House Republicans plan to strategize with President-elect Trump on a path forward to fund the government beyond the current Dec. 20 deadline, conference leaders said Tuesday.

After retaking the White House and Senate in last week’s elections and appearing likely to retain control of the House, Republicans are seeking to maximize their influence in setting spending levels for the remainder of the 2025 fiscal year. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and his deputies have floated various proposals, including passing another stopgap that would keep agencies funded at their current levels through March or approving projects of financing law for the entire year that set agency spending until the end of the fiscal year in September.

For now, top Republicans plan to ask Trump for his preference and decide how to proceed. Johnson said Tuesday that he had already spoken briefly with Trump about government funding, but planned to travel to Trump-owned Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Thursday to discuss the issue in more depth. Trump also plans to address House Republicans at the Capitol on Wednesday ahead of his Oval Office meeting with President Biden.

Johnson said he would be at Trump’s home and compound “all weekend making plans.”

In September, as lawmakers negotiated ways to avoid a shutdown at the end of the month, Trump encouraged Republicans to close federal agencies unless Congress responded to his unsubstantiated claims that the no vote -citizens was widespread. Ultimately, Johnson agreed to a short-term continuing resolution through December 20, and the measure easily passed both chambers.

Senate Democrats, who will lose their majority in January, had hoped that after the election the focus would be on approving appropriations bills for the entire year. The House has passed five of the required 12 annual spending bills, although it did so on party-line votes and at lower spending levels than Republicans and the White House had previously agreed to under the of a two-year budget agreement. The Senate passed 11 of its 12 bills using higher funding totals in mostly bipartisan votes at the committee level, although none were approved on the floor.

Before the election, the House and Senate remained sharply divided on the path forward on appropriations for the full year.

To date, Republican reappropriators have set aside part of President Biden’s two-year budget deal with House Republicans last year in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. Instead, they limited themselves to the spending levels detailed in writing in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. In addition to that law, Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., agreed to other mechanisms that would eventually allow discretionary defense and nondefense spending to increase by 1% in fiscal year 2025.

If Congress attempts to finalize funding for fiscal year 2025 before the end of the current session, it will face a tight schedule. Senate Democrats suggested they would use as much of the limited remaining time as possible to confirm judges and other Biden nominees who would outlast the end of his presidency, while Johnson insisted he would not introduce not an omnibus package of all the annual spending bills. for a single vote.

Congress opted to delay funding until 2017 after Trump’s first victory in 2016, leading to a series of delays as the president pushed lawmakers to fund his proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The agencies did not receive their full funding until May of that year.