After months of negotiations that culminated in an all-night marathon vote session, House Republicans finally passed President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” tax-and-spend reconciliation package on Thursday.
The bill passed by a vote of 218 to 214, with Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania joining a united Democratic caucus in voting against the legislation. The bill will now head to the president’s desk ahead of Congress’s July 4 recess.
Thursday’s vote represents a monumental success for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.), who spent months strategizing on how to muscle the president’s legislative agenda across the finish line. The vote came after Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a record-breaking floor speech in an effort to delay the final passage.
Trump is expected to sign the bill into law at a White House ceremony Friday morning.
The bill includes a big funding boost for defense and border security and extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, with temporary new tax breaks for overtime pay, tips, and an increased standard deduction for seniors.
To offset the cost of the bill, Republicans passed modest reforms to social-safety-net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The controversial state and local tax deduction — reviled by most GOP lawmakers but beloved by Republicans from high-tax states like California and New York — will be temporarily increased from its current $10,000 level to $40,000, with income phaseouts for earners who more than $500,0000 annually. The write-off cap will return to $10,000 in 2030.
To win over fiscal hawks, the bill will also phase out green-energy tax breaks that were passed in the Democrats’ mammoth climate bill in 2022. Some Senate Republican holdouts were concerned that phasing out those tax breaks would hurt the energy sector in their states; they succeeded in convincing Thune to amend the legislative language to allow a one-year extension for wind and solar energy construction projects.
Slim margins in both chambers meant success was not guaranteed. As of Wednesday evening, the Senate-passed bill’s fate remained in the hands of a handful of House Republican holdouts, most of whom argued that the upper chamber’s version did not include enough spending cuts and would only balloon the nation’s deficit crisis. Uncertainty trickled into the early hours of Thursday morning, as debt hawks and Medicaid moderate Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) dragged out a procedural vote on whether to open the floor to debate on the legislation.
Following in-person White House meetings with Trump on Wednesday, an hours-long overnight leadership whip operation on the House floor, and an early-morning phone call with the president on Thursday, those same debt moderate and fiscal hawks holdouts ended up folding and voting for the same exact Senate-drafted bill they’d spent days criticizing. Extraordinarily, they voted for the bill without any substantive changes to the legislative text.
Ultimately, the political pressure from Trump was simply too much for the Medicaid-cut and deficit-concerned holdouts to overcome. “What are the Republicans waiting for???,” Trump wrote in a social media post early Thursday. “For Republicans, this should be an easy yes vote. Ridiculous!!!”
Fitzpatrick, the Pennsylvania centrist who represents a swing district Kamala Harris won in 2024, was the lone GOP congressman to join Democrats in a procedural vote blocking debate on the measure. Later on Thursday, he reversed course and joined Republicans in backing the bill.
Ahead of the final vote, Johnson rejected a reporter’s suggestion that last-minute holdouts caved to political pressure. “No I don’t think they caved, I think they made a thoughtful and informed decision,” he said.
The bill’s passage comes as a great relief to the White House. After all, this legislation is expected to represent the signature domestic policy achievement of the president’s second term. While Republicans currently enjoy a rare trifecta in Washington, Democrats may flip the House in the 2026 midterms. That meant time was of the essence for Republicans to act this year, especially ahead of Congress’s debt-ceiling deadline in August and ahead of January, when many provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs act that Trump signed into law during his first term are set to expire. And as congressional GOP leaders had spent months emphasizing, a vote against the bill would represent a vote against border-security provisions and a vote to join Democrats in letting those 2017 tax cuts expire.
Even still, Johnson acknowledged that the bill will not please every faction of the House GOP conference, telling reporters early Thursday morning: “I believe we’ve delivered the best possible product we could with the small margins we have.”
The president was deeply involved in the negotiation process. In recent months, he has delegated complicated tax fights to congressional GOP leaders while insisting that Republicans must prioritize a few of his preferred legislative priorities, such as increased border-security funding, extending his 2017 tax cuts, and making good on his populist campaign pledges to temporarily exempt tips, overtime pay, and car loan interest from taxes.
The House’s passage of the bill on Thursday followed a similarly dramatic amendment vote-a-thon in the Senate earlier this week that lasted more than 26 hours. With four Republican dissenters on the board – Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – Senate GOP leaders had to strategize which member to try and flip. They settled on Murkowski.
Early Tuesday morning, Thune and other Senate Republican leaders spent hours huddling with the Alaskan centrist on the Senate floor pleading with her to support the legislation by working to alleviate her concerns about the bill’s food-assistance and Medicaid reforms as well as its green-energy tax break phaseouts. Eventually, she relented, but only after securing a series of generous legislative carveouts for her home state, such as billions in funding for rural hospitals, a tweak to the bill’s wind and solar energy project tax break phaseouts, and generous tax breaks for Alaskan whaling captains and fishermen.
“We do not have a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” she told reporters of the bill, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has since dubbed the “polar payoff.” While she acknowledged her success in winning over a series of legislative goodies for her home state, she warned that in her view, the legislation is “not good enough for the rest of our nation.”
With three Senate Republicans joining their Democratic colleagues in opposing the legislation, the bill narrowly cleared the upper chamber on Tuesday with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote.
Ahead of the final vote House vote on Thursday, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York spent his unlimited floor time – typically called the “magic minute” — railing against the bill’s Medicaid reforms. Democrats have spent months arguing that the bill will cut benefits for the needy to offset tax cuts for the rich, and they’re expected to lean into Republican-passed entitlement cuts during the 2026 midterm cycle.