WASHINGTON — House Republicans strained through a day of starts and stops trying to advance President Donald Trump’s tax and spending cuts package , GOP leaders working almost around the clock to persuade skeptical holdouts to send the bill to his desk by the Fourth of July deadline. A procedural roll call that started late Wednesday night was held open into Thursday morning as several Republicans refused to give their votes. With few to spare from their slim majority, the outcome was in jeopardy. House Speaker Mike Johnson had recalled lawmakers to Washington, eager to seize on the momentum of the bill’s passage the day before in the Senate , and he vowed to press ahead.

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“Our way is to plow through and get it done,” Johnson said, emerging in the middle of the night from a series of closed-door meetings. He expected votes later Thursday morning. “We will meet our July 4th deadline.”

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But as voting stalled Trump, who hosted lawmakers Wednesday at the White House and spoke with some by phone, lashed out in a midnight post: “What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove???” He also warned starkly of political fallout from the delay “COSTING YOU VOTES!!!”

The idea of quickly convening to for a vote on the more than 800-page bill was a risky gambit, one designed to meet Trump’s demand for a holiday finish. Republicans have struggled mightily with the bill nearly every step of the way, often succeeding by the narrowest of margins — just one vote. Their slim 220-212 majority leaves little room for defections.

Several Republicans are balking at being asked to rubber-stamp the Senate version less than 24 hours after passage. A number of moderate Republicans from competitive districts have objected to the Senate bill’s cuts to Medicaid, while conservatives have lambasted the legislation as straying from their fiscal goals.

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It falls to Johnson and his team to convince them that the time for negotiations is over. They will need assistance from Trump to close the deal, and lawmakers headed to the White House for a two-hour session Wednesday to talk to the president about their concerns.

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“The president’s message was, ‘We’re on a roll,’” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C. “He wants to see this.”

Republicans are relying on their majority hold of Congress to push the package over a wall of unified Democratic opposition. No Democrats voted for bill in the Senate and none were expected to do so in the House.

“Hell no!” said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, flanked by fellow Democrats outside the Capitol.

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In an early warning sign of Republican resistance, a resolution setting up terms for debating Trump’s bill barely cleared the House Rules Committee on Wednesday morning. As soon as it came to the full House, it stalled out as GOP leadership waited for lawmakers who were delayed coming back to Washington and conducted closed-door negotiations with holdouts.

By nightfall, as pizzas and other dinners were arriving at the Capitol, the next steps were uncertain.

Trump pushes Republicans to do ‘the right thing’

The bill would extend and make permanent various individual and business tax breaks from Trump’s first term, plus temporarily add new ones he promised during the 2024 campaign. 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. In all, the legislation contains about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

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The bill also provides about $350 billion for defense and Trump’s immigration crackdown . Republicans partially pay for it all through less spending on Medicaid and food assistance. The Congressional Budget Office projects the bill will add about $3.3 trillion to the federal debt over the coming decade.

The House passed its version of the bill in May by a single vote, despite worries about spending cuts and the overall price tag. Now it’s being asked to give final passage to a version that, in many respects, exacerbates those concerns. The Senate bill’s projected impact on the nation’s debt, for example, is significantly higher.

“Lets go Republicans and everyone else,” Trump said in a late evening post.

The high price of opposing Trump’s bill

Johnson is intent on meeting Trump’s timeline and betting that hesitant Republicans won’t cross the president because of the heavy political price they would have to pay.

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They need only look to Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who announced his intention to vote against the legislation over the weekend. Soon, the president was calling for a primary challenger to the senator and criticizing him on social media. Tillis quickly announced he would not seek a third term.

One House Republican who has staked out opposition to the bill, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, is being targeted by Trump’s well-funded political operation.

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Democrats

target vulnerable Republicans to join them in opposition

Flanked by nearly every member of his caucus, Democratic Leader Jeffries of New York delivered a pointed message: With all Democrats voting “no,” they only need to flip four Republicans to prevent the bill from passing.

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Jeffries invoked the “courage” of the late Sen. John McCain giving a thumbs-down to the GOP effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, and singled out Republicans from districts expected to be highly competitive in 2026, including two from Pennsylvania.

