By Jacob Bogage, Marianna Sotomayor, Matthew Choi, Paul Kane – House Republicans approved President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax and immigration agenda Thursday morning, sending to the Senate legislation that the GOP hopes will transform the federal government and the economy and power the White House’s drive to deport immigrants and build up the military.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, as the measure is formally known, extends trillions of dollars in tax cuts from his first term along with new campaign promises – including no taxes on tips and overtime wages – and hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending.
But the legislation, which passed 215-214-1 after marathon talks, carries a hefty price tag. The latest projection from the Congressional Budget Office, lawmakers’ nonpartisan bookkeeper, showed it will add $2.4 trillion over 10 years to the national debt, which already exceeds $36 trillion.
To offset the cost, the measure would slash spending on social safety net programs by more than $1 trillion over 10 years. Even then, the mammoth legislation could also force nearly $500 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next decade to keep the national deficit within legal limits, unless Congress later adjusts the limits. The legislation could strip Medicaid coverage from 8.7 million people and lead to 7.6 million more uninsured people over 10 years, the CBO projected.
The final vote came just before 7 a.m. Thursday, wrapping up a more than 24-hour session that started in committee at 1 a.m. Wednesday. Determined to pass the bill to keep it on a long track to win approval by July, House Republicans forced debate deep into the night, as each caucus hauled in food, coffee and other energy drinks to keep bleary-eyed lawmakers alert.
Members of both chambers expect extensive revisions in the Senate, where similar tensions could force major policy shifts that would probably reignite ideological feuds among congressional Republicans. A handful of GOP senators want to adjust the bill’s Medicaid provisions; others don’t like the way it expanded a deduction for state and local taxes.
“The Senate will have its imprint on it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) told reporters Wednesday.
Leaders in Congress hope to have a final product to Trump’s desk by July 4, in plenty of time to raise the nation’s debt ceiling as part of the legislation before the government runs out of borrowing room, which the Treasury Department has warned could happen in August.
The House legislation was a product of Trump’s creation – and execution. Many of the proposals were ripped directly from the president’s campaign rallies. No tax on tips, then candidate-Trump said, came at the suggestion of a waitress. No tax on overtime soon followed in stump speeches. Another campaign pledge, ending taxes on Social Security benefits, did not make the legislation; Republican lawmakers swapped it out for a $4,000 bonus to the standard deduction for seniors.
And when the legislation appeared doomed on numerous occasions because of Republican divisions, Trump himself stepped in as the closer. In January, he spoke to the House GOP policy retreat, hosted at his luxury golf resort in South Florida, a gathering from which lawmakers emerged with the early contours of the legislation. Twice Trump intervened with holdouts as the House debated a budgetary framework for the measure; each time, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) convened naysayers in a private room off the House floor to broadcast the president on speakerphone.
As recently as Wednesday, the White House warned that a GOP rejection of his bill would amount to “the ultimate betrayal.” Disagreements among Republicans in the lower chamber led to a marathon committee hearing in the House that lasted nearly 24 hours. That afternoon, Trump summoned hard-line budget hawks to the White House with instructions to toe the line. Hours later, the holdouts flipped.
“He’s the maestro. He’s the master of the deal,” said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Missouri), one of the fiscal hawks. “It was amazing to see him in action.”
Republicans have insisted the U.S. economy is waiting for tax cuts to blast off on years of growth.
“With this bill, your life will be dramatically better because you’re going to have more money in your pocket,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) told a crowd of conservative activists on Tuesday. “Your small business that you’re working for, or large business, is going to now invest more money into the economy to allow you to get a higher-paying job, to grow more jobs so they can hire more people.”
But much of the current uncertainty in the markets, economists say, is a result of Trump’s tariffs, which have disrupted supply chains and threatened a new round of consumer inflation.
The fiscal impact of the bill, too, has investors spooked. As lawmakers zeroed in on a deal Wednesday, and eschewed further spending cuts, bond yields inched higher in a sign of growing investor concern over the country’s financial health.
“This bill is a debt bomb ticking,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), said early Thursday on the House floor. “Congress can do funny math, fantasy math, if it wants, but bond investors don’t.”
Republicans are attempting to pass the measure through what is known as the budget reconciliation process, which would allow them to bypass a Democratic Senate filibuster. But that maneuver comes with complicated rules that could still threaten the bill’s path to becoming law.
With internal divisions brewing Tuesday between budget hawks and blue-state Republicans, Trump visited the Capitol for a conservative pep rally, and lawmakers emerged from the gathering bullish on finalizing the legislation.
In the meeting, the president scolded blue-state Republicans seeking a higher cap on state and local tax deductions (SALT), and he chided GOP hard-liners not to “f— around with Medicaid” benefits. A consensus, lawmakers said, appeared in the offing.
But lawmakers raced to put their own spin on Trump’s words. To some, the president’s comments about SALT meant refusing to raise the tax deduction, and to others, he meant accepting moderates’ demands.
To one group, his remarks about Medicaid meant searching for only egregious abuses, while another handful thought it meant finding “waste” within the program’s DNA.
The dynamic set two ideologically disparate factions of the GOP against each other. The more moderate blue-state Republicans argued they’d already been forced to accept cuts to programs Medicaid and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps.
The archconservative House Freedom Caucus said the bill came up short of Trump and the GOP’s goals to cut federal spending. Many complained that SALT rewards predominantly Democratic states that impose higher taxes.
Late Tuesday evening, Johnson cut a deal with the blue-state Republicans that would raise the cap on the amount of state and local taxes that filers could offset from their federal tax balances. Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act limited the deduction to $10,000. The deal struck with Johnson would raise the cap to $40,000 beginning in 2025 for taxpayers earning less than $500,000; the cap and income limit would then increase by 1 percent each year for the next 10 years.
Meanwhile, White House tax negotiators and the Freedom Caucus discussed new policies around reducing Medicaid spending, The Washington Post reported. When those proposals did not end up in the bill, though, the hard-liners rebelled against Johnson and his self-imposed Memorial Day timetable to ship the bill to the Senate.
“This is a completely arbitrary deadline set by people here to force people into a corner to make bad decisions,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania) said Wednesday morning. “It’s more important to get this right, to get it correct, than to get it fast.”
By that afternoon, at the White House, Trump had swayed enough holdouts to back the legislation by endorsing policies House leaders had mostly already backed.
“When have I ever been a ‘No?’” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) asked after returning from the White House. Earlier Wednesday, he’d stood with Freedom Caucus colleagues to oppose a substantially similar version of the legislation that ultimately passed. “We’ve been focused on getting to consensus, resolution and the most conservative product. When have we ever wavered on that?”
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Theodoric Meyer and Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.
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Video: The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax and immigration agenda by a vote of 215-214, with one voting present, on May 22.(c) 2025 , The Washington Post
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