House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday found himself in an all-too-familiar position: scrambling to win over a bloc of Republican holdouts to prevent a signature piece of President Donald Trump’s agenda from collapsing on the House floor—and once again, needing Trump to help close the deal.
The top House Republican spent the day behind closed doors with about a dozen wavering lawmakers after several of his members shuttled to the White House to raise complaints directly with Trump about the revised “big, beautiful bill” that passed the Senate a day earlier. Fiscal hawks warned that the Senate’s version of the sweeping tax and spending bill adds too much to the national debt, while more centrist Republicans expressed concern about steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps that would harm their constituents.
“We can’t make everyone 100% happy,” Johnson told reporters of the negotiations between different factions of his party. “Never going to ask anybody to compromise core principles, but preferences must be yielded for the greater good.”
But by Wednesday evening, enough House Republicans remained opposed to the Senate’s version of the legislation to effectively stall the bill’s passage in the lower chamber, where Speaker Johnson can afford to lose no more than three votes. A key procedural vote that would have allowed Republicans to bring the Senate bill to the floor for final passage was held open for more than two hours on Wednesday afternoon as some lawmakers were yet to return to Washington due to bad weather and the remaining holdouts continued to negotiate over potential changes to the Senate bill. Party leaders eventually told Republicans to head back to their offices and wait while more meetings occurred.
The delay underscored just how fragile the coalition behind the bill remains—and how much Johnson is once again relying on Trump’s political muscle to salvage the sweeping legislation.
“The bill is not going to pass today,” said Rep. Jason Smith, an Ohio Republican who chairs the powerful Ways and Means committee. House leaders could bring the procedural vote back to the floor Wednesday evening or Thursday, but any further delays or changes to the bill would almost certainly blow past Trump’s July 4 deadline.
The legislation, which just barely passed the Senate on Tuesday with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance, would broadly fund many of Trump’s biggest priorities of his second term: extending his 2017 tax cuts set to expire at the end of this year; eliminating taxes on tips and overtime; and providing a large funding boost to his immigration and border policies. To offset some of those costs, the bill also includes deep spending cuts to Medicaid and nutrition assistance and slashes green energy tax credits.
But House Republicans are being asked to quickly vote on a bill that was just altered by the Senate in ways that fiscal hawks argue irresponsibly expands the national debt and breaches the red lines they laid out months ago. The Senate’s bill also includes more drastic policy shifts on Medicaid that centrists warn could put them at risk of losing their seats if they vote in favor of the changes.
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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the Senate version of the bill would increase the deficit by $3.4 trillion, which is about $1 trillion more than the bill the House previously passed in May. The Senate’s proposed changes to Medicaid would also leave about 12 million people without insurance by 2034, the report said, compared with 11 million people in the House version.
Some deficit hawks from the conservative House Freedom Caucus have said that they would block the bill if changes aren’t made. The group released a memo on Wednesday that tore into what it called the “failures” of the Senate’s bill, taking aim at its deficit increase and a carveout that helped swing Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski by delaying food stamp cuts in states with high error rates, among other new provisions.
Trump on Wednesday met with members of the House Freedom Caucus and moderate Republicans, urging both sides to get on board and send the legislation to his desk before Friday. Trump brought in Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the agency in charge of Medicaid, to downplay concerns about Medicaid cuts and related portions of the Senate GOP bill, such as provisions that would impact provider taxes that help fund the low-income health insurance program and increase a fund for rural hospitals. Vance was also present during the meetings.
“The President from day one has been our best closer, and he’s going to continue to be through today,” said House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Trump’s involvement in the discussions.
Some signs soon emerged that critics were starting to come around. Rep. Ralph Norman, who previously lambasted the Senate bill and said he would vote against it, sounded slightly more positive after the meeting. “I can’t tell you I’m a yes, I can’t tell you I’m a no,” he told reporters. “The meeting was very helpful.”
But several sticking points remained. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a key GOP holdout, said that he was still trying to go through the bill and understand a number of the Senate’s changes to Medicaid provisions before deciding how to vote. “I will note that I have now gotten a little bit more information on some of the Medicaid stuff that I feel like it’s a little bit better than I originally anticipated,” he said in a Fox News interview. “But I still have concerns.”