BEACON HILL passed another annual mile marker with House approval of an annual budget bill, and as is often the case, the road there was more interesting for the way it revealed policy and political fault lines than for the nuts and bolts of spending state dollars.

Yes, representatives added some $81 million to the bottom line, but they also tilted at times into discussion of immigration enforcement, clean energy mandates, communication between incarcerated individuals and their loved ones, and much more.

In most cases, the topics got a few minutes in the spotlight because Republicans pushed for public discussion and standalone recorded votes. And virtually every time, Democrats flexed their power-in-numbers strength and circled the wagons to reject GOP proposals to tack serious policy changes onto the budget.

That doesn’t mean they limited amendments only to earmarks. House Democrats slipped a few eye-catching initiatives of their own into the mega-amendments they hashed out in private, including language prohibiting the Department of Mental Health from cutting caseworker levels beyond fiscal 2025 levels.

Another provision quietly tucked into the House budget would require employers with 25 or more workers who do not already offer a qualified retirement plan to automatically enroll workers into a state-run retirement savings plan, or else face fines.

While Republicans generated commentary and recorded votes on several high-profile topics, they did not present a unified front over the course of the week.

Only a subset of the 25-member House GOP caucus expressed support for roll call votes on several tax policy proposals from Rep. Marc Lombardo of Billerica, and the same pattern played out again when first-term Rep. John Gaskey tried to force a roll call during a debate about transgender athletes in high school sports.

The kerfuffle over tax amendments prompted Lombardo, who mounted a failed bid to become House GOP leader at the start of the term, to call for House Minority Leader Brad Jones to resign from that post.

“This is unbelievable. This is absolutely treasonous from the Republican leader to not want to give roll calls for the taxpayers,” Lombardo said in a video he posted to social media from outside the House chamber. “You’re not hurting me. The amendment went down just the same. What you’ve done is hurt the party, for candidates that want to run, and you’ve hurt the taxpayers who want to understand how their representatives vote. Brad Jones conspired with the Democrats today. I expect more of that this week. He needs to resign.”

Jones fired back, saying the lack of unified Republican support for roll calls on Lombardo’s idea was a result of the Billerica rep not showing up to private meetings, according to the Boston Herald.

“I’m not going to go waste my time working with people who just want to kick me. It’s kind of human nature. It’s not Republican, not Democrat … it’s just human nature,” Jones said, per the Herald. “He’s obviously still hurting over the fact that he got smoked.”

Said Lombardo: “Brad Jones might be the Republican manager but he certainly is not the Republican leader. Leaders take care of their team and do what’s right for the team and lift everybody up. We don’t try to create division in the ranks. And that’s what Brad did earlier this week. Perhaps he’s upset that he’s getting local opposition for him supporting massive earmarks that the Democrats are putting in and actively conspiring with the Democrats against Republican initiatives.”

The budget now moves across the hall to the Senate, where the top Democrat this week cautioned the plan the Senate plans to pass this month might shift considerably later in the year if federal funds are pulled back.

Senate President Karen Spilka said the budget that makes its way back to Gov. Maura Healey’s desk “may not be the final budget if some of these cuts, or many of them, unfortunately prove true.”

Beacon Hill Democrats have spent months talking up the damage of potential federal actions, while not making spending adjustments and expressing hope that the Washington funding faucet will stay in the open position.

The governor, often a vocal critic of Trump, finds herself walking a fine line these days, especially as peers like Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan draws criticism and interest from some corners for actively fostering a relationship with the president.

“Any governor in any state wants to have a good working relationship with the federal administration, and that continues to be the case,” Healey said. “What is also clear after 100 days is that this federal administration is finding ways to hurt our states left and right.”

Before they get to their annual budget rewrite, senators will take up another spending bill putting to use about $1.3 billion in collected-but-not-appropriated revenue from the voter-approved surtax on wealthy households.

The draft that emerged this week augurs tricky negotiations between House and Senate Democrats.

Both the House and Healey proposed directing most of that money toward transportation and the T in particular, where recent service improvements could be threatened by a budget gap. The Senate, however, suggested a more even education-transportation split and less than half as much one-time MBTA funding as did the other two corners of the Big Three.

Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues said his team wanted to “maintain as close to a 50-50 split as possible between education and transportation,” describing “serious concerns” about special education costs in school districts.

The spending dispute is one of the first big pressure points this term for House and Senate Democrats, who four months in still have not agreed to final rules reforms they touted as a way to boost transparency.

Other signs of tension are emerging, like when House budget chief Aaron Michlewitz capped off completion of his chamber’s annual budget bill by taking a shot at the Senate.

Less than an hour after the engrossment vote, Michlewitz circulated an email listing which representatives attended which Ways and Means Committee hearings in recent months — in the process resurfacing a House-Senate disagreement over in-person attendance requirements.

“Per the rules proposals passed by the House, our intention is to regularly publish this committee member attendance information on the legislature’s website,” Michlewitz wrote. “However to this point we have been unable to do so, because the Senate has not allowed Legislative Information Services, our joint IT department, to publicly post House member committee attendance.”

Zing! And on the subject of transparency, the Ways and Means Committee that Michlewitz leads is one of the few on Beacon Hill that notify the press when they are voting to move bills out of committee.

The state Department of Public Utilities also ruffled feathers this week with a sudden regulatory action further reducing how much gas companies can charge customers for replacing pipes.

DPU chair James Van Nostrand said the change would provide savings for ratepayers at a time of high energy costs, slamming gas companies for “costing the state’s ratepayers billions for over a decade” via “unnecessary” Gas System Enhancement Plan projects.

But some figures are less than thrilled. The business-backed Mass Coalition for Sustainable Energy called on regulators to rethink the order “and ignore unrealistic, ideologically driven assumptions that put our safety and economic future at risk.”