The Trump administration on Monday pressed Senate negotiators to strike a Sept. 30 cutoff on combat operations from the $67.4 billion Iran war supplemental, arguing that the ceasefire announced from Islamabad over the weekend had rendered the deadline both unnecessary and, in the words of one senior official, “a signal we do not want to send 36 hours before a truce takes effect.”

The White House push, conveyed through a series of calls and Capitol Hill meetings beginning shortly after Sunday’s network shows, threatened to scramble a Senate compromise that had appeared all but settled before mediators in Islamabad delivered their joint statement Saturday evening. It also reopened a debate that had seemed, briefly, to have been overtaken by events: whether Congress, having spent the past week asserting itself on questions of war authority, would continue to do so once shooting was set to stop.

Vice President JD Vance led the administration’s outreach Monday morning, meeting first with Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, and then with a smaller bipartisan group that included Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the three principal sponsors of the war powers resolution that had cleared the Senate 56-42 on Friday evening. A senior administration official, granted anonymity to describe the meetings, said Vance had offered to accept “essentially every other condition in the committee package” — including the 45-day reporting cycle adopted on the floor last week and the doubled casualty-assistance line — if the Sept. 30 cutoff were removed.

“The ceasefire takes effect Wednesday,” the official said. “A statutory date that assumes the war is still being prosecuted in September is not a date we can sign.”

Collins, emerging from the late-morning meeting, told reporters in the Dirksen basement that the conversation had been “candid and serious” and that she would convene the conferees Tuesday morning to consider a possible modification. But she stopped short of endorsing the administration’s request. “The cutoff was the conscience of this bill,” Collins said. “If we are going to change it, we are going to change it because the facts on the ground warrant it, not because the White House wants it changed.”

The supplemental, which passed the Senate on a 79-19 vote Friday night, is now in conference with a House version that contains neither a combat cutoff nor a casualty-assistance increase. House conferees, led by Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, R-Okla., had been expected to accept the Senate’s conditions in full as the price of moving the package to the president’s desk before the end of the week. The ceasefire announcement, several aides said, had changed that arithmetic overnight.

“There is a real argument now that a cutoff dated to the end of September presumes a war that is supposed to end on Wednesday,” said a senior House Republican aide familiar with the conference posture, granted anonymity to describe internal discussions. “Members who held their nose on the cutoff Friday are not sure they should hold their nose on it Tuesday.”

The political ground had shifted further by midday. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a Navy veteran who had voted for both the supplemental and the war powers resolution, told reporters he would consider replacing the calendar cutoff with what he called “a condition-based equivalent” — an automatic sunset triggered by a 60-day uninterrupted hold in the ceasefire or by a certification from the secretary of defense that no U.S. forces remained in combat against Iranian or Iran-aligned forces. “If the war is over, the cutoff has done its job,” Kelly said. “If it is not, the cutoff stays in some form.”

Kaine, asked whether the war powers resolution itself should be revisited in light of the ceasefire, was emphatic that it should not. “The resolution is about the next war as much as it is about this one,” he said. “A ceasefire is not a repeal of Article I.”

The resolution, which President Donald Trump has said he will veto, must now travel to the House, where leadership has not yet scheduled a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Monday only that he would “consult the conference.”

Trump, speaking to reporters before boarding Marine One for a fundraising stop in Pennsylvania, sounded a more conciliatory note than the White House had publicly struck on Friday. “We’re working with the Senate, we’re working with the House, and we’re going to get a deal — a good deal — for our troops, who deserve it,” Trump said. Pressed on whether he would sign the supplemental if it retained the cutoff, the president said only that he did not “think we’re going to be there.”

Press Secretary Karoline Renfro, in the afternoon briefing, framed the cutoff as a matter of operational rather than constitutional concern. “The president supports congressional oversight. What he cannot sign is a date that tells our adversaries when the United States plans to stop fighting, when the United States is actively trying to ensure that the fighting stops on the terms we have negotiated.”

Reema Khoury, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide now at the Stimson Center, said the administration’s position was tactically reasonable but unlikely to fully prevail. “The Senate did not write that cutoff to send a signal to Tehran. It wrote it because 358 service members are dead, and because the chamber concluded, correctly, that an open-ended authorization had drifted into something neither party had authorized,” Khoury said. “Replacing the date with a conditional sunset is the obvious landing zone. Removing it entirely is not.”

The Senate, meanwhile, prepared for a long week. Conferees on the supplemental were expected to meet Tuesday morning, with the goal of a final conference report by Wednesday — the day the ceasefire is to take effect. Schumer told reporters Monday afternoon that he expected the chamber to remain in session through Friday, and that he was “in regular conversation with the speaker about timing in the House.”

Aides in both parties said the next 48 hours would determine whether the supplemental cleared Congress before the truce or after it — and, with it, whether the country’s first comprehensive legislative reckoning with the Iran war ended on the terms the Senate had set, or on terms the White House was scrambling to renegotiate.