“Why would Rob Bresnahan vote for this bill? Why would Scott Perry vote for this bill?” Jeffries asked.

Democrats have described the bill in dire terms, warning that Medicaid cuts would result in lives lost and food stamp cuts would be “literally ripping the food out of the mouths of children, veterans and seniors,” Jeffries said Monday.

Republicans say they are trying to right-size the safety net programs for the population they were initially designed to serve, mainly pregnant women, the disabled and children, and root out what they describe as waste, fraud and abuse .

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The package includes new 80-hour-a-month work requirements for many adults receiving Medicaid and applies existing work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to more beneficiaries. States will also pick up more of the cost for food benefits.

The driving force behind the bill, however, is the tax cuts. Many expire at the end of this year if Congress doesn’t act.

The Tax Policy Center, which provides nonpartisan analysis of tax and budget policy, projected the bill would result next year in a $150 tax break for the lowest quintile of Americans, a $1,750 tax cut for the middle quintile and a $10,950 tax cut for the top quintile. That’s compared with what they would face if the 2017 tax cuts expired.

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WASHINGTON — As the Senate prepares to consider the sprawling domestic package that House Republicans passed last week, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said he thinks there are “enough” Republicans to “stop the process” in order to prioritize stronger reductions in spending and the national deficit.

The Wisconsin Republican has criticized the bill’s impact on the deficit, characterizing outsize spending as “mortgaging our children’s future.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the bill would add $2.3 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years.

Johnson said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that congressional Republicans should examine spending “line by line, like DOGE has done” to find areas to eliminate.

The senator’s criticism comes as the Senate is gearing up to consider changes to the House bill, which passed by a single vote, setting up another fight over government deficit levels, funding for programs and attempts to rein in spending ahead of Republicans’ goal to send a final version of the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4.

Several Republicans in the Senate have expressed skepticism about aspects of the bill for what they view as inadequate spending cuts or shrinking Medicaid access and have promised to change it. Any changes to the bill would need to be approved by the House before it goes to Trump.

Trump told reporters Sunday that he expected the Senate to make “fairly significant” changes to the funding package but that he remained confident the bill would ultimately pass both chambers and reach his desk.

“I want the Senate and the senators to change, you know, to make the changes they want, and we’ll go back to the House and we’ll see if we can get them,” Trump said. “In some cases, those changes maybe are something I’d agree with.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that the current spending cuts in the bill “are wimpy and anemic,” adding that he “still would support the bill even with wimpy and anemic cuts if they weren’t going to explode the debt.”

“The problem is the math doesn’t add up,” Paul said, adding that “they’re going to explode the debt.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has also criticized potential Medicaid cuts. The bill, if passed in its current form, is expected to rescind health coverage for about 8.6 million people, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

Hawley told NBC News shortly after the House passed the bill that “the Senate will basically write its own version of this bill, and I just want to make sure that there are no Medicaid benefit cuts.”

In an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this month, Hawley accused a wing of the Republican Party of wanting “Republicans to build our big, beautiful bill around slashing health insurance for the working poor.”

“But that argument is both morally wrong and politically suicidal,” Hawley said.

When asked during a Sunday interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” to respond to Hawley’s comments, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said that “we are not cutting Medicaid” but instead “working in the elements of fraud, waste and abuse.”

The House speaker repeatedly defended the bill’s impact on people who would lose Medicaid coverage, instead casting the bill as targeting waste, fraud and abuse among Medicaid users. He said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Republican-led bill was not cutting Medicaid, arguing that “the numbers of Americans who are affected are those that are entwined in our work to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse.”

The speaker pointed to “illegal aliens on Medicaid,” saying that “Medicaid is not intended for non-U.S. citizens.” Certain non-U.S. citizens are allowed to enroll in government health care options.

Johnson also criticized “young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working.” He argued that people were committing “fraud” by “choosing not to work when they can.”

Anchor Jake Tapper asked Johnson whether he believed that if any of his constituents were to lose benefits like Medicaid, it would be because they should not have received those benefits “because they were committing waste, fraud or abuse.”

