House passes Trump’s domestic policy bill, overcoming last-minute resistance

Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.), the ranking minority member, listens as the House Rules Committee meets in the early morning hours of Wednesday, May 21, 2025, to debate the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act at the Capitol in Washington. House Republican leaders labored on Wednesday to win over holdouts for their sweeping domestic policy bill to deliver Trump’s agenda, slogging through a marathon overnight committee session to prepare the measure for a floor vote. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)

By Catie Edmondson

The House early Thursday narrowly passed a wide-ranging bill to deliver President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda, after Speaker Mike Johnson put down several mini-rebellions in Republican ranks to muscle the legislation to its first major victory over unified Democratic opposition.

The early morning vote was 215-214, mostly along party lines. The legislation would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of this with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education and clean energy programs, adding significantly to federal deficits and to the ranks of the uninsured.

Its passage was a crucial victory for what Trump and Republicans are calling the “big, beautiful bill” and the first step in their plan to push it through Congress over unified Democratic opposition using special rules that shield it from a Senate filibuster.

That process has been fraught with problems given the GOP’s tiny margins of control in both chambers and rampant divisions within its ranks. And the measure is likely to face substantial obstacles in the Senate, where Republicans have far different ideas about what should be in the legislation and a more complicated set of rules for considering such bills.

But the action in the House, where the measure’s fate was uncertain almost until the last moment, kept the effort on track.

“After a long week and a long night and countless hours of work over the past year, a lot of prayer and a lot of teamwork, my friends, it quite literally is morning in America,” Johnson said after 6 a.m. following an all-nighter of a debate on the House floor. “After four long years of President Biden’s failures, President Trump’s America First agenda is finally here, and we are advancing that today.”

For days, Johnson had haggled with Republicans from across the ideological spectrum who were demanding changes to the bill and refusing to lend their support. Just hours before the vote, he unveiled a series of concessions to win over disparate factions, including speeding up new work requirements for Medicaid, increasing the state and local tax deduction, expanding a rollback of clean-energy tax credits created by the Biden administration in the Inflation Reduction Act and steering additional money to reimburse states for immigration enforcement efforts.

Then, he sought to call the bluff of the holdouts, setting a vote on the legislation for the early morning and effectively daring recalcitrant Republicans to oppose it. On the House floor, forced to go on the record on Trump’s legislative agenda, their opposition collapsed. In the end just two Republicans, Reps. Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky — both anti-deficit conservatives — voted against it.

Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, chair of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, voted “present,” a way of protesting the measure without causing its defeat. And two other Republicans who had expressed opposition to the measure ahead of the vote, Reps. David Schweikert of Arizona and Andrew Garbarino of New York, did not show up to vote.

“This bill is a debt bomb ticking,” Massie said on the House floor ahead of the vote, explaining his opposition. “We’re not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic tonight. We’re putting coal in the boiler and setting a course for the iceberg.”

Trump had pressed hard for the bill’s passage, visiting the Capitol on Tuesday to pitch Republicans on the legislation and meeting with holdouts Wednesday at the White House. Earlier Wednesday, his administration put out a statement calling the failure to pass the bill “the ultimate betrayal.”

Still, the legislation has a long and challenging road ahead of it.

It is expected to face substantial changes in the Senate. A group of fiscal conservatives has demanded structural changes and cuts to Medicaid and other programs to hold down the overall cost of the bill and rein in deficits. More moderate and politically vulnerable lawmakers have sought to protect Medicaid and fought to preserve clean energy tax credits.

Cost estimates for the changes Johnson made late Wednesday to the legislation were not yet available.

But the bill as originally written had been expected to add trillions to the national debt, which is already at a level that many economists and Wall Street investors find alarming. In a preliminary analysis of an earlier version of the bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would add roughly $2.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

“The deficit hawks have become chicken hawks tonight, in submission to Trump, the self-described king of debt,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said on the House floor.

In a separate analysis requested by Democrats, the budget office found that the legislation would leave the poorest Americans worse off while providing a lift to the richest. In 2027, the bottom 10% would lose the equivalent of 2% of their income largely because of the reduced benefits, while the tax cuts would provide the top 10% with a 4% increase to their income, the budget office estimated.