House Republican leaders labored on Wednesday to find the votes to pass their sweeping domestic policy bill, pushing it past a key hurdle and effectively daring recalcitrant lawmakers to fall in line as they raced toward a floor vote on the main elements of President Trump’s agenda.
With several G.O.P. lawmakers still unsatisfied with the sprawling tax and spending cut package, Speaker Mike Johnson and his deputies spent Wednesday toiling behind the scenes to hammer out concessions to cobble together the votes in their fractious ranks.
They were able to push the process forward late Wednesday night, when the powerful House Rules Committee voted to bring the legislation to the floor after a 22-hour session.
But it seemed that even after a meeting with Mr. Trump and fiscal conservatives at the White House, it was still uncertain whether Mr. Johnson had the votes in hand to pass the bill. He spent Wednesday evening briefing lawmakers on a list of changes he had negotiated with a wide spectrum of factions across his conference.
They included 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 providing additional money to reimburse states for immigration enforcement efforts.
It was not clear whether those concessions would be enough to flip Republican opponents of the bill, whose ranks appeared to be growing on Wednesday as the negotiations dragged on, or whether they might alienate other lawmakers who had been supporters before the changes were made.
With his razor-thin margin of control in the House, Mr. Johnson can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes on the legislation if all Democrats oppose it, as expected, and every member votes. The speaker has insisted the bill must pass before Memorial Day, and he was pressing for a vote later Wednesday night or Thursday.
Mr. Trump has publicly called on House Republicans to pass the bill quickly. White House officials released a statement urging its immediate passage, with an implicit threat to lawmakers who opposed it.
“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 Chip Roy, Republican of Texas and a ringleader of right-wing opposition to the bill, said in an interview on a conservative podcast that the deal had moved in the right direction, citing the further eliminations of the Biden-era clean energy tax credits.
But those concessions threatened to cost the measure support among more moderate lawmakers who have been fighting to preserve the energy tax breaks.
Emerging from Mr. Johnson’s office on Wednesday evening, Representative Andrew Garbarino, Republican of New York, would not commit to supporting the bill, saying, “It is not what I had hoped it would be.” He said he had informed G.O.P. leaders they needed to “change some of the things they were thinking, because we need this energy produced.”
And Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, had suggested earlier on Wednesday in an interview with Newsmax, 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. The changes Mr. Johnson put forward on Wednesday night would raise the cap to $40,000, an increase from the $30,000 level included in the bill.
“Raising the SALT deduction is a bailout for Democrat governors — paid for by red states with low taxes,” Mr. Rose wrote on social media. He declared that he was opposed to the measure “in its current form.”
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.
The sprawling legislation — which Republicans have named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — would largely keep current tax rates in place extending the 2017 tax cut while temporarily implementing new reductions 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 substantial 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. 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.
But they did add a new requirement that childless adults prove they worked or volunteered 80 hours a month or qualified for an exception in order to enroll in Medicaid. That was initially scheduled to take effect in 2029, after the next presidential election, but the package of changes Mr. Johnson proposed on Wednesday would accelerate it to the end of 2026.
The legislation was 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 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.
The self-imposed Memorial Day deadline for passage has created significant — if artificial — pressure, leading to fevered, down-to-the wire negotiations and an often nocturnal legislative schedule.
The Rules Committee began meeting at 1 a.m. on Wednesday and did not complete its action until 10:40 p.m. A floor vote could come in the wee hours of Thursday morning.
Democrats had 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 into the evening, 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.
After Republicans finally introduced their changes to the bill, Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, accused them of trying to rush through changes without time for review.
“We should recess and give everyone the time needed to understand these changes,” he said. “This is a big deal. This is consequential. And we’re moving forward with major changes, and we’re just supposed to take your word for it.”
Maya C. Miller, Robert Jimison, Andrew Duehren and Margot Sanger-Katz 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.
The post House G.O.P. Presses Ahead on Tax and Spending Bill, With Votes Uncertain appeared first on New York Times.
