WASHINGTON — House Republicans stayed up all night to pass their multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package, with Speaker Mike Johnson defying the skeptics and unifying his ranks to muscle President Donald Trump’s priority bill to approval Thursday.
With last-minute concessions and stark warnings from Trump, the Republican holdouts largely dropped their opposition to salvage the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that’s central to the GOP agenda. The House launched debate before midnight and by sunrise the vote was called, 215-214, with Democrats staunchly opposed. It next goes to the Senate.
“To put it simply, this bill gets Americans back to winning again,” said Johnson, R-La, just before the vote.
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The outcome caps an intense time on Capitol Hill, with days of private negotiations and public committee hearings, many happening back-to-back, around-the-clock. Republicans insisted their sprawling 1,000-page-plus package was what voters sent them to Congress — and Trump to the White House — to accomplish. They believe it will be “rocket fuel,” as one put it during debate, for the uneasy U.S. economy.
Trump himself demanded action, visiting House Republicans at Tuesday’s conference meeting and hosting GOP leaders and the holdouts for a lengthy session Wednesday at the White House. Before the vote, the administration warned in a pointed statement that “failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal.”
Central to the package is the GOP’s commitment to extending some $4.5 trillion in tax breaks they engineered during Trump’s first term in 2017, while adding new ones he campaigned on during his 2024 campaign, including no taxes on tips, overtime pay, car loan interest and others.
To make up for some of the lost tax revenue, the Republicans focused on changes to Medicaid and the food stamps program, largely by imposing work requirements on many of those receiving benefits. There’s also a massive rollback of green energy tax breaks from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
Additionally, the package tacks on $350 billion in new spending, with about $150 billion going to the Pentagon, including for the president’s new “ Golden Dome” defense shield, and the rest for Trump’s mass deportation and border security agenda.
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All told, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates 8.6 million fewer people would have health care coverage and 3 million less people a month would have SNAP food stamps benefits with the proposed changes.
The CBO said the tax provisions would increase federal deficits by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would tally $1 trillion in reduced spending. The lowest-income households in the U.S. would see their resources drop, while the highest ones would see a boost, it said.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York read letters from Americans describing the way the program cuts would hurt them. “This is one big ugly bill,” he said.
As the minority, without the votes to stop Trump’s package, Democrats instead offered up impassioned speeches and procedural moves to stall its advance. As soon as the House floor reopened for debate, the Democrats forced a vote to adjourn. It failed.
In “the dark of night they want to pass this GOP tax scam,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif.
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Other Democrats called it a “big, bad bill” or a “big, broken promise.”
Pulling the package together and pushing it to passage has been an enormous political lift for Johnson, with few votes to spare from his slim GOP majority whose rank-and-file Republicans have conflicting priorities of their own.
Conservatives, particularly from the Freedom Caucus, held out for steeper spending cuts to defray costs piling onto the nation’s $36 trillion debt.
At the same time, more moderate and centrist GOP lawmakers were wary of the changes to Medicaid that could result in lost health care for their constituents. And some worried the phaseout of the renewable energy tax breaks will impede businesses using them to invest in green energy projects in many states.
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