The House and the Senate face a challenge coming up with a final One Big Beautiful Bill Act that will be able to get enough support in both chambers.

The House narrowly passed the tax and spending legislation last month after weeks of at times tense negotiations. But the carefully worded bill was then changed, considerably, by the Senate Finance Committee. The Senate bill has left several lawmakers at odds, members that Republican leadership must convince to come on board if they want the legislative package to pass.

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Deficit hawks still want bigger spending cuts, centrists are unhappy about changes to Medicaid and rollbacks of green tax credits, and House members of the so-called SALT caucus are incensed over the potential for a smaller cap on state and local tax deductions than was negotiated in the House.

“We are in conversations with all of our members,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters this week. “But we continue to hear from our members specifically on components or pieces of our bill that they would like to see modified or changed or have concerns about, and we’re working through that.”

Thune said that his main goal in the Senate is to get 51 votes — enough to pass the tax and border agenda through reconciliation, a legislative process that allows bills to bypass the filibuster and pass with only a simple majority in the Senate. 

Just as importantly, House Speaker Mike Johnson needs to get 218 votes in the House in order to approve the final version of the bill and send it to President Donald Trump’s desk.

While the House version of the legislation had enough popular support to pass, the Senate version has enough differences that it would not pass in the House right now if it came to an up-or-down vote.

Johnson and Thune must appeal to at times contradictory groups, such as those demanding bigger spending cuts and those opposed to more spending reductions from Medicaid and other entitlement programs.

The budget hawks in the House and Senate are concerned about the trajectory of federal budget deficits and have threatened to withhold their votes unless there are sufficient spending reductions in the legislation.

For instance, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has warned he will oppose the Senate tax bill without further spending cuts. He released a report on deficit spending on Wednesday in an effort to spur debate on the matter.

“You can argue about the twigs and leaves on the forest floor, but I’m forcing everybody to take a step back and look at the forest,” Johnson told the Washington Examiner. “It’s blazing, and we got to put this forest fire out.”

Both versions of the Republican tax legislation would roll back energy tax credits created or expanded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA was a signature piece of legislation Democrats passed under former President Joe Biden.

But the Senate version of the legislation also includes a slower phase-out of clean energy credits than the House-passed version, something that has upset some of the more conservative members of the House.

“My main takeaway for you guys is this bill, as the Senate has produced it, is definitely dead if it were to come over to the House in anything resembling its current form,” Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, said this week during a press call.

But there was also a major change in the Senate version to how Medicaid is handled that could endanger the votes of some critical centrists in the House and the Senate.

The Senate version of the reconciliation legislation lowers Medicaid provider taxes to a maximum of 3.5% for states that adopted Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. The House-passed bill set the number at 6%, but it only applied to new taxes. States use the taxes to inflate reimbursements from the federal government. Some lawmakers have warned that the change could be difficult for rural hospitals.

For instance, Sens. Jim Justice (R-WV), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have all expressed concerns about the change. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) also said he doesn’t think deeper Medicaid cuts would be able to pass either the House or the Senate, according to the Wall Street Journal.

And Hawley has also said he was caught off guard by other aspects of the legislation. He told the Washington Examiner that it was accurate to say that the Senate version of the bill waters down some of the populism in the House bill.

“Oh, I’m shocked. It needs work,” Hawley said. “I mean, it pairs down the president’s tax priorities, it boosts up Green New Deal subsidies, and it defunds rural hospitals — it’s going to be interesting to run on in 2026.”

But perhaps the biggest wrinkle that the Senate and House will have to iron out is the issue of SALT.

Republicans in high-tax blue states such as New York have been pushing to raise the $10,000 SALT cap and made it a campaign priority. The House-passed version of the legislation quadrupled the cap to $40,000. Republicans in the Senate want to see that pared back.

The Senate essentially punted on SALT for the time being. Instead of inserting a new SALT cap number, members kept the SALT cap at the existing $10,000 level in their forthcoming legislation as a placeholder for negotiations over the contentious issue.

That $10,000 number is a nonstarter in the House, where lawmakers even rejected a $30,000 offer during House negotiations. Some lawmakers like Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) have maintained a firm line on what was agreed to in the House.

“After engaging in good faith negotiations, we were able to increase the cap on SALT from $10,000 to $40,000,” Lawler said. “That is the deal, and I will not accept a penny less. If the Senate reduces the SALT number, I will vote NO, and the bill will fail in the House.”

HOW THE SENATE GOP TAX PLAN DIFFERS FROM THE HOUSE BILL

Republicans will have to corral all these different factions into one voting bloc. Many of the factions will likely be unhappy with some of the provisions that end up in the final tax plan.

“You may have to hold your nose on some things that you just absolutely don’t like, because we can’t like everything,” Justice told reporters this week.