“Yeah,” Johnson answered. “Look, my district, as every district in America, has people who are on the program who shouldn’t.”

Democrats have seized on potential Medicaid cuts, blasting Republicans’ domestic policy bill and working to characterize the GOP as willing to cut health insurance options for poor people while increasing the wealth of Americans with higher incomes.

NBC News previously reported that during negotiations over the bill last week, Trump visited House Republicans and instructed them, “Don’t f— around with Medicaid,” according to two lawmakers present.

The House speaker said during multiple Sunday-morning interviews that he has urged Senate Republicans to make as few changes to the bill as possible. The House and Senate will ultimately need to reconcile different versions of the bill before it heads to Trump’s desk to be signed into law.

“I had lunch with my Senate Republican colleagues on Tuesday, their weekly luncheon, and I encouraged them to remember that we are one team,” Johnson said on CBS News. “It’s the Senate and the House Republicans together that will deliver this ball over the goal line, so to speak. And I encouraged them to make as few modifications as possible, remembering that I have a very delicate balance.”

The bill passed the House 215-214, with two Republicans opposing the bill, one voting “present” and two missing the vote.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., criticized the bill last week, saying that “Trump promised to love and cherish Medicaid.”

“Instead, his One Big Ugly Bill represents the largest healthcare cut in our country’s history,” Jeffries said in a statement. “Millions of people will lose their Medicaid coverage and hardworking American taxpayers will be forced to pay higher premiums, copays and deductibles.”

Senate Republicans will take control of the party’s mammoth tax and domestic policy bill when they return to Washington on Monday — and seek to win over a diverse group of GOP lawmakers agitating for changes to the legislation.

Members are staring down a key four-week stretch to hammer out provisions of the bill, with their Fourth of July goal in sight and pressure mounting to complete President Trump’s top domestic agenda priority.

The bill narrowly passed the House last month after Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) struck a fragile compromise with different factions of his conference.

But there are still Senate Republicans who could gum up the works as Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) works to shepherd the legislation through the upper chamber with only three votes to spare.

Here’s a look at a half-dozen of those lawmakers to watch in the coming weeks.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)

Murkowski, one of the foremost Senate GOP moderates, is atop the list of the members Thune and his leadership team will have to win over, and she has already indicated she has a number of concerns.

Although Murkowski voted for the Senate GOP’s budget resolution — which served as the blueprint for the bill — in early April, she told reporters she was worried about three items.

Among those is the impact of potential Medicaid work requirements, as she believes her state will have trouble implementing them due to its outdated payment systems for the program.

“There are provisions in there that are very, very, very challenging if not impossible for us to implement,” Murkowski said.

She has also expressed worries about what the Medicaid changes could mean for tribal communities in her state, which are heavily reliant on Medicaid for health coverage.

On top of that, she and three of her colleagues have expressed concerns with language in the House bill that would nix wind, solar and geothermal energy tax credits that were put in place by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) seen May 14, 2025, has also expressed worries about what the Medicaid changes could mean for tribal communities in her state, which are heavily reliant on Medicaid for health coverage. (Greg Nash, The Hill)

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)

He’s not a name that usually ends up on these lists, but Hawley has been perhaps the most vocal member of the Senate GOP conference about potential cuts to Medicaid benefits.

He has maintained that the Medicaid cuts are a red line for him in backing the final package — even as conservatives in the House have shown an interest in taking a hatchet to the health care program.

And he has a key player in the entire effort seemingly on his side.

“We ought to just do what the president says,” Hawley told reporters last month after the House passed the bill.

Two days earlier, Trump had told House Republicans in a closed-door meeting to “leave Medicaid alone.”

Hawley added that he spoke with Trump about the state of play.

“His exact words were, ‘Don’t touch it, Josh,’” Hawley told reporters. “I said, ‘Hey, we’re on the same page.’”

Hawley has also shown a willingness to take that stand on the floor. During the chamber’s first vote-a-rama in February, Hawley sided with Democrats on an amendment that would have prevented tax cuts for wealthy Americans if Medicaid funding is slashed.

