President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” suffered a temporary defeat Friday afternoon following four conservative Republicans’ decision to tank the package, citing insufficient reforms to Medicaid and Biden-era green energy tax credits.
The president’s vast tax and spending package failed to clear the House Budget Committee during a vote of 16 to 21, with Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Andrew Clyde of Georgia, joining all Democrats in voting “no” on the bill. The lawmakers, who are all members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said they would continue to negotiate with House GOP leadership throughout the weekend as House Speaker Mike Johnson looks to pass the bill in the chamber by his self-imposed deadline of Memorial Day.
A fifth Republican, Budget Committee Vice Chairman Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania, also voted “no,” albeit for procedural reasons.
The bill’s failure to advance out of the committee marks an early setback for Trump’s legislative agenda, much of which is included in the package, such as the extension of the president’s 2017 tax cuts, new border security funding and prohibiting Medicaid funding for child sex change procedures. Trump called on House Budget Committee Republicans to vote “yes” on the bill prior to the vote — only to see four Freedom Caucus members temporarily kill the legislation’s momentum.
“We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday morning. “STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!”
Republican California Rep. Tom McClintock, who sits on the Budget Committee and voted “yes” on Friday, torched the four House Republicans who tanked the bill’s passage.
“These are people who promised their constituents not to raise their taxes, and those … ‘no’ votes just voted for the biggest tax increase in American history, with a cost of the average family earning $75,000 about $1,500 in original income taxes next year,” McClintock told reporters after the vote.
The four conservative holdouts, however, blasted the budget reconciliation package, as it is currently written, for delaying the implementation of Medicaid work requirements until 2029 and for phasing down, rather than eliminating, green energy subsidies for wind and solar. The lawmakers said they would “work through the weekend” to ultimately get to a yes on the president’s sweeping tax and spending package.
“It’s money we don’t have to spend,” Norman told reporters Friday. “This business of writing checks and having no income to pay for it is smoke and mirrors again and I’m through with that.”
“Medicaid Work requirements must start NOW not 2029 & the Green New Scam must be fully repealed, as President Trump called for,” Roy wrote on X following the vote.
Roy and Brecheen are cosponsoring a bill to fully repeal the IRA’s green energy subsidies dubbed the Energy Freedom Act, the Daily Caller News Foundation first reported.
Smucker, who supports the bill and changed his vote from “yes” to “no” at the end to allow the committee to reconsider it, expressed confidence that the holdouts would ultimately sign off on the bill.
“We’re a diverse conference and with very tight margins, and so it takes a while to work through these [issues] and it was a very aggressive time timeline that the Speaker had put forward,” Smucker said.
House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington defended calling the vote despite lacking support from fellow Republican lawmakers, saying it was a way to clarify the concerns of conservative holdouts.
“You cannot debate things ad infinitum and achieve anything, including something this important,” Arrington said following the vote. “But I think it provides clarity, better clarity on where people stand.”
“I think we’re very close to the resolutions necessary to get it out of this barn into the pasture of the Rules Committee and the floor,” Arrington continued. “Nothing this big is ever going to satisfy everybody. But it is a very good piece of legislation, and it will do a great deal to improve the lives of the American people, but we have to make it a reality.”
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