Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry told Republican lawmakers in a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning that the tally sets a record for the most “undecided” responses. | Getty House Republicans to fall back on more modest spending plan

House GOP leaders are resorting to Plan B on their spending strategy after falling woefully short of the support needed to pass a massive government funding package without Democratic votes.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced Tuesday night that the House will vote next week on a measure that includes just four of the 12 bills needed to fund the federal government. That decision comes after GOP leaders failed to get enough Republican support to pass the full dozen without the help of their minority-party counterparts.


The so-called “minibus” or “security-bus” will include measures that would fund the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Legislative Branch, the Energy Department and water projects.

After launching a whipping operation Monday night to gauge interest in voting on the full spate of spending bills, GOP leaders walked away with a tally of dozens of Republican lawmakers who said they couldn’t commit — as well as several hard “no’s” — to voting for the partisan bundle of 12 bills, according to Republican lawmakers and aides.

The survey underscored GOP leadership's ongoing difficulty in appeasing the party’s most fiscally conservative wing while still holding onto support from moderates, and serves as a reminder that ideological differences within the House Republican conference are likely to force the majority to continue making deals with Democrats to keep the government funded.

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The initial vote count was so dismal, in fact, that Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) told Republican lawmakers in a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning that the tally set a record for the most “undecided” responses, according to people who were in the room.

Although McCarthy instructed his members to read up over the weekend on the fiscal 2018 funding proposals crafted so far in committee, several Republican appropriators have said their colleagues didn’t do their homework and were withholding support because they aren’t familiar enough with the spending bills, which are each more than 100 pages long.

“Getting people to commit to a huge number when they haven’t seen the bill is pretty hard,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who chairs the spending subcommittee in charge of funding the departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services. “Only the appropriators commit.”

Cole said one of his Republican counterparts asked him Monday night what the spending committee ended up deciding on funding for the National Institutes of Health — a spending level that was announced, and highly publicized, five days before.

Hours before House Republicans announced they would resort to bringing the smaller package of spending bills to the floor, Democrats were already seizing on the idea to highlight their Republican counterparts’ struggles after years of promising “regular order” through the spending cycle.

“I don’t think Republicans on their own can pass any budget but the national security bills,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Tuesday.

Even though many of the spending levels in the 12-bill package would have been too low to clear both chambers, the strategy was alluring to House Republicans who yearn to return home for August recess with the ability to say they successfully passed a government funding bill that includes major GOP priorities.

A spokesman for Rep. Tom Graves, who came up with the idea of passing the larger package with only GOP votes before August, told POLITICO earlier Tuesday that the Georgia Republican had been trying to win his colleagues' support by highlighting “the big conservative wins like border wall, increasing funds for military, cutting spending, slashing regulations.”

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.