The House early Thursday narrowly passed a wide-ranging bill to deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda, after Speaker Mike Johnson put down several mini-rebellions in Republican ranks to muscle the legislation to its first major victory over unified Democratic opposition.
The early morning vote was 215 to 214, along party lines. The legislation would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of this with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education and clean energy programs, adding significantly to federal deficits and to the ranks of the uninsured.
Its passage was a crucial victory for what Mr. Trump and Republicans are calling the “big, beautiful bill,” and the first step in their plan to push it through Congress over unified Democratic opposition using special rules that shield it from a Senate filibuster.
That process has been fraught with problems given the G.O.P.’s tiny margins of control in both chambers and rampant divisions within its ranks. And the measure is likely to face substantial obstacles in the Senate, where Republicans have far different ideas about what should be in the legislation and a more complicated set of rules for considering such bills.
But the action in the House, where the measure’s fate was uncertain almost until the last moment, kept the effort on track.
“After a long week and a long night and countless hours of work over the past year, a lot of prayer and a lot of teamwork, my friends, it quite literally is morning in America,” Mr. Johnson said after 6 a.m following an all-nighter of a debate on the House floor. “After four long years of President Biden’s failures, President Trump’s America First agenda is finally here, and we are advancing that today.”
For days, Mr. Johnson had haggled with Republicans from across the ideological spectrum who were demanding changes to the bill and refusing to lend their support. Just hours before the vote, he unveiled a series of concessions to win over disparate factions, including speeding up new work requirements for Medicaid, increasing the state and local tax deduction, expanding a rollback of clean-energy tax credits created by the Biden administration in the Inflation Reduction Act and steering additional money to reimburse states for immigration enforcement efforts.
Then, he sought to call the bluff of the holdouts, setting a vote on the legislation for the early morning and effectively daring recalcitrant Republicans to oppose it. On the House floor, forced to go on the record on Mr. Trump’s legislative agenda, their opposition collapsed.
Mr. Trump had pressed hard for the bill’s passage, visiting the Capitol on Tuesday to pitch Republicans on the legislation, and meeting with holdouts on Wednesday at the White House. Earlier on Wednesday, his administration put out a statement calling the failure to pass the bill “the ultimate betrayal.”
Still, the legislation has a long and challenging road ahead of it.
It is expected to face substantial changes in the Senate. A group of fiscal conservatives has demanded structural changes and cuts to Medicaid and other programs to hold down the overall cost of the bill and rein in deficits. More moderate and politically vulnerable lawmakers have sought to protect Medicaid and fought to preserve clean energy tax credits.
Cost estimates for the changes Mr. Johnson made late on Wednesday night to the legislation were not yet available.
But the bill as originally written had been 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 an earlier version of the bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would add roughly $2.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
“The deficit hawks have become chicken hawks tonight, in submission to Trump, the self-described king of debt,” Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, said on the House floor.
In a separate analysis requested by Democrats, the budget office 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 2 percent of their income largely because of the reduced benefits, while the tax cuts would provide the top 10 percent with a 4 percent increase to their income, the budget office estimated.
Among the concessions Mr. Johnson made to conservatives in the hopes of winning their votes was speeding up when work requirements for Medicaid would kick in by two years — from 2029 to the end of 2026. The legislation is projected to cause around 10 million Americans to become uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The bill now also contains a faster phaseout of existing tax credits for low-carbon electricity. Under the new language, companies building solar, wind, geothermal or battery plants could only claim the credit if they started construction within 60 days of the bill passing into law and then put the plant in service by the end of 2028, a narrow window that many businesses might struggle to meet.
In a nod to the blue-state Republicans in the conference, G.O.P. leaders also included a larger increase to the $10,000 limit on the state and local tax deduction, a key demand from a small group of lawmakers from New York, New Jersey and California.
The legislation would set the cap at $40,000, an increase from the $30,000 limit in the earlier draft of the legislation. The size of the deduction would shrink for people making more than $500,000 a year, rather than the $400,000 level included under the previous version of the bill.
Michael Gold, Andrew Duehren, Margot Sanger-Katz, Brad Plumer, Robert Jimison, Maya C. Miller, and Tony Romm contributed reporting.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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