Washington — President Trump met Wednesday with key conservative holdouts to the massive budget package containing his second-term agenda, before GOP leaders made concessions to fiscal hawks and blue-state Republicans — as leadership aims to hold a vote on the bill possibly within hours.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, returned from the meeting between Mr. Trump and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, calling it “productive.” Johnson said the plan is still to move forward as expected, with the details of the final version of the legislation unveiled later Wednesday.
“There’s not much changing here, because the underlying product we thought was so well done,” Johnson told reporters ahead of its release.
Timing for a floor vote is also unclear. Johnson said it could happen Wednesday night or Thursday morning. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, said he expected the vote would take place Wednesday night.
“We’ve got to keep the bill moving,” Scalise said. “Because there’s a lot more steps in the process. The Senate, of course, has to go and do their work.”
But before a floor vote, the legislation will have to make it through the Rules Committee, the last stop for most legislation before the full House votes on a measure. The committee began meeting shortly after 1 a.m. early Wednesday morning, and was still meeting late into Wednesday evening. Eighteen hours after the committee began meeting, House Republican leadership unveiled a “manager’s amendment,” which included highly anticipated changes to the legislation that had been negotiated in recent days.
The developments on Wednesday came after Mr. Trump also met Tuesday morning with House Republicans as leaders ramped up their efforts to push the bill over its last hurdle in the Rules Committee before it can get to the House floor for a vote.
The president put pressure on members to fall in line Tuesday as the party’s dueling factions threatened to upend the plan with demands that will be difficult to reconcile. When he arrived on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump suggested that any GOP member who doesn’t back what he and Republicans have deemed the “big, beautiful bill” would be “knocked out so fast,” a warning to a handful of “grandstanders.”
“It’s the biggest bill ever passed, and we’ve got to get it done,” Mr. Trump said.
Johnson can only afford three defections in a floor vote, if all members are present and voting, given his slim majority. All Democrats are expected to oppose it.
“I would say that if the vote were held right now, it dies a painful death,” Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee said Tuesday evening.
But a day later, on Wednesday evening, Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota expressed confidence in the outcome: “I believe we’ll have the votes.”
Rules committee meets overnight — as conservatives push for more spending cuts
When the Rules Committee began meeting early Wednesday, Democrats chastised Republicans over the timing.
“If you guys think this ugly bill is so damn beautiful, like Trump keeps saying, you should have the courage to debate it in primetime,” Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, said.
Republicans, however, rejected the request to adjourn the meeting until daylight hours. And the committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, said the Rules Committee “has a long tradition of meeting late into the evening and reporting legislation long after most of America has gone to bed.”
The committee’s rare overnight meeting took place as Republican leadership races to pass the budget package before its self-imposed Memorial Day deadline.
Johnson has been meeting with the different factions in recent days to hear the demands and build a consensus around a modified version of the legislation that was produced by nearly a dozen House committees.
More conservative members, who are upset that that bill does not make steep enough spending cuts to significantly bring down the deficit, have pushed for Medicaid work requirements to kick in much sooner than a 2029 deadline. They also want to eliminate all the clean energy subsidies that were implemented under the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law by former President Joe Biden.
After right-wing opposition appeared to remain firm overnight, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters Wednesday morning the White House offered a proposal that would enable these holdouts to back the budget bill, if it were to be included in the package.
“I don’t think it can be done today,” Harris said. “I think that there is a pathway forward that we can see.”
Within the manager’s amendment released late Wednesday was a provision that would move up the timeline for Medicaid work requirements to kick in from the beginning of 2029 to the end of 2026, while also phasing out some of the clean energy subsidies earlier than previously outlined in the package.
Conservatives have also been pushing to change the rate by which the federal government pays states for Medicaid, a point of contention with moderates, who have warned against larger cuts to the program.
Johnson reiterated earlier this week that the change has “been off the table for quite some time,” however. And Mr. Trump said ahead of the meeting Tuesday morning that “we’re not doing anything cutting of anything meaningful,” adding that on Medicaid, “the only thing we’re cutting is waste, fraud and abuse.”
Before the manager’s amendment’s release, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that the original version of the bill would add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. And a new preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office found it would increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion.
SALT conflict may be resolved
Right-wing Republicans weren’t the only ones with objections to the legislation, though. Blue-state Republicans opposed a provision on the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, and they threatened to withhold their votes unless their demands were met.
Prior to the SALT deduction cap, which was imposed by the 2017 Trump tax law, taxpayers could deduct all their state and local taxes from their federal taxes, which some policymakers have said mainly benefits wealthy homeowners in states with high taxes, such as New York and California. But others also pointed out that the $10,000 cap is increasingly impacting middle-class homeowners who live in regions where property taxes are rising.
Republicans who represent blue states balked at the $30,000 cap outlined in the package and reached an agreement to further increase it to $40,000. The manager’s amendment included a provision that increases the SALT deduction to $40,000 per household for incomes up to $500,000.
GOP Rep. Mike Lawler of New York said Wednesday night that with the increase he believed all those opposed to that provision were now on board.
Mr. Trump weighed in on the SALT issue Tuesday, suggesting that he opposes raising the cap because he claimed Democratic governors from states like New York, Illinois and California would benefit, calling them the “biggest” beneficiaries. But after the group of moderates met with the speaker Tuesday evening, Johnson indicated that they had “found a point of compromise.”
According to a senior White House official, Mr. Trump told the House GOP conference during the meeting that they should not let division over the SALT cap get in the way of the bill, and said they should not touch Medicaid, except for addressing waste, fraud and abuse, along with cutting benefits for noncitizens and imposing work requirements. The official said Mr. Trump also made clear he wants every Republican to vote “yes” on the bill, while saying he’s losing patience with the remaining holdouts.