Congress passes Big Beautiful Bill

After a marathon of backroom talks that stretched from Wednesday night into the next morning, including a record-breaking speech from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., the House of Representatives passed President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in a 218-214 vote on Thursday afternoon.

It’s a near-miraculous victory for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who, just a few hours before, faced as many as 15 Republican holdouts. The speaker spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday chasing down stray votes. In the end, only two Republicans opposed the package: Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa.

“A couple of us quite literally haven’t slept in two days,” Johnson said moments after the bill cleared the chamber. “I’ll just say this: We had a vision for what we wanted to do. We did not want to waste that opportunity.”

The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which narrowly passed the Senate on Tuesday, now heads to Trump’s desk for his signature. He is expected to sign it on Friday, the Fourth of July.

The legislation—which among other priorities makes portions of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent, revamps border security, and trims government programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid—has divided Republicans. It falls short of the cost-cutting efforts many fiscal conservatives had hoped to enact. But with much of the work on spending reductions left up to future sessions of Congress and uncertainty about the changes to government programs set to become law, moderates and conservatives alike are uneasy about the final picture.

“Was it perfect?” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a key fiscal hawk, asked. “No. But it was a move in the right direction.”

Ahead of the vote, the House Freedom Caucus, a group of the most conservative members in the House of Representatives, published a 3-page letter that detailed their many objections to the bill. They pointed out that the measure adds roughly $1 trillion more to the deficit than the original version of the bill, includes a delayed phaseout of Biden-era clean energy tax credits, eliminates language preventing illegal aliens from receiving Medicaid, and more. In an earlier version of the bill, Republicans had planned to cut $3.5 trillion in spending over 10 years while expanding tax cuts and other items that would add north of $4 trillion to the nation’s costs. There’s debate about whether they’re on track to meet those projections.

Norman, who had been on the fence on the bill at the outset of the week, said the president had been key to getting Republicans on the same page about what the bill would do and why making 11th-hour changes to the bill would ultimately work against fiscal conservatives.

“The president and others said, ‘If you send it back, it’s going to get far worse.’ [The Senate] would have had an open shot at asking for more gravy train Christian tree ornaments,” Norman said. “We didn’t do that.”

He also said the president promised to use executive power, such as mandating tariffs, to pursue outstanding priorities that ultimately didn’t make their way into the bill—for example, eliminating Biden-era tax credits.

“Like wind and solar—that ought to be phased out,” Norman said, referring to government funding aimed at encouraging renewable energy source production. “The president was on board with cutting everything out. What he assured us was he was going to take a hard look at all of them.”

While fiscal hawks supported the tax credits’ removal, some Republican moderates ultimately shot down those components of the bill.

Other Republicans also described similar pledges from the president. Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., chair of the House Freedom Caucus, echoed Norman’s description of conversations that conservatives had with Trump.

“We came to significant agreements with the administration over executive actions both inside and outside of the bill that will make America great again,” Harris said. He declined to say more on the issue.

In addition to conservative pushback, the bill faced opposition from many moderate Republicans who echoed Democratic concerns about changes to SNAP, the elimination of environmental subsidies, and—most notably—tweaks to Medicaid.

One of the most controversial changes centered on how states secure federal funding for the program. Under current law, states may tax up to 6% of the revenues of healthcare providers, like hospitals and clinics, to raise funding for Medicaid, setting themselves up to receive a federal match for that same 6%. With that extra money in tow, states then can pump resources back into the healthcare providers.

The bill looks to shrink that cap on provider tax down to 3.5% for the 41 states that expanded their coverage under the Affordable Care Act by the end of 2027. In short, it shrinks the ability for states to secure federal funding.

Lawmakers like Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., believe that will leave some state budgets high and dry. Boyle sits on the House Ways and Means subcommittee on health.

“I think it will depend on your state,” Boyle said when asked how lawmakers might adjust to the change in funding. “But my state’s governor has already said he’s not going to backfill any of these cuts. So even though we’re citing 17 million people in total losing their healthcare, I think the real number is going to be far worse.”

The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan evaluation group tasked with making cost evaluations for legislation, has estimated more than 16 million people would lose healthcare coverage by 2034 under the Big Beautiful Bill. The changes are also slated to save $1 trillion over the same window.

Dips in coverage had been a concern for Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and other New York Republicans. But on Thursday, Lawler said he was confident that the bill had struck a good balance between cutting down on the program’s costs and keeping it for those who needed it the most.

“Even with the changes, Medicaid is going to grow by 24% over the next decade,” Lawler said. “We are slowing the rate of growth to make sure that the program is sustainable.”

With the Big Beautiful Bill now out of the way, GOP leaders have hinted that Congress may attempt to pass a second domestic policy package sometime in the fall. So far, they have not indicated what it might include.

In the closing of his post-vote news conference, Johnson doubled down on the growth Republicans are counting on to come from the bill.

“Wages will rise, I think household income, job participation rate will increase dramatically,” he said. “We can’t wait for that to happen. This is jet fuel for the economy and all boats are going to rise.”