The House of Representatives on Thursday passed President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which features sweeping cuts to Medicaid and nutrition assistance programs, after a whirlwind 24 hours of last-minute arm twisting of holdout Republicans — and a record-breaking floor speech from Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The final vote was a narrow margin of 218-214, with every Democrat and two Republicans —Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick — voting against the measure.
After Jeffries wrapped his eight-hour and 44–minute delaying tactic — which surpassed former GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s “magic minute” speech record of eight hours and 32 minutes, set in 2021 when the House passed President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” — the House finally commenced its vote on Trump’s bill. The “magic minute” procedure grants members unlimited time to speak after debate on a bill has concluded.
“We have a big job to finish,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana. “With one big beautiful bill we are going to make this country stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before.”
The bill will now be sent to Trump by the July 4 deadline he’d insisted upon with congressional Republicans in the House and Senate.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on a press call following the vote that Trump would be signing the legislation at 5:00 pm on Friday in what she described as “a big, beautiful signing ceremony” at the White House.”
Leavitt said the bill’s passage marked a “victorious day for the American people” and predicted that the legislation would “create an economic boom for the United States of America.”
“We’re going to continue to bring in revenue, drive down our deficit, and we’ll have more money back into the pockets of the American people. And this bill is an encapsulation of all of the policies that the President campaigned on and the American people voted on on November 5 and entrusted the President and Republicans in the White House to enact,and it is a great day for our country and for the American people,” she said.
A senior White House official who worked on pushing the bill through Congress called the tax cut and spending package “a historic achievement for the Republican Party and for President Trump” because the voluminous bill “satisfies virtually every major campaign promise that President Trump made” during his 2024 campaign.
“It represents his keeping of his commitments to the American people, everything that we talked about, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime pay, no tax on seniors’ Social Security, to securing the border, rebuilding our military. It’s all in this bill,” said the official, who added that the stock markets appeared to be “loving” the legislation because they were closing at all-time highs ahead of the July 4 holiday.
“We think that it is the bridge to the golden age of America, truly, and now we will really get to work on restoring prosperity and security and safety for this country for a generation,” they added.
It all came to a head after a day of grumbling from a handful of conservative Republicans who criticized the Senate version of the bill that was handed back to the House for passage just in time to meet Trump’s July 4 deadline.
But after meeting with the president and receiving promises from the White House — and an all-caps threat from Trump on Truth Social overnight — members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, voted to push the bill through. Throughout the process, the group of rabble-rousers has often held out their votes, only to fold after speaking with Trump.
Still, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, a member of the Freedom Caucus, insisted this was not a concession. “The reason we have credibility, they know we’ll vote ‘no,’” Norman told The Independent.
Norman said that he was disappointed that wind and solar tax credits or the $7,5000 tax credit for electric vehicles from the Inflation Reduction Act, the signature climate law signed by Joe Biden, were not completely phased out in the legislation.
“With that being said, we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” Norman said. “I feel perfectly comfortable with that, which I wasn’t before.”
House members scrambled to make it to Washington after severe thunderstorms and inclement weather delayed travel for many from both parties. Some members drove to D.C. while Democrats held digital town halls to criticize the legislation.
The vote came after the Senate spent a marathon 27 hours in the two days beforehand voting on amendments before the measure was tied at 50-50. Vice President JD Vance came in to cast the deciding tie-breaker.
House Speaker Mike Johnson limited the number of amendments to get the bill to the president’s desk.
The bill’s passage did not come easy, though. In the afternoon, the House held a vote to amend the rules for passage of the bill, which turned out to be the longest in the chamber’s history.
But Republicans soldiered on. Speaker Johnson called into Fox News in between whipping votes to reassure people the bill could pass by the July 4 deadline imposed by Trump.
The rule vote finally passed at around 3.30am on Wednesday morning 219-213, with Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick the only member of the GOP to break ranks as the rest of the party’s holdouts were persuaded to fall in line to set up a final floor vote.
“The bill is going to pass, they’re going to vote for it, they’re not opposed to the bill,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith told The Independent.
“Don’t allow perfection to get in the way of greatness,” he said. “And that is why they will vote for this bill, and that is why the president will be signed into law on July 4 and record that. See if I’m right.”
The bill is one of the most sweeping pieces of Republican domestic policy legislation in history. Not only does it extend the 2017 tax cuts that Trump signed in his first presidency; it also includes money to hire 10,000 new agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and 3,000 Border Patrol agents, a core tenet of Trump’s promise to conduct “mass deportations” of undocumented immigrants. It also includes money to construct the barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The legislation further allows for more oil exploration and a massive increase in military spending.
At its core, the package’s priority is $4.5 trillion in tax breaks enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term that would expire if Congress failed to act, along with new ones. This includes allowing workers to deduct tips and overtime pay, and a $6,000 deduction for most older adults earning less than $75,000 a year.
There’s also a hefty investment, some $350 billion, in national security and Trump’s deportation agenda and to help develop the “Golden Dome” defensive system over the U.S.
To help offset the lost tax revenue, the package includes $1.2 trillion in cutbacks to the Medicaid health care and food stamps, largely by imposing new work requirements, including for some parents and older people, and a major rollback of green energy tax credits.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the package will add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the decade and 11.8 million more people will go without health coverage.
The bill would require able-bodied adults without dependent children to work for Medicaid benefits and, in the coming years, would cap the level at which states can tax medical providers such as hospitals and nursing homes.
The American Hospital Association warned it could lead to the closing of rural hospitals, which serve many Republican congressional districts.
The act also imposes work requirements for SNAP recipients for able-bodied adults without dependent children. But it lowers the age at which children are considered dependent to 14 years old and would require states with high rates of overpayment or underpayment to shoulder part of the cost of administering SNAP.
The legislation remains wildly unpopular, with polling showing a large amount of Americans disapprove of it.
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez Jr., a Democrat who represents a district that also voted for Trump in 2024, said his district would be hit hard by the legislation.
“But I still feel, unfortunately, that people don’t react until they feel the pain, and they’re going to feel it pretty quick for this with this bill,” he told The Independent.
Democrats will likely campaign against the bill in the coming months ahead of the midterm election, hoping to criticize the GOP for taking away healthcare benefits as a way to extend tax cuts.
Republicans for their part already do not want to talk about the unpopular parts of the bill. When The Independent asked Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska about the side deal brokered by his Sen. Lisa Murkowski to shield the state from many of the provisions for SNAP and Medicaid during the rule vote, he did not speak and bolted onto the House floor.
A second White House official credited Trump with being “deeply involved” in both crafting the bill and helping move it through a narrowly-divided House and Senate along with help from his economic team.
The official called Trump “the motive force behind this legislation” based on his “unique and powerful relationship with lawmakers” going back to the transition period after he won last year’s election, during which he spent “dinner after dinner” engaging with members.
“The President’s focus on relationships carried us through in kind of a cascade here, when it came to be crunch time and the President was asking people to take tough votes, to come together, to unify, and ultimately, through late night phone calls,” they said. “He is the omnipresent force behind this legislation, obviously.”
The official added that Vice President JD Vance had been a “key player” as well, including by “working behind the scenes constantly in the Senate, hearing from senators, understanding their concerns, [and] making sure that the White House was responsive to them.”
