House Republican leaders labored on Wednesday to find the votes to pass their sweeping domestic policy bill, haggling over changes to win over holdouts as President Trump summoned recalcitrant conservatives to the White House to press them to fall in line.
The powerful Rules Committee began meeting after midnight on Wednesday morning, and continued debating the measure long into the afternoon, while Speaker Mike Johnson and his deputies worked behind the scenes to hammer out enough concessions to cobble together the votes in their fractious ranks to push it through the House.
But they had yet to release any new language, and the panel had yet to vote to send the legislation to the floor.
Still, Mr. Trump was ramping up the pressure on conservative Republicans to drop their objections and embrace the bill. He called them and Mr. Johnson to a meeting at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. And White House officials released a statement that called on Congress to “immediately pass this bill,” with an implicit threat to any opponent.
“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises, and failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal,” said the statement from the Office of Management and Budget.
Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, told reporters on Wednesday morning that the White House had offered a proposal late Tuesday that he believed the hard-liners could accept.
“I think this package is en route to get passed,” Mr. Harris said. But he added: “I don’t think it can be done today.”
Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas and a holdout on the bill, said in an interview on a conservative podcast that the deal included further eliminations to clean energy tax credits created during the Biden administration and stricter limits on a loophole that states use obtain extra Medicaid funds.
Should the bill advance from the committee to the House floor, it could receive a vote as early as Wednesday. But it was not clear when Republicans would cement the changes they were proposing to the legislation, much less reveal them publicly or be able to bring them to a vote.
“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.
Reflecting the unwieldy negotiations, Mr. Harris’s positive comments on Wednesday morning were a turnaround from remarks he had made just hours earlier.
In an interview with Newsmax, Mr. Harris suggested that conservatives were unhappy with concessions Republican leaders had made to a group of blue-state Republicans to increase the limit on the state and local tax deduction, now set at $10,000. Those lawmakers, late Tuesday night, had been closing on a deal to raise the cap to $40,000, an increase from the $30,000 level included in the bill, according to three people familiar with the talks.
The debate was unfolding the day after Mr. Trump visited Capitol Hill to pressure Republicans to 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.
If Republicans are able to strike a deal on a set of concessions, the House could be on track within hours to pass the sprawling legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — which would largely keep current tax rates in place, while temporarily implementing new cuts like Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to not federally tax tips or overtime.
“We are delivering on the promise we made to the voters: on no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on seniors,” Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said. “These are real impacts for real Americans.”
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 have demanded structural changes and cuts to Medicaid and other programs to hold down the overall cost of the bill and rein in deficits, while more moderate and politically vulnerable lawmakers have sought to protect Medicaid, demanded larger tax breaks for their constituents and fought to preserve clean energy tax credits.
The legislation is projected to cause around 10 million Americans to become uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Republican leaders opted against more aggressive options they had considered to cut Medicaid, bowing to more moderate Republicans, mostly from politically competitive districts, who warned they could not accept such reductions. Mr. Trump has also opposed such cuts.
Even with the spending cuts demanded by the fiscal hawks, 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 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.
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 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.
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 that has created significant — if artificial — pressure, leading to fevered, down-to-the wire negotiations and an occasionally nocturnal legislative schedule.
The marathon 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. As the hearing stretched past 12 hours, House Democrats repeatedly came before the committee to offer amendments as a way to forcefully argue against a bill that they say will hurt working-class Americans to benefit wealthier ones.
“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 of Wednesday morning’s session, “then why are you trying to ram it through in the dead of the night?”
Maya C. Miller and Andrew Duehren and contributed reporting.
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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