President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill cleared a critical hurdle in the early hours of Thursday morning as House GOP leaders push ahead to a full House floor vote, which is now on track to take place within hours.
The House voted 217 to 212 to clear a key procedural hurdle and bring the bill to the floor with one Republican voting in opposition: GOP Rep. Thomas Massie. GOP Rep. Chip Roy, who had been closely watched as a potential holdout, voted in favor.
A vote on final passage is expected around 5 a.m., though the timing could slip as Democrats have attempted to delay GOP leaders’ effort in protest over the legislation.
The push to pass the bill in the House has been a key test of Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson’s influence. Republican leaders have engaged in intensive negotiations over the bill, and Trump has made impassioned appeals to House Republicans to get on board in an effort to pave the way for passage.
GOP leaders have had to carefully thread the needle between competing demands from conservative hardliners and centrist members of their conference – a delicate balancing act as Speaker Johnson can only afford a handful of defections with his razor-thin majority.
If the House passes the bill, it would mark a major victory for the president and the speaker, but the legislation will still face challenges ahead. It would next head to the Senate, where Republicans in the chamber have signaled that they plan to make their own changes to the bill.
The legislative package includes measures that would deeply cut into two of the nation’s key safety net programs – Medicaid and food stamps – while making permanent essentially all of the trillions of dollars of individual income tax breaks contained in the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
House Republicans unveiled a slate of changes to the bill on Wednesday evening in an effort to win over GOP holdouts. Those changes included speeding up work requirements for Medicaid to the end of 2026, from the start of 2029. Republicans also decided to phase out Biden-era energy tax credits sooner than planned, among other provisions.
GOP leaders tee up high-stakes vote after president’s pitch to holdouts
House GOP leaders barreled ahead with a vote on Trump’s agenda after the president privately implored key holdouts not to derail the tax and spending cuts package.
The president had summoned members of a key wing of the Republican Party to the White House at a moment of crisis for Speaker Johnson: A half-dozen conservatives were vowing to defy their own party leadership because of spending cuts they still wanted to see in the bill.
But as of Wednesday evening, Johnson and his leadership team appeared confident that Trump had helped get the bill back on track. One day earlier, Trump made an impassioned appeal to the full House GOP conference.
Trump on Tuesday delivered a forceful message to House Republicans to line up behind his massive domestic policy bill. The president’s emphatic, 90-minute address to House Republicans — in which he alternated between strong-arming his fellow Republicans and cheering them on — brought Johnson and his leadership team a big step closer to delivering that bill, according to half a dozen GOP lawmakers and senior aides.
The legislation, which Republicans have named the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” aims to fulfill many of Trump’s campaign trail promises and touches on a wide range of policy issues.
Ahead of a final floor vote, House Republicans released a package of changes to the bill that reflected days of negotiations from GOP leaders in an effort to win over holdouts.
In addition to provisions impacting Medicaid work requirements and Biden-era energy tax credits, the package of changes formalizes one of Johnson’s biggest deals this week: The so-called SALT cap. It would allow people to deduct state and local income taxes up to $40,000 for certain income groups.
GOP leaders had initially proposed a cap of $30,000 but key New York, New Jersey and California Republicans had refused to support it.
Prior to the release of the changes, Johnson had been engaged in meetings with various factions to finalize a deal that would win over both GOP hardliners, who had been threatening to block the tax and spending cuts bill, as well as centrist members who had been wary of some of the right-wing’s proposed changes to it.
Not long after midnight on Thursday, Speaker Johnson projected confidence that the bill would successfully pass in the House, despite the challenges.
“You never know ‘til the final vote tally, but I’m convinced we’re going to pass this bill tonight,” he said. “This is a massive piece of legislation with lots of moving parts. So we’ll see what happens. But I think we’re going to get this job done and we’re going to do it by Memorial Day which is what we predicted from the beginning.”
CNN’s Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, Sarah Ferris and Tami Luhby contributed to this report.
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