‘Ultimate Betrayal’: White House Seeks To Bring Hammer Down On GOP Holdouts

The White House is stepping up its public pressure campaign against House Republicans who are resisting the swift passage of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”

The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a statement of administrative policy Wednesday afternoon endorsing the House bill and making clear that standing in the way of Trump’s legislative agenda would constitute “the ultimate betrayal.” House Speaker Mike Johnson is racing to get GOP holdouts, including members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC), on board with passing the president’s massive tax and spending package as quickly as possible to meet his deadline of Memorial Day.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act reflects the shared priorities of both Congress and the Administration,” the White House wrote. “Therefore, the House of Representatives should immediately pass this bill to show the American people that they are serious about ‘promises made, promises kept.’ President Trump is committed to keeping his promises, and failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal.”

HFC members, who have thus far not committed to supporting the president’s sweeping bill, are meeting with House GOP leadership and Trump at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to discuss their concerns with the spending package. The deficit-concerned fiscal hawks are advocating for more aggressive reforms to Medicaid and green energy tax credits that could face resistance from moderate GOP lawmakers and the Senate.

Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy, who is viewed as a pivotal vote, told “The Charlie Kirk Show” on Wednesday that HFC members were nearing an agreement over sticking points that have held up negotiations thus far.

“We’re trying to close the deal,” Roy said. “We’re almost there. To really make this work for president Trump and Americans, we got to close the deal.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters upon leaving the Capitol for the White House that House GOP leadership would move forward with a vote despite not having all of the caucus on board with proceeding.

“We also know that we’ve got to keep the bill moving because there’s a lot more steps in this process,” Scalise said.

Scalise said Tuesday that House GOP leadership would dismiss calls to delay a vote so certain holdouts could keep negotiating on certain provisions of the bill.

“They’re trying to say, ‘Hey, let’s not vote this week. Let’s just push it off another week,” Scalise told Fox News’ Guy Benson on Tuesday. “I have heard that for about three months now. They’ve wanted to push this off and push it off. We’d be voting next February, if some people got their way, and we’d never get there, and the economy would never recover. The families who are waiting on this bill, which by the way, most Americans want the relief in this bill, you don’t get it until it’s signed by Donald Trump.”

“What President Trump said this morning, that I thought was the most important message, is all these issues — SALT, Medicaid, all the open ended things that we can negotiate for months and months and not make any room on because we’ve already been negotiating them — it’s time to make a deal. It’s time to close the deal and vote,” Scalise added.

Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, former HFC chair, argued that Johnson’s deadline to pass the budget reconciliation package was “arbitrary” in a press conference on Wednesday.

“This is a completely arbitrary deadline set by people here to force people into a corner to make bad decisions,” Perry continued. “It’s more important to get this right, to get it correct, than to get it fixed.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Johnson in a May 9 letter to move with urgency in passing the budget reconciliation bill as Congress must raise the debt ceiling by mid-July to avoid the government defaulting on its debt. House Republicans have included a provision to suspend the debt ceiling by $4 trillion in the president’s budget reconciliation bill.

The fate of the president’s “big, beautiful” bill is far from certain once it clears the House.

Upon passage in the House, the budget reconciliation bill will then go to the Senate for consideration. The upper chamber is expected to amend the legislation, which would require the House to vote on the package for a second time before sending the package to the president’s desk for signature. This process would have to wrap up by mid-July to meet the so-called X date pinpointed by Bessent to avoid a breach in the debt ceiling.

Trump met with House Republicans at the U.S. Capitol on Monday in a major push to get GOP lawmakers in agreement on the legislation incorporating vast swathes of his first-year agenda.

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