Speaker Mike Johnson, short of the votes for a megabill to deliver President Trump’s agenda, looked around the conference table in his ornate office in the Capitol on a recent morning and faced a pack of disgruntled Republicans — each demanding something different.
There was Representative Chip Roy, the Texas congressman who was insisting the bill include steep cuts to Medicaid. And there was Representative Andrew Garbarino, the New Yorker who has pledged to tank any bill that would reduce Medicaid coverage for his constituents.
Representative Nick LaLota of New York, who has said the legislation’s rollback of Biden-era clean energy tax credits goes too far, was also on hand. So was Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, who is urging Republican leaders to repeal those tax breaks completely.
The tableau of attendees, summoned by Mr. Johnson late last week as he sought to gather support for what Mr. Trump has called the “big, beautiful bill,” encapsulated the precarious seesaw the speaker faces as he labors to shepherd the sprawling tax and budget legislation through the House. The factions hold vastly different, competing priorities for major pieces of the domestic policy package, and encompass the divergent ideological, political and regional interests at play inside the G.O.P.
For every bloc with one demand that must be met before its members agree to support the measure, there is another demanding the opposite.
And with his tiny margin of control, Mr. Johnson can afford to lose only three Republicans on the bill, which is expected to be uniformly opposed by Democrats, if all members are present and voting. The predicament helps explain why the legislation faltered in a key committee last week, how difficult it will be for Republicans to push it through the House in time to meet a self-imposed Memorial Day deadline and why — even if they can — it faces an uncertain fate in the Senate.
“We had a good sampling of the conference in my conference room here for the last couple of hours,” Mr. Johnson said after his meeting with Republican holdouts late last week. “Not everybody’s going to be delighted with every provision in a bill this large, but everyone can be satisfied, and we’re very, very close to that.”
That remains to be seen, given the depth of disagreement among crucial constituencies.
Conservatives pressing for more cuts
The fiscal hawks struck first, defeating the bill on Friday in the critical Budget Committee and blocking the legislation from advancing toward a vote on the House floor. Mr. Roy and three other Republicans demanded changes to the bill, then allowed it to advance late Sunday night after G.O.P. leaders assured them the bill would be modified to resolve their concerns.
Their chief complaint has been that the package does not make enough structural changes to federal programs to substantially bring down the deficit. They pressed to speed new work requirements for Medicaid recipients, which under the bill would not take effect until 2029, after the next presidential election. They were also dismayed that the legislation, while it would curtail most of the big tax credits for clean energy contained in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, would not eliminate all of them.
Those concerns are widely shared by the most conservative members of the House G.O.P. conference, who hold a deep ideological aversion to federal deficits that is at odds both with Mr. Trump’s view and the prevailing approach of the rest of their party.
A group of about three dozen Republicans — many in the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, but others as well — who view themselves as fiscal hawks have been strategizing on a group text and meeting at the Capitol Hill home of one of the members. Most of them signed a letter earlier this year saying they would not vote for a bill that would add to the federal deficit.
The legislation as currently written would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that calls for lower deficits.
Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri said that he had been proud of the group last month when they staged a revolt that forced Mr. Johnson to delay a vote on the budget blueprint outlining the contours of the bill. That prompted White House officials and the top Senate Republican to pledge that their concerns would be addressed later in the process.
In a lengthy statement at the time, Mr. Roy said those promises included “a minimum of $1 trillion in real reductions in mandatory spending” — the portion of federal funding not controlled by Congress, most of which goes to entitlement programs for the poor, older people, veterans and others. He also said the president had committed to “efforts to fully repeal the damaging ‘green scam’ subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act” and “Medicaid reforms.”
“That was a win for that group, and I think it was monumental,” Mr. Burlison said. “The question is, will it pan out? How much of that will we actually get? And right now we’re in the middle of it.”
Those targets run squarely counter to what another crucial faction — more moderate lawmakers from politically competitive districts — have said they want.
Swing-district Republicans opposing Medicaid cuts
While the Republican Party has lurched sharply to the right in recent years, it owes its majority in the House in large part to victories in politically competitive districts in California and New York, two blue states where many constituents rely on programs including Medicaid.
That has made a number of the most politically vulnerable House Republicans — a bloc that party leaders typically defer to in an attempt to keep their majority — major players in the debate over Medicaid, perhaps the biggest sticking point in the legislation.
Members of this group often call for spending cuts but do not share the ideological opposition to deficits held by their more conservative colleagues. They typically eschew big reductions to social programs that affect their constituents, fearing they could lose their seats as a result.
It was at their behest that Republican leaders ultimately dropped two of the most aggressive options they were considering to cut Medicaid costs.
“We’ve had a couple of comments from people saying that seems to be too far for them to go,” said Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation, as written, would cause 8.6 million more Americans to be uninsured at the end of a decade, while reducing federal spending on health care by more than $700 billion over that period.
Republicans fighting to preserve clean energy tax breaks
Some of the same politically endangered lawmakers object to the portion of the bill that would roll back most of the big tax credits for clean energy projects contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, many of which were expected to last a decade.
Representative Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, who was one of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s most valued recruits and flipped a Democratic seat in 2022, has emerged as an unlikely proponent of some of the tax credits established by the law. The breaks have been a boon to his Tucson-based district, where Lucid Motors, a major American electric vehicle company, expanded its factory expecting to be able to reap the rewards of the law.
“We must ensure certainty for current and future energy investments to meet the nation’s growing power demand and protect our constituents from higher energy costs,” Mr. Ciscomani said in a joint statement with 13 other House Republicans.
Conservatives like Mr. Roy join Mr. Ciscomani in being unhappy with the bill’s approach to tax credits.
But while Mr. Ciscomani and his peers believe the bill’s writers went too far in targeting the provisions, Mr. Roy and his ilk believe they did not go far enough. That was one of the main reasons the Texas Republicans and three other conservative lawmakers on the Budget Committee blocked the legislation from being approved on Friday.
“When I told my constituents I would fight IRA subsidies enriching leftists and allowing solar and battery facilities across the Texas Hill Country,” he wrote on social media hours after he derailed his party’s bill, “I meant it.”
SALT crusaders from high-tax states
One of the biggest outstanding obstacles for House Republican leaders to resolve is how the legislation handles state and local taxes.
Representatives from high-tax states — New York, California and New Jersey — have picked a fight with their leaders over what they say was a critical campaign promise several of them made that helped their party win back the majority.
The tax law Republicans passed in 2017 imposed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes Americans can write off on their federal returns, and the bill now under discussion would triple that, bringing the cap to $30,000. But Republicans from high-tax states are pressing to lift that cap substantially more, and have said they are willing to take down the bill if it does not accomplish that.
They say their party risks losing its majority if it fails to embrace their demands.
“New York is a donor state, receiving less money back than it sends to the federal government in tax revenue,” Representative Mike Lawler of New York said. “Republicans from blue states such as New York, California and New Jersey were instrumental in delivering the Republican Party its majority in the 119th Congress.”
Conservatives, however, have balked at lifting the cap, arguing that it would amount to an expensive handout to wealthy residents of blue states. A relatively modest change, like doubling the cap for married couples, carries an estimated cost of $230 billion over a decade.
“I’m sure if Congress starts subsidizing high tax blue states they’ll learn their lesson and stop raising taxes,” Mr. Roy wrote sarcastically on social media.
He added: “We are 37 TRILLION IN DEBT. Pound sand.”
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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