WASHINGTON — House Republicans are ready to vote on President Donald Trump’s $4.5 trillion tax breaks and spending cuts bill Thursday after being up all night persuading skeptical holdouts to drop their opposition by the president’s July 4 deadline.
Final debates began in the predawn hours after another chaotic day, and night, at the Capitol. House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted the House would meet the holiday deadline after the Senate approved Trump’s signature domestic policy package on the narrowest vote.
“Our way is to plow through and get it done,” Johnson said, emerging in the middle of the night from a series of closed-door meetings. “We will meet our July 4th deadline.”
The outcome would be a milestone for the president and his party, a longshot effort to compile a long list of GOP priorities into what they call his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” an 800-plus page package. With Democrats unified in opposition, the bill will become a defining measure of Trump’s return to the White House with Republican control of Congress.
The package’s priority is $4.5 trillion in tax breaks enacted in Trump’s first term, in 2017, that would expire if Congress failed to act, along with new ones. There’s also a hefty investment in national security and Trump’s deportation agenda and to help develop the “Golden Dome” defensive system over the U.S.
To help offset the costs of lost tax revenue, the package includes $1.2 trillion in cutbacks to the Medicaid health care and food stamps, largely by imposing new work requirements, including for some parents and older people, and a massive rollback of green energy investments.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the package will add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage.
“This was a generational opportunity to deliver the most comprehensive and consequential set of conservative reforms in modern history, and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” said Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the House Budget Committee chair.
Democrats unified against the bill as a tax giveaway to the rich paid for on the backs of the most vulnerable in society, what they called “trickle down cruelty.”
Hauling the package this far in Congress has been difficult from the start. Republicans have struggled mightily with the bill nearly every step of the way in the House and Senate, often succeeding only by the narrowest of margins: just one vote.
In the Senate, Vice President JD Vance broke the tie vote after three Republicans including Susan Collins of Maine sided with Democrats. Maine’s congressional delegation is united against the bill, whose Medicaid work requirements are expected to drop 31,000 people from coverage in the first year, according to a state estimate. Hospitals expect major budget hits.
“The Senate has only made the bill worse,” U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine’s Trump-friendly 2nd District, wrote in a post this week.
The slim 220-212 majority in the House leaves Republicans little room for defections. It looked like conservatives holding out for steeper reductions were going to force changes, but they acceded to party leaders overnight. A morning roll call dragged for about seven hours, while an evening vote stalled for more than five.
Trump himself worked the phones and lashed out on social media. Lawmakers were being told the administration could provide executive actions, projects or other provisions they needed in their districts back home.
“The president’s message was, ‘We’re on a roll,’” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina. “He wants to see this.”
The alternative of bucking the president on his signature second-term package, carried grave political risks. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had been on the receiving end of Trump’s lashings, announced he would not seek reelection shortly before voting against the bill.
In many ways, the package is a repudiation of the agendas of the last two Democratic presidents, a chiseling away at the Medicaid expansion from Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and a pullback of Joe Biden’s climate change strategies in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Story by Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Joey Cappelletti and Matt Brown and BDN writer Michael Shepherd.
