Conservative Republicans revolt over domestic policy bill, threatening its path

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday, May 15, 2025. In the latest indication of the dissent in the GOP’s ranks, two Republicans, Norman and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told reporters they plan to vote against approving the tax and budget legislation in the Budget Committee in a session planned for Friday. (Al Drago/The New York Times)

By Catie Edmondson

Conservative Republicans in the House were in open revolt Thursday over their party’s major legislation to deliver President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda, threatening to derail the tax and budget measure over concerns that it would add too much to the deficit.

In a sign of the dissent in the party’s ranks, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, an influential anti-spending conservative, left a meeting in Speaker Mike Johnson’s office in the Capitol meant to assuage holdout lawmakers and declared that he planned to vote against approving the legislation in the Budget Committee in a session planned for Friday.

If another Republican on the panel were to join Roy, they could block the measure from reaching the floor, upending the party’s drive to push the legislation through the House before a Memorial Day recess. A number of other conservative, anti-spending Republicans sit on the panel.

“Right now, the House proposal fails to meet the moment,” Roy said. “It does not meaningfully change spending. Plus, many of the decent provisions and cuts don’t begin until 2029 and beyond. That is swamp accounting to dodge real savings.”

The legislation would extend Trump’s 2017 tax cut and temporarily enact his campaign pledges not to tax tips or overtime pay. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for clean energy would partly offset the roughly $3.8 trillion cost of those tax measures, as well as increased spending on the military and immigration enforcement.

Republicans like Roy are demanding changes to the bill, arguing that their leaders did not go far enough to cut federal spending. Some had earlier insisted that the final product add nothing to the deficit. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that calls for lower deficits, estimated that the bill would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.

They are also unhappy that a number of the provisions in the legislation to cut spending — chief among them a measure imposing work requirements on childless Medicaid recipients without disabilities — would not kick in until 2029.

“On Medicaid work requirements: Start ‘em now,” Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania wrote on social media. “The American People are sick of half measures. Some of my congressional colleagues want to do anything but LEGISLATE...”

Republican leaders had toiled to structure the legislation to protect their most politically vulnerable members from accusations that the party was moving to gut popular health care programs like Medicaid. They stopped short of a structural overhaul that would have made deep cuts to the program.

It is a treacherous balancing act for Johnson, who must try to appease his most conservative members agitating for deep spending cuts, and his swing-seat members who say voting for legislation taking an ax to popular federal programs would send them to an early political retirement.

He was sanguine emerging from the meeting in his office Thursday.

“Not everybody’s going to be delighted with every provision in a bill this large, but everyone can be satisfied, and we’re very, very close to that,” Johnson told reporters.

But conservatives such as Roy are not the only Republicans who have concerns about the legislation.

A small group of Republicans from New York and California are threatening to torpedo the bill over the state and local tax deduction. Others have called on Republican leaders to kill some of the most aggressive provisions in the legislation roll eliminating clean energy tax credits.

And even if the House can clear the legislation, a number of Republican senators have been unsparing in their criticism of the bill and suggested they would want to impose significant changes.

But first, the legislation must clear the Budget Committee.

The panel’s role is mainly procedural but very significant for complying with the special reconciliation rules that protect the legislation from a filibuster in the Senate. The committee is responsible for merging the legislative proposals produced by 11 committees who have written various pieces of the reconciliation package into a single bill and sending it to the House floor through the Rules Committee.

Members of the Budget Committee don’t have the power to make any changes to the legislation at this point, but they must approve it to allow the bill to move forward.

With Democrats unanimously opposed, Republicans on the panel need almost unanimity to make that happen.

Any attempt to skirt the committee could lead to trouble in the Senate even if the House were to approve the bill. The reconciliation rules require that the measure be a product of the Budget Committee for it to qualify for a majority-only vote. Working around the Budget Committee could violate that rule and allow Democrats to filibuster the legislation, effectively killing it.