US House Republicans stayed up all night to pass their multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package, with Speaker Mike Johnson defying the skeptics and unifying his ranks to muscle President Donald Trump’s priority bill to approval Thursday.
With last-minute concessions and stark warnings from Trump, the Republican holdouts largely dropped their opposition to salvage the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that’s central to the GOP agenda. The House launched debates before midnight and by dawn the vote was called, 215-214, with Democrats staunchly opposed, AP reports.
It will now move on to the Senate
“To put it simply, this bill gets Americans back to winning again,” said Johnson, R-La.
The outcome caps an intense time on Capitol Hill, with days of private negotiations and public committee hearings, many taking place back-to-back and around-the-clock. Republicans insisted their sprawling 1,000-page-plus package was what voters sent them to Congress — and Trump to the White House — to accomplish. They believe it will be “rocket fuel,” as one Republican put it during the debate, for the uneasy US economy.
Trump himself demanded action, visiting House Republicans at Tuesday’s conference meeting and hosting GOP leaders and the holdouts for a lengthy session Wednesday at the White House. Before the vote, the administration warned in a pointed statement that “failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal.”
Central to the package is the GOP’s commitment to extending some $4.5 trillion in tax breaks Republicans had engineered during Trump’s first term in 2017, while temporarily adding new ones he campaigned on during his 2024 campaign, including no taxes on tips, overtime pay, car loan interest, and others.
To make up for some of the lost tax revenue, the Republicans focused on changes to Medicaid and the food stamps program, largely by imposing work requirements on many of those receiving benefits. There’s also a massive rollback of green energy tax breaks from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
Additionally, the package tacks on $350 billion in new spending, with about $150 billion going to the Pentagon, including for the president’s new “Golden Dome” defense shield, and the rest for Trump’s mass deportation and border security agenda.