House passes sprawling domestic policy bill, sending it to Trump’s desk
WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled House on Thursday passed a multitrillion-dollar package of tax cuts and spending, sending the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk after a tense 24 hours of negotiations and arm-twisting.
The mostly party-line vote of 218-214 came one day ahead of Trump’s July 4 deadline and caps an arduous process that lasted more than four months, rife with ideological clashes and acrimony between the House and Senate, where Republicans had little margin for error given their narrow majorities.
In the end, the GOP largely unified to pack the bulk of Trump’s domestic agenda into a single measure, with just Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., voting against it. A bloc of Republican holdouts had initially opposed a procedural vote Wednesday to advance the bill, leading to an hourslong overnight standoff. But Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., managed to sway all but one of them, teeing up final passage in the House.
Trump is now expected to sign the bill into law on Independence Day, marking the party’s biggest legislative accomplishment since taking full control of Washington in January.
The 887-page package extends the tax cuts Trump enacted in 2017, while temporarily slashing taxes on tips and overtime pay. It approves hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending on the military and to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans. And it partially pays for all that with steep cuts to Medicaid, food aid benefits and clean energy funding. That includes an estimated $930 billion in spending reductions under Medicaid, violating Trump’s promise not to cut the program.
Overall, the bill is projected to increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion over a decade, with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office finding that the revenue losses of $4.5 trillion outstrip the spending cuts of $1.2 trillion. The bill also increases the debt ceiling by $5 trillion.
Throughout the process, Republican leaders had an ace in the hole to corral the votes even as the competing demands of rival factions appeared irreconcilable: They knew their members wouldn’t ultimately say no to Trump, from the most conservative to the least ideological and politically vulnerable.
Republicans often turned to Trump throughout the process to help close the deal on key votes. He regularly held meetings with and made phone calls with key lawmakers, while issuing the occasional threat on Truth Social to holdouts who stood in the bill’s way. Vice President JD Vance was also a regular presence in Senate and House meetings around the bill.
“If President Trump and Vice President Vance had not engaged at the time they did, it wouldn’t have passed,” said conservative Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who attended White House meetings in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room Wednesday and ultimately voted for the bill.
Speaking to reporters in the wee hours of the morning, Johnson said Trump had been making phone calls to recalcitrant holdouts as late as 1 a.m. Thursday to help break an impasse on the floor.
“He doesn’t really sleep a lot,” said Johnson, who also dangled the prospect of future bills to address concerns and demands from a variety of members.
In his 1 a.m. call with holdouts, Trump and other White House officials made promises to aggressively implement key provisions in the bill — from clean energy tax credit phase outs to new Medicaid restrictions, a source familiar with the call said.
One by one, the GOP critics folded and accepted demands they insisted they wouldn’t. Conservatives swallowed a bill that adds trillions to the debt. Politically vulnerable Republicans endorsed steep cuts to Medicaid and health care spending that are projected by CBO to cost 11.8 million people their insurance. Republicans whose districts and states benefit from clean energy incentives ended up voting to strip them away.
“They’re just afraid of Trump and the backlash that would ensue if he called them out,” Massie, who opposed the bill, told NBC News the day before the final vote. “I’m not concerned.”
Trump and his allies sought to strike fear in GOP lawmakers by vowing to support a primary challenger to Massie in his next election. Massie said Trump’s real goal was to keep other Republicans in line by sending a message that defying him comes with political pain.
“They’re whipping this horse, because I’m out of the barn, to keep the other horses in the barn,” he said.
Later, on the 1 a.m. call with Trump, Massie remarked how it’d be nice if Trump stopped attacking him, the source said, then flipped from no to yes on the key procedural vote.
The House took up the bill after the Senate voted 51-50 to pass the legislation on Tuesday, with Vance breaking the tie. The only Republicans who voted against it were Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Thom Tillis, R-N.C. and Susan Collins, R-Maine. The party used the filibuster-proof “budget reconciliation” process to get around the 60-vote threshold, which meant that some non-budgetary provisions were stripped out.
Every Democrat in both chambers voted against the bill, blasting it as a tax cut for the wealthy that is paid for by cutting programs like Medicaid that benefit the working class. They plan to place a heavy focus on the bill in their message to voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, emboldened by polls showing that the legislation is unpopular.
At the start of a record-breaking floor speech Thursday morning that lasted for 8 hours and 44 minutes, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., ripped what he called the “big, ugly bill, this disgusting abomination,” and accused Republicans of working through the night to pass it because it would kick millions of Americans off Medicaid and food stamps. Republicans argued that work requirements would target waste, fraud and abuse in those programs.
“Why did debate begin at 3:28 a.m. in the morning?” Jeffries asked with House Democrats filling the seats behind him. “Republicans are once again, which has been the case, Mr. Speaker, through every step of this journey, trying to jam this bill through the House of Representatives under cover of darkness.”
Republicans began making plans for their reconciliation package even before last year’s presidential election. In March 2024, House Republicans huddled at their annual retreat, at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, to brainstorm what should be included in the bill so they’d be better prepared than in 2017.
But after Republicans took unified control of the White House and Congress in January, fissures in the party quickly began to emerge. Senate leaders pushed to carry out Trump’s agenda in two separate bills, before the president endorsed the House approach of passing his agenda in “one big, beautiful bill,” which eventually became the title of the legislation.
Along the way, all 53 Senate Republicans voted to set a novel precedent by using a budget trick known as “current policy baseline” that treats $3.8 trillion in Trump tax cut extensions as costing $0, in order to avoid satisfying Senate rules requiring that they be paid for. Democrats said it was akin to the “nuclear option” will weaken the 60-vote threshold going forward.
Still, Democrats did get a jab at Trump in the process: They deleted the title, “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” by successfully arguing that the name wasn’t budgetary in nature. The legislation’s official title is instead, “An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14.”