Members of the House Rules Committee are expected to vote on a manager’s amendment of the GOP’s “big, beautiful” spending bill in the coming hours, lawmakers told reporters Wednesday evening, a move congressional GOP leaders hope will advance the bill to a floor vote sometime in the next 24 hours. The timing of impending floor action remains fluid as Republican leaders continue to whip last-minute holdouts into the yes column.
Johnson can only afford a few defections given the GOP’s 220-212 majority, and that libertarian-leaning fiscal hawk Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) is expected to join a united House Democratic caucus in opposing the legislation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) has spent recent days huddling privately with holdouts trying to corral them into supporting the mammoth bill to boost defense spending, increase border security funding, and extend and expand many expiring provisions in the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA). Those negotiations bled into Wednesday afternoon, when GOP leaders and budget hardliners met inside the White House to hash out last-minute disagreements over the legislative language surrounding Medicaid, clean-energy tax credits, and the bill’s tax provisions.
The legislation includes some reforms to Medicaid, such as scaling back federal funding to states that provide entitlements to illegal immigrants. The bill would also institute new work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients, requiring them to demonstrate 80 hours of work a month to receive coverage. But the GOP decided against big cuts to Medicaid largely because Trump sees entitlement reform as a political loser.
After huddling with budget hawks who threatened to vote against the bill over concerns with ballooning deficits, House GOP leaders agreed to amend the bill so that new work requirements will kick in beginning in December 2026 instead of the initially proposed 2029 timeline. The amendment also changes legislative language surrounding clean-energy tax breaks, such as prohibiting any tax credits for nuclear energy facilities that begin construction after December 31, 2028.
Moderate Republicans from high-tax states have spent recent days aggressively lobbying leadership for a larger cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, a controversial provision of the tax code reviled by budget hawks and beloved by moderate Republicans in high-tax states such as California and New York. The previously unlimited write-off was capped at $10,000 in 2017 as a pay-for in that year’s TCJA, allowing individuals and married joint filers to deduct $10,000 in their state and local taxes when filing federally.
According to the manager’s amendment, blue-state Republicans succeeded in pressuring House GOP leaders to raise the initial $30,000 deduction cap proposal up to $40,000 with write-off phaseouts for those earning more than $500,000 a year.
Even if the legislation clears the House sometime in the next 24 hours, it’s success isn’t guaranteed in the upper chamber — at least in its current form. As National Review previously reported, Senate Republicans are expected to pick up any House-passed bill with an eraser in hand.