House Speaker Mike Johnson, (R-Louisiana) speaks to reporters before entering the House Chamber on July 2, 2025 on Capitol Hill in Washington. Photo / Tom Brenner, The Washington Post
Republicans on Thursday notched the first major legislative victory of President Donald Trump’s second term, a mammoth tax and immigration agenda the GOP hopes will reshape the US economy and unwind many of the Biden administration’s accomplishments.
The House, in a 218 to 214 vote, passed Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”, a US$3.4 trillion ($5.6t) measure to extend tax cuts from Trump’s first term and implement new campaign promises – such as eliminating income taxes on tips and overtime wages – while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and defence. It raises the country’s borrowing cap by US$5 trillion ($8.2t), staving off a debt default that the Treasury was weeks away from breaching.
The House’s approval sends the bill to Trump’s desk to be signed into law in time to beat a self-imposed July 4 deadline. The Senate passed its edition of the legislation on Tuesday.
To offset the cost of the bill, the legislation cuts about US$1t ($1.6t) from Medicaid, the federal health insurance programme for low-income individuals and people with disabilities, and other healthcare programs. It reduces spending on anti-hunger programmes, including SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps, by US$185 billion ($304.9b).
Nearly 17 million people will lose healthcare coverage or healthcare subsidies over the next decade if the bill becomes law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“This bill is a deal with the devil,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said during the debate on the House floor. “It explodes our national debt. It militarises our entire economy and it strips away health care and dignity of the American people.”
Republicans heralded the legislation as a boost for the working class coalition that swept the party to victory in November’s elections, giving it unified control of Congress and the White House.
“It is the principal vehicle for advancing President Trump’s America First agenda, unleashing a rising tide of prosperity, securing our border, modernising our national defence and supercharging energy, agriculture, all the sectors of our economy that our government has kept in a choke hold for too long,” Budget Committee chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) said on the House floor.
As talks dragged on, leaders left open two votes for over five hours – a sign of the Republican conference’s dysfunction and also the furious backroom dealing to get Trump’s agenda over the finish line by an arbitrary July 4 deadline.
Lawmakers spent Wednesday into the wee hours on Thursday shuttling between talks with party leaders, Trump administration lieutenants and the President himself at the White House.
But as Wednesday turned into Thursday morning, Johnson was still working to convince 10 lawmakers to vote to advance the bill. Republicans opened debate on the measure after 3am.
Holdouts said the prospect of forthcoming executive orders from the White House and another Republican budget bill helped ease some concerns.
Trump’s proposal to end taxes on tips – up to US$25,000 ($41,213.25) – came from a Nevada restaurant server, the President bragged on the campaign trail. He often speaks about ending taxes on overtime during political events with production line workers. Trump pledged to exempt Social Security benefits from taxes; instead, Republicans passed a $6000 bonus to the standard deduction for seniors.
The GOP borrowed a Democratic proposal to launch savings accounts for newborns, seeded with US$1000 ($1648.53) of taxpayer money; Republicans in earlier versions of the legislation called them “Trump accounts”.
“No one puts a deal together like President Trump. He’s a master. But I think one of the other persuasive things was just looking at the Democrats’ reaction to it,” said Representative Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who voted against an earlier iteration of the package. “Maybe the bill is better than I thought.”
But for the lowest-income Americans, the benefits of those provisions are wiped out by the cuts to social safety net programmes, according to independent analyses of the bill, and its gargantuan debt impact could slow the US economy.
By 2033, the bottom 60% of US taxpayers would be worse off because of the measure, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Budget Model reported. The top 0.1% of taxpayers – those earning at least US$5.1 million ($8.4m) – would be more than US$83,000 ($136,827.99) better off.
“This bill is a middle finger to working people,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) said on the House floor.
Republicans, citing their own rosy economic growth projections, insist that it would improve those households’ fortunes, and hundreds of billions of dollars of homeland security and defence spending would goose job-creating industries.
Nearly US$170 billion ($280.2b) in the bill funds the Trump administration’s border and immigration crackdown and it would impose US$69 billion in fees on immigrants and visitors to the country. An additional US$160 billion ($263.7b) would flow to the Defence Department, partially for Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” continental missile defence system.
The legislation would make permanent a trio of corporate tax deductions that make it easier for companies to invest in research and purchase new equipment while rescinding more than half a trillion dollars in clean energy programmes from President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Many of the tax proposals changed as the bill pinged between the two chambers of Congress. The House passed legislation in May that had a smaller debt impact while cutting less from Medicaid.
The Senate swiftly overhauled the measure, making it simultaneously more expensive and more punitive toward Medicaid. Republicans used the budget reconciliation process to bypass a Democratic filibuster in the Senate; that meant when the upper chamber sent its approved legislation back to the House, the lower chamber was unable to alter it and still beat Trump’s deadline. Amendments would have restarted many of the cumbersome processes needed to pass tax legislation on party lines.
The Senate made the corporate tax cuts more generous and temporarily preserved some of the climate credits. On health care, it imposed strict limits on taxes that states charge medical providers as a roundabout way of collecting more federal Medicaid dollars.
That prompted concern among some lawmakers about the fate of rural hospitals, which rely heavily on Medicaid patients.
The Senate’s changes managed to frustrate both ends of the House’s GOP conference. From the centre, moderates raged about the approach to health care spending.
“I’m not happy with it at all,” raged Representative Greg Murphy (R-North Carolina), a physician. “That’s horrible policy.”
From the right, lawmakers grumbled about the bill’s debt effects. A group of budget hawks in April extracted a promise from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) that the amount in tax cuts would not exceed the amount of spending the bill cut.
“It wasn’t achieved. It was failed,” harrumphed Representative Chip Roy (R-Texas). “The Senate failed.”
Members of the archconservative House Freedom Caucus circulated a three-page memo with a list of nearly two dozen deficiencies with the legislation at a Wednesday meeting at the White House.
“Leave it to the Senate to find a way to aggravate both the moderates and the conservatives in the Freedom Caucus,” said Representative Jeff Van Drew (R-New Jersey), who had concerns about cuts to health care programmes. “That’s extraordinary that they did that. That is a real art and science to be able to aggravate everyone in the House. We had a really good bill, a good work product, got everybody on board, and they just had to play with it.”
That White House meeting, though, seemed to be enough to unify Republicans. As House Ways and Means Committee chair Jason T. Smith (R-Missouri) put it, “The President is the most gifted and skilled negotiator and whip.”
Mariana Alfaro, Liz Goodwin, Theodoric Meyer, Paul Kane and Emily Davies contributed to this report.