Donald Trump and House Republican leaders faced a major setback with their “big, beautiful” bill on Friday as they rushed to push the president’s agenda across the finish line.
The growing feud within the party was blown wide open when conservative GOP members voted to block the legislation focused on taxes and the border in the House Budget Committee.
The final vote was 16 to 21 with five GOP members voting against the bill, sending the committee to recess for the weekend without the legislation moving forward to the House floor.
The humiliating vote came just hours after the president urged members of his party to get behind the legislation.
“Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!’” he wrote on Truth Social.
“We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party. STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!” he added.
The right-wing Republican revolt against the mega-bill puts House Speaker Mike Johnson in a nearly impossible negotiating position ahead of his self-imposed Memorial Day deadline.
The bill cannot pass without the support of GOP hardliners who have expressed frustration over the cost. The said they still do not have the cost analysis on part of the bill from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). They have also called for new Medicaid work requirements to kick in faster.
At the same time, some centrist Republicans are also seeking their own changes.
Several conservative House members, including Chip Roy and Ralph Norman, stormed out of the House Budget Committee meeting just as it was getting underway on Friday, but shared few details on where their efforts to extract significant changes to the legislation stood.
Roy has been one of the most outspoken conservatives against the current legislation as it stands.
The bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation said Monday that the tax breaks in the bill would reduce revenue by $4.9 trillion over a decade even before Trump’s new tax breaks were included.
But Roy has warned the national debt could rise to $20 trillion and called for changes to Medicaid.
“This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits,” Roy yelled at his colleagues in the committee.
“I’m not going to sit here and say that everything is hunky dory when this is the Budget Committee,” he furiously added. “We’re supposed to do something that actually results in balanced budgets, but we’re not doing it.”
Roy said he was a “no” until further changes are made. He was one of several members who said they would not vote for the bill ahead of Friday’s brutal vote.
Congressman Ralph Norman also said he was a hard no on the current bill, while Congressman Andrew Clyde said the legislation “fails to deliver the transformative change Americans were promised.” The three Republican “no” votes were enough to block the bill from moving forward.
Congressman Josh Brecheen also appeared pessimistic before voting against it. He called for changes to the timelines on when some provisions would kick in, but he avoided saying how he was going to vote in his comments.
The House Freedom Caucus said the committee would be working through the weekend to try and force through a compromise.
Reps. Roy, Norman, Brecheen, Clyde and others continue to work in good faith to enact the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — we were making progress before the vote in the Budget Committee and will continue negotiations to further improve the reconciliation package. We are not…
— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) May 16, 2025
If Johnson caves to conservative demands, he risks alienating more moderate Republicans who have raised concerns over the changes to Medicaid, food assistance, and other tax provisions.
A group of House Republicans from higher-tax states have been demanding that the bill raise the cap on state and local tax deductions. The legislation raises the limit from $10,000 to $30,000 for couples, but New York Congressman Mike Lawler was among those who said it does not go far enough.
His push for the cap increase put him at odds with MAGA-favorite Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who singled out her fellow Republican in a heated spat on social media.
Meanwhile, a group of fourteen House Republicans have asked Johnson to make changes as the bill looks to rollback energy tax credits passed under President Biden.
House Democrats spent Friday united against the legislation. No Democrats are expected to vote for the legislation, which they slammed as a billionaire bill, pointing out that multiple provisions that would benefit many Americans, like ending taxes on tips and a new deduction for seniors, would expire in 2028.
House Republicans have an extremely slim majority and need nearly every member to support the legislation for it to pass the House. However, it will then face significant hurdles in the Senate.
House Democrats quoted Republican Senator Josh Hawley multiple times on Friday. The Missouri lawmaker penned an op-ed this week that argued against cutting Medicaid. He wrote that the push to slash health insurance for low-income Americans is “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
An initial estimates by the CBO found 8.6 million people would become uninsured due to health care spending cuts in the legislation, mostly from Medicaid.
The post Feuding Republicans Torpedo Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill appeared first on The Daily Beast.
