But obviously that’s why we’ve had to do things through reconciliation, because Democrats wouldn’t join us,” Hoeven said.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., also put the blame on Democrats, adding that Republicans are “very unified.” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a House Freedom Caucus member who is in the running for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s seat, said the party is pushed to use the filibuster-proof reconciliation process because “we’re not getting 60 votes in the Senate — that’s a given.”

“We’ve strived. I mean, have we met everything? No. But we’re moving the ball forward,” Norman said. “The socialist agenda the Democrats have is not acceptable. We’ll fight that all day long.” 

And while the House GOP is moving forward with reconciliation 3.0, it again became apparent that some of Republicans’ problems this Congress have stemmed from cross-chamber disagreements, as Thune on Tuesday said he would “hold” any framework passed by his House colleagues for now. 

Thune said he wants to put a stopgap funding bill on the Senate floor before his members jet for their August recess — with the hopes of preemptively staving off a shutdown in September  — but noted he may want to use the budget resolution “as a vehicle” to fund the government if needed. 

But that could kick that vote to September, Thune said. 

“It’s a possibility that, if necessary, we could pull that budget resolution passed by the House and use it to fund the government,” Thune said.

Can’t SAVE themselves? 

At the top of Trump’s “mandate” wish-list for Congress is a sweeping voter ID and elections overhaul bill known as the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. That dream bill is threatening to derail more mundane ones. 

The president and the House Freedom Caucus have attempted to tie the measure to unrelated legislation as the means of a pressure campaign on the Senate, where the votes don’t exist for passage. 

Trump last month even canceled an event for one of the only major bills Congress has passed this year — designed to increase the supply and lower the costs of housing — and later refused to sign it because he’s frustrated the Senate has not passed the separate election security bill.  

Thune said Monday, “I mean, if it’s anything that [the House] wants to see become law,” attaching SAVE to it makes it “a challenge.”

“We’re looking for all legislative windows or opportunities to do that, but there are limitations on what we can do here,” he said. 

Aside from slowing down legislation, the SAVE snafu has bred a nasty blame game.

“Seems to me the Senate is actually controlled by the parliamentarian, not the Republicans over there,” said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., referring to the Senate’s inability to act on portions of SAVE during the previous reconciliation round. 

“The American people need to start calling their senators, because we have a Republican-controlled Senate right now,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., Tuesday. “There is zero excuse as to why the Senate is not doing what they promised to do to the American people, and also too, every single one of those senators ran on President Trump’s election platform, and yet they’re doing nothing.”

At least one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, sides with Democrats in arguing that all the blame can’t fall on the minority party during a trifecta. 

“I think it’s ironic that we control the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the White House, and we’re yelling ‘election fraud,’” Massie said in a video posted on his social media account. “I mean, we won all the damn elections. … We’re wasting the opportunity that the voters gave us.”

“You don’t take responsibility for anything,” House Rules ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., told Republicans in a Rules meeting Monday. “This idea that somehow, you can’t get anything done — but the stuff you do get done, unfortunately, is bad for the American people. But everything is somebody else’s fault, it’s never your fault.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring, said the GOP “had some good experiences, but the razor-thin margins could grossly overstate just how much control we have over the capital.”

“I think if we could have just gotten some of the members to recognize some of their priorities are never going to happen … if they looked at the art of the possible and kind of moved more into the 35-yard line of conservative ideology, we’d get a lot more done,” he said. “But I think people are going for the end zone, and we’re not near as productive as we could be.”

Jacob Fulton contributed to this report.