House Republican leaders agreed early Wednesday to include deeper tax cuts and an accelerated timetable for Medicaid cuts in their sweeping domestic policy bill, making a number of last-minute changes to win over holdouts as they pushed the measure through a key committee and toward the House floor for a vote.
The changes to what President Trump calls the “big, beautiful bill,” which came out of extensive negotiations between Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans from disparate factions, still must clear the powerful House Rules Committee. That panel began meeting to debate the package at 1 a.m., well before the modifications had been finalized, in a session that stretched for hours while Republicans hammered out a deal that could win enough votes to pass.
“We’re meeting in the dead of night to consider a terrible bill, and you haven’t even drafted or shared some of the most critical parts of the bill,” Representative Mary Gay Scanlon, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said at 2:40 a.m.
Should the bill advance from the committee to the House floor, it could receive a vote before the end of the week. But its prospects are not yet assured.
The latest version of the measure emerged less than 24 hours after Mr. Trump visited Capitol Hill to pressure Republicans to put aside their reservations and unify around the wide-ranging package, which would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of it with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education and clean energy programs. Mr. Johnson, his deputies and White House officials spent days haggling with rank-and-file Republicans who were seeking changes to the legislation.
If the deal holds, the House will be on track to pass a sprawling bill — entitled the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — which would largely keep current tax rates in place while temporarily enacting new cuts like Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to not tax tips or overtime. While cuts to social programs would cover some of the cost, nonpartisan budget scorekeepers have estimated the measure would still increase deficits by trillions of dollars.
The bill, which is expected to face changes in the Senate, is a reflection of competing Republican factions with disparate priorities. A group of fiscal conservatives demanded structural changes and cuts to Medicaid and other government programs to hold down the overall cost of the bill, while more moderate and politically vulnerable lawmakers sought to protect Medicaid, larger tax breaks for their constituents and the preservation of clean energy tax credits.
Among the last-minute changes Republicans made to the bill was to further increase the limit on the state and local tax deduction, currently set at $10,000, which had been set to triple to $30,000 under the original draft. After days of negotiations with a group of Republicans from high-tax states who wanted a much larger increase, leaders agreed to increase the limit to $40,000. The size of the deduction would shrink for people making more than $500,000, though that level, as well as the $40,000 cap, would increase over time.
Republicans also agreed to move up the start date for work requirements the bill would impose on Medicaid recipients, setting them to begin in 2027, after the midterm elections. A group of conservative hard-liners had balked at the slower timetable in the original bill, which would delay the work requirements until 2029, after the next presidential election.
Before the changes, the legislation had been predicted to cause about 10 million Americans to become insured, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Republican leaders opted against more aggressive options they had considered to cut Medicaid, bowing to moderate Republicans, mostly from politically competitive districts, who warned they could not accept such reductions. Mr. Trump has also expressed opposition to the cuts.
Even with the spending cuts the fiscal hawks demanded, the legislation was still expected to add trillions to the national debt, which is already at a level that many economists and Wall Street investors find alarming. In a preliminary analysis of the bill made before the latest changes on Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would add roughly $2.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
In a separate analysis requested by Democrats, the budget office also found that the legislation would leave the poorest Americans worse off while providing a lift to the richest. In 2027, the bottom 10 percent would lose the equivalent of two percent of their income largely because of the reduced benefits, while the tax cuts would provide the top 10 percent with a four percent increase to their income, the budget office estimated.
Facing a tight margin in the House, Mr. Johnson can afford to lose only three Republican votes on the spending package if all Democrats uniformly oppose it, as expected, and every member votes. The speaker has insisted his conference must pass the bill before Memorial Day.
That self-imposed deadline has created significant — if artificial — pressure, leading to fevered, down-to-the wire negotiations and an occasionally nocturnal legislative schedule.
The early-morning meeting of the Rules Committee, a panel that controls whether and how legislation can be debated and what modifications can be made to a bill before it comes to a final vote, was meant to clear the way for a vote later Wednesday or Thursday.
Democrats criticized Republicans for the scheduling, accusing them of trying to hide parts of their signature legislation from the public and push through changes while most Americans were sleeping.
“If Republicans are so proud about what is in this bill,” Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the committee, said in the predawn hours on Wednesday, “then why are you trying to ram it through in the dead of the night?”
Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
The post House G.O.P. Alters Trump’s Major Policy Bill, Grasping for Votes to Pass It appeared first on New York Times.
