Brady started to answer, then dissolved into chuckles. “Comfort?” repeated the craggy Texan, who resembles a cross between a high-school football coach and a bulldog. “I’m gonna give ‘em a hug—all of them, every one that shows up!”

The assembled reporters cracked up. It was a good line—and a light-hearted admission that Brady and the rest of the “Big 6” reformers (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Trump’s chief economics adviser Gary Cohn) have vanishingly little to offer fellow Republicans in the way of specifics. As House Freedom Caucuser Jim Jordan told me after the Wednesday confab (with a nod to the goofy, Reagan-era Wendy’s ad): “Where’s the beef? Well, where’s the bill—or at least where are more particulars and details?”

Republican leaders keep stressing that they want to get the whole team—House, Senate, and White House—on “the same page” before rolling out their new baby. “We do not want a situation similar to health care, where we did ours, then the Senate tried something different, and the administration didn’t have a plan of its own,” said veteran Representative Tom Cole. But the midterms loom, and the legislative window is closing. Wednesday, Brady promised colleagues some sort of framework to peruse on September 25. At that point, look for things to get really hairy.

The big issue on everyone’s mind: As noted whenever the words “tax reform” are uttered, under reconciliation, a bill cannot add to the long-term deficit—that is, it can’t blow a hole in the budget that extends beyond 10 years. This means that the cost of any cut—such as, say, dropping the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent or 20 percent—must be offset.

The reform blueprint Paul Ryan was peddling last year balanced the numbers using a Border Adjustment Tax. By placing a levy on imports while making export revenues tax deductible, a BAT would have increased tax revenues by $1 trillion or so over the next decade. The provision was not, however, beloved by import-reliant businesses (including retail giants like Wal-Mart), who linked arms and groused, loudly, until the BAT was officially declared dead in July.

This has left reform architects in the vexing position of scurrying to fill that $1 trillion-plus hole.

During the BAT battle, House leadership argued that, if the provision died, there was absolutely, positively no way to make up the difference. Poppycock. There are scads of loopholes and rates that could be tinkered with to achieve deficit-neutral reform. Unfortunately for Republicans, most are likely to provoke as much (or more) political blowback as the BAT. It is thus totally unsurprising that, even as September 25 looms, the Big 6 are reportedly nowhere close to agreeing on how to fill that big ol’ hole.