WASHINGTON — Landmark legislation that would rewrite the tax code and levy steep cuts to programs providing healthcare and food stamps to the poor passed the House early Thursday, a development that was celebrated by President Trump despite the bill facing an uncertain future among Senate Republicans.
The measure, titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” would boost funding for border security and the Defense Department, eliminate taxes on tips and overtime, provide a new tax deduction to seniors and renew the 2017 tax cuts passed during the first Trump administration. To pay for those new funding commitments, the bill proposes eliminating green energy tax benefits passed under President Biden, as well as an estimated $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Even still, the bill would add so much money to the debt that Congress may be forced to execute cuts across the board, including hundreds of billions to Medicare, in a process known as sequestration, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The House vote fell along party lines. By opposing the bill, the Trump administration said that Democrats were supporting the largest tax increase on middle-class Americans in decades, a reference to the upcoming expiration of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts at the end of the year.
Democrats, on the other hand, have accused Republicans of voting for the deepest cuts to healthcare in modern times. By creating new barriers to Medicaid coverage through the introduction of work requirements, as well as increasing premiums under the Affordable Care Act, the CBO and other nonpartisan organizations estimate up to 14 million Americans could lose their insurance coverage.
Those drastic changes to the healthcare landscape have given pause to several Republican senators.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has said she is “very wary of cutting Medicaid.” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said he “can’t support” substantial cuts to Medicaid benefits. And after the vote on Thursday, Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas said that material changes should be expected to the House bill.
“We need to go back through that bill with a fine-tooth comb and make it better,” Marshall said in an interview with the conservative cable channel Newsmax. “I think there’s opportunities in Medicaid to make that bill better, to make sure that we strengthen it, that we preserve it for those who need it most.”
Any Senate rollback of cuts to the Medicaid program could face resistance from the House Freedom Caucus during the reconciliation process. Members of that group, which proclaims a commitment to fiscal conservatism, have called for even deeper cuts to the Medicaid program.
Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, voted “present” early Thursday morning, preserving negotiating leverage as the bill makes its way across Capitol Hill.
“I voted to move the bill along in the process for the president,” Harris wrote on social media. “There is still a lot of work to be done in deficit reduction and ending waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program.”
The vote came hours after Trump met with GOP holdouts at the White House. As late as Wednesday afternoon, before meeting with the president, several of those lawmakers were casting doubt on the prospects of the bill’s passage this week, ahead of a Memorial Day deadline set by House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was dismissive of the Freedom Caucus on Thursday, telling CNN that the cuts they are pushing for would barely make a dent in the national debt.
“You had your chance,” Graham said to the caucus. “Some of these cuts are not real. We’re talking about over a decade — you know, if you do $1.5 trillion, that’s like a percent and a half. So let’s don’t get high on our horse here that we’ve somehow made some major advancement of reducing spending, because we didn’t.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota also mocked the caucus, calling it “rich” for its members to lecture Senate Republicans on fiscal conservatism, “and end up with not that conservative a bill.” The CBO estimates the House legislation would result in a $3.8-trillion increase to the deficit.
If passed, the new work requirements to Medicaid would kick in at the end of 2026, right after the midterm elections. Green energy tax credits would phase out for any project that is not already under construction 60 days after the law comes into force.
The cap on the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, will increase to $40,000 from $10,000, phasing out for individuals and households making more than $500,000. And while the president campaigned on a promise to eliminate taxes on Social Security, a parliamentary rule precluded Republicans from including a full cut. Instead, the bill proposes an enhanced tax deduction for senior citizens of up to $4,000.
On his social media platform, Trump wrote that the bill is “arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!”
“There is no time to waste,” he added. Johnson, the speaker, has set a goal of sending the bill to the president’s desk by Independence Day.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president’s team was “suiting up” for negotiations with the Senate now that the bill has passed the House. “We will see how it goes,” she said.
“The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is named the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ for a reason, because it is a one big beautiful bill that encompasses just about everything this president could want for the American public. It delivers on so many of his core campaign promises. So surely we want to see those campaign promises signed into law,” Leavitt said. “He’s expecting them to get busy on this bill and send it to his desk as soon as possible.”
The two House Republicans who voted against the bill, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, should face primary challenges for their defiance of the president’s directive, Leavitt added.
“What’s the alternative, I would ask those members of Congress. Did they want to see a tax hike? Did they want to see our country go bankrupt? That’s the alternative by them trying to vote no,” she said. “The president believes that the Republican Party needs to be unified.”
