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But budget politics, unfortunately for the GOP, comes first. The House Budget Committee approved the package late Wednesday night, a victory for House Budget Committee chair Diane Black (R-Tenn.).

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Politico's Sarah Ferris:

But a huge challenge awaits: Conservatives say the plan’s $203 billion in cuts to mandatory spending over the next decade are too meager, and vow to vote against the budget once it gets to the floor; moderates, meanwhile, say the cuts are too steep, and they’ll try to sink it for that reason. (A similar split is complicating House Republican efforts to pass the 12 annual appropriations bills, Mike DeBonis reports.)

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The potential impasse has budget experts puzzling over what maneuvers Republican leaders could employ to salvage a tax code rewrite if they can’t muster the support from their own ranks for the spending plan. In short, they have options, but they aren’t pretty — and experts disagree over how they can be used.

The most straightforward option remains the one Republicans are pursuing now -- passing a budget with what's known as reconciliation instructions to allow GOP leadership in the Senate to negotiate a tax package without Democratic support.

But even if House GOP leaders discover a legislative wormhole that allows them to squeeze through a package opposed by the wings of the conference, the Senate presents its own problem. Defense spending in the House plan busts the cap imposed on it by the 2011 Budget Control Act, so Senate Republicans would need to work with their Democratic colleagues to approve it in that chamber — a longshot. Otherwise, Senate Republicans could come up with their own spending levels, forcing them to go back to the bargaining table with House negotiators.

That’s a lot of iffy, time-consuming hurdles just to lay the groundwork for the tax project that Republicans would like to wrap up by the end of the year. “It’s going to be extremely difficult to get a budget conference agreement before the end of the year,” says Bill Hoagland, senior vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former top Senate budget aide.

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So some Republican insiders expect lawmakers to skip the difficult work of forging a spending agreement and attempt to rally instead behind a shell budget. Such a measure would hold spending levels constant to serve as a vehicle for reconciliation instructions on a tax revamp. The challenge to that strategy is that House Republicans already employed it, back in January, to unlock the streamlined process for their health-care package. Conservatives fumed then but went along with the understanding the next spending blueprint would include the government-shrinking entitlement cuts they prioritize. Members of the House Freedom Caucus are already signaling they won’t go along with such a plan again.

That leaves the third and most exotic option: Repurposing the reconciliation instructions House Republicans already used to pass their Obamacare replacement bill for a tax overhaul. Hoagland said Senate Republicans could refer the House-passed health-care bill to the two relevant committees, where they’d refashion the measure as a tax package. Budget experts disagree about just how easy that switcheroo would be. One called it a “House of Cards” scenario that wasn’t worth discussing. If Republicans choose to pursue it, there’s an open debate about whether the instructions would expire with the fiscal year, at the end of September, or if they’d remain in force indefinitely, as long as lawmakers don’t pass a new budget resolution to replace the old one. The distinction matters because Republicans are highly unlikely to finish work on a tax package by the end of September.

“It is uncharted and untested territory,” said Ed Lorenzen, a former House Democratic budget aide now with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

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Republicans staring down an empty legislative scorecard may find desperate times call for untested measures.

MARKET MOVERS

— The Trump administration's 100 days of trade talks with China ended with a whimper on Wednesday, as the two sides failed to reach a breakthrough agreement. The Post's Ana Swanson reports: "The United States unsuccessfully pressed China to make a substantial commitment to cut its steel production, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private discussions. U.S. officials also asked China to do more to reduce its trade surplus with the United States and open its market for agriculture, financial services and data flows, the people said. In a terse statement released after the talks, the Treasury Department said that China had “acknowledged our shared objective to reduce the trade deficit which both sides will work cooperatively to achieve.” It also pointed to earlier-announced agreements on issues including credit ratings, electronic payments, liquefied natural gas and American beef." The two sides canceled what was meant to be a celebratory news conference.

Here's another headline that isn't what the White House had in mind for its "Made in America" week, from USA Today: "Carrier to lay off 300 employees on six-month anniversary of Trump's presidency."

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— Meanwhile, the U.S., Canada and Mexico have agreed to move quickly on a NAFTA renegotiation, with the aim of wrapping up by early next year, before Mexico's presidential elections. Reuters’ Anthony Esposito and David Ljunggren report: "The plan is to hold seven rounds of talks at three-week intervals, according to two Mexican officials who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. Described by one Mexican official as a 'very aggressive calendar,' the sources said the goal was to conclude the talks before the electoral campaign was in full swing... The first round of talks to upgrade the accord underpinning over a trillion dollars of trilateral trade between the United States, Mexico and Canada is due to take place in Washington from Aug. 16-20, U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer said on Wednesday."

-- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has been diagnosed with brain cancer, his office said Wednesday night. The Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix said in the statement that following a procedure on Friday to remove a blood clot above McCain’s left eye, a pathology report “revealed that a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot.”

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“The Senator and his family are reviewing further treatment options with his Mayo Clinic care team,” the statement continued. “Treatment options may include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.”

Glioblastoma is an aggressive cancer with a generally poor prognosis. It’s the same type of cancer that killed Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Beau Biden, the son of former vice president Joseph Biden.

MONEY ON THE HILL

— Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) says congressional Republicans will move in a matter of weeks to kill a new rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would make it easier for customers to sue financial institutions. Cotton said in a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that he's optimistic Congress will scrub the rule before lawmakers go home for the August recess, Reuters reports.

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— House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) will be in Lawrence, Mass. today, touring a New Balance factory to highlight the need for a tax code update and conducting a roundtable with small business leaders, per the Associated Press.

TRUMP TRACKER

— Time to update that old saw, “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” It needs a corollary for whose problem it becomes when you owe the bank hundreds of millions, and then you’re elected president, and then you become the subject of a sprawling federal investigation that expands to include your personal finances. It appears the answer is, “both."

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The New York Times’s Ben Protess, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Jesse Drucker dropped this bombshell last night:

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Banking regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele, according to three people briefed on the review who were not authorized to speak publicly. The regulators want to know if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risks. Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators about the Trump accounts, according to two people briefed on the matter. And the bank is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

More from the story:

There is no indication that federal investigators suspect a Russian connection to Mr. Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, according to people briefed on the matter… But separate from Mr. Trump, the German bank has a host of Russian connections. Soon after Mr. Trump took office, the bank settled allegations that it helped Russian investors launder as much as $10 billion through its branches in Moscow, London and New York. In May, the Federal Reserve reached its own settlement with the bank over the money laundering violations

The story appeared an hour after the Times posted a another piece, based on a sit-down with Trump, in which the president issued a veiled threat to Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation, to steer his probe away from his personal finances. From that story: “Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, ‘I would say yes.’ He would not say what he would do about it. ‘I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.’”



POCKET CHANGE

— Maybe not the most surprising news, but a new Bloomberg poll reveals that most Americans hold unfavorable views of Wall Street banks and corporate executives, and they distrust billionaires more than they admire them. Bloomberg's Tom Metcalf and John McCormick: "Despite efforts by Wall Street firms to regain trust since the 2008 financial crisis, fewer than a third of Americans view the industry positively -- unchanged from 2009, according to the latest Bloomberg National Poll... The CEOs have sought to rehabilitate their banks’ brands in the wake of a crisis that left more than 8 million Americans out of work and cost shareholders tens of billions of dollars in fines and legal settlements. Blankfein, for example, created a business standards committee and responded to public outrage over Goldman Sachs’s compensation practices by taking $500 million from bonuses to provide money and advice to budding entrepreneurs through the firm’s 10,000 Small Businesses program."

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THE REGULATORS

— The Trump administration wants to continue an Obama-era initiative to issue national banking licenses to financial-technology firms. Acting Comptroller of the Currenct Keith Noreika laid out the case Wednesday: “We all need the federal banking system to be more inclusive, to accommodate new banks, and to adapt to the changing needs of the marketplace, customers and communities,” he said, the Wall Street Journal's Rachel Witkowski reports.

— The White House is rolling out its plan for scrubbing hundreds of regulations from the books, though the project already risks falling short of the Trump team's goals for it. More, from The Post: "On Thursday, the White House's Office of Management and Budget is planning to release a list of rules it plans to weaken or eliminate. The list will note that 469 proposals that were in the works during the Obama administration have been scrapped, and another 391 have been slowed. The administration is not releasing a full list of which regulations it's targeting until Thursday, but they will run the gamut from significant policy measures to minor procedural measures, said Neomi Rao, who heads the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs...Trump has promised to jettison 80 percent of all federal regulations, a vow that likely means eliminating many thousands of existing policies across the federal government."

CHART TOPPER

DAYBOOK

Today

The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on housing finance reform.

The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade will hold a hearing on “Monetary Policy v. Fiscal Policy”

The Heritage Foundation will hold an event on social and economic trends.

THE FUNNIES

BULL SESSION

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was diagnosed with brain cancer:

Here are President Trump's top 5 miselading claims, so far:

Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort are scheduled to appear before Senate committees next week. Here’s what’s at stake for them:

Made in America vs. Made in the U.S.A.: Trump and manufacturing leaders discuss:

The many trials and tweets of President Trump's travel ban: