President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” cleared a critical hurdle Sunday night as House GOP leadership looks to send the sweeping tax and spending package to the Senate by the end of the week.
The House Budget Committee advanced Trump’s budget reconciliation package in a late night vote of 17 to 16 with four conservative fiscal hawks — Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Andrew Clyde of Georgia — voting “present.” The four conservative lawmakers, who initially tanked the bill during a prior vote on Friday, allowed it to move forward, citing “progress” to make the bill more fiscally responsible.
However, the four congressmen, who are members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, stated that additional changes would have to be made for them to ultimately support the bill.
“As written, the bill continues increased deficits in the near term with possible savings years down the road that may never materialize,” the House Freedom Caucus posted to X on Sunday following the vote. “We are determined and committed to working through the remaining obstacles within this bill, and we stand with our colleagues Reps. Roy, Brecheen, Clyde and Norman in the Budget Committee who voted present to signal the need for further negotiations.”
Budget Committee members met after 10 p.m. Sunday night to reconsider the president’s tax and spending package, which failed to advance from the budget panel Friday due to the four fiscal hawks voting “no” on the package alongside all of the committee’s Democrats. The dissenting conservatives justified their opposition, citing the budget bill’s insufficient reforms to Medicaid and its slow phasedown of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy tax breaks.
Fiscal hawks and House GOP leadership talked throughout the weekend about making changes to the bill to create additional savings pushed by the four conservative lawmakers, including kicking in the Medicaid eligibility standards sooner and siphoning off the availability of IRA tax breaks for new projects.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who made a surprise appearance at the budget panel vote to continue talking with the holdouts before the vote began, told reporters that he hopes to send the reconciliation package to the Senate by Thursday.
The bill will now be considered by the House Rules Committee in a vote scheduled for Wednesday at 1 a.m. before being advanced to a House-wide vote.
“We have several more [details] to take care of, but I’m looking forward to very thoughtful discussions, very productive discussions over the next few days, and I’m absolutely convinced we’re going to get this in final form and pass it in accordance with our original deadline, and that was to do it before Memorial Day,” Johnson told reporters.
Norman, one of the holdouts who also sits on the House Rules Committee, told reporters following the vote that he and the other holdouts received commitments in writing addressing some of their concerns, including the acceleration of Medicaid work requirements and the termination of IRA green energy subsidies.
Proposed changes to the bill include accelerating the implementation of work requirements to Dec. 31, 2026 and terminating all IRA green energy subsidies by 2028, Punchbowl News first reported.
“It’s a lot better than what it was,” Norman told reporters. He also stated that he and other fiscal hawks are pushing for additional reforms to Medicaid, including changing the minimum share the federal government pays for Medicaid funding in each state, known as the federal medical assistance percentage (FMAP).
Moderate Republicans and populist-leaning GOP lawmakers, such as Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, are expected to strongly oppose more aggressive reforms to Medicaid.
The budget reconciliation package is a combination of the bills passed by 11 House committees that each had savings and spending targets.
House instructions required certain committees to cut a total of $1.5 trillion over a ten-year period. House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington claimed the bill incorporates the most savings out of any legislation passed through the budget reconciliation process since the advent of the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act.
In addition, nearly every committee has surpassed their savings target or spent less than their spending target, according to House Republican leadership staff.
However, fiscal hawks have suggested that the more than $1.5 trillion in savings is not good enough especially if reforms do not begin to kick in until after Trump is set to leave office in January 2029.
Conservative lawmakers have also cited the United States losing its last triple-A credit rating Friday evening as another indication that GOP lawmakers must be more aggressive with spending cuts in the president’s “one big, beautiful bill.”
“[T]he bill does not yet meet the moment – leaving almost half of the green new scam subsidies continuing,” Roy wrote on X Sunday referring to the IRA’s green energy tax breaks following the vote. “More, it fails to end the Medicaid money laundering scam and perverse funding structure that provides seven times more federal dollars for each dollar of state spending for the able-bodied relative to the vulnerable. This all ultimately increases the likelihood of continuing deficits and non-Obamacare-expansion states like Texas expanding in the future. We can and must do better before we pass the final product.”
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