Any cuts to Medicaid beneficiaries would hit the Show Me State hard in particular given that 21 percent of Missourians rely on the program or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the companion insurance program for lower-income children.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)

Collins stands out as one of only two Republicans — along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — to vote against the party’s budget resolution in April, though she is the far more likely of the two to vote “aye” when push comes to shove on final passage.

The Maine Republican has continuously expressed opposition to reductions in federal Medicaid funding and shifting costs to the states, sounding the alarm on the effect doing so would have on her state’s rural hospitals. Maine’s rural hospitals intensely rely on the health care program, and cuts could deal a crippling blow, she argues.

Collins cited that issue in her vote against the budget blueprint, and she has kept up the drumbeat.

“Medicaid is a critically important program for Maine’s health care system and a vital resource for many seniors, low-income families, disabled patients, and those who cannot work,” Collins said in a statement at the time. “I cannot support proposals that would create more duress for our hospitals and providers that are already teetering on the edge of insolvency.”

She said last week, on the eve of the House passing the measure, that “we’re still trying to figure out what the provider tax reforms are, but I’m very worried about our rural hospitals in Maine.”

Collins was also the only other Senate Republican to vote with Hawley and Democrats for the vote-a-rama Medicaid amendment in February.

Her up-in-the-air standing is nothing new for the GOP, especially on a single-party effort. Eight years ago, Collins was a split decision on the GOP’s two reconciliation bills.

She voted alongside Murkowski and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) against the party’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Months later, though, she backed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The GOP’s current tax agenda would likely make those 2017 cuts permanent.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), seen May 14, has been a vocal critic of the House’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)

If there’s one Republican senator who is the most likely to oppose the package at the end of the day, it’s Paul.

The Kentucky Republican has been a loud critic of the bill over its inclusion of a debt ceiling hike and lack of deficit reduction.

Paul has made clear that his red line for any bill is a debt ceiling increase. But Republicans on both sides of the Capitol are seemingly intent on following through on Trump’s wishes to include it and help the party avoid giving Democratic concessions in any possible negotiation.

This means that without any changes, Paul will be a “no,” and Senate GOP leaders have less breathing room than they had hoped, capping their votes at 52 in the process.

“I’ve told them if they’ll take the debt ceiling off of it, I’ll consider voting for it,” Paul said last week after the House vote about his talks with GOP leadership. “It’s not conservative; I can’t support it.”

“The spending reductions are imperfect, and I think wimpy, but I’d still vote for the package if I didn’t have to vote to raise the debt ceiling,” he added.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)

Senate GOP leaders have long had to worry about the concerns of moderates, but it’s Johnson and his fellow conservatives who are making their complaints known over what they view as unacceptable levels of cuts.

Johnson has not gone nearly as far as Paul in saying he is prepared to oppose a final bill, but he has hinted that conservatives may throw their weight around.

“We need to be responsible, and the first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit,” Johnson told CNN last weekend. “This actually increases it.”

“I think we have enough [senators] to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” Johnson added.

Johnson has been vocal about his desire to see greater spending reductions, pointing to the roughly $4 trillion the bill would add to the deficit in its current form.

He has voiced a preference to move toward pre-COVID spending levels, arguing that this is the U.S.’s last chance to do so.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)

Tillis, a moderate-leaning senator eyeing what could be a close reelection race in 2026, has aired multiple points of concern, headlined by the axing of energy tax incentives in the bill.

He has told colleagues that the swift termination of the credits enacted by the Inflation Reduction Act will cause major harm to numerous companies in North Carolina and force them to scramble after years of planning.

He pointed specifically to former President Biden’s abrupt killing of the Keystone XL Pipeline four years ago and how it has left investors second-guessing whether to back similar projects.

“A wholesale repeal, or the termination of certain individual credits, would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy,” Tillis, Murkowski and Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) wrote to Thune back in early April.

Adding to the drama for Tillis, he is staring down one of the two most contentious Senate races on the 2026 map, forcing him to shore up potential weak points as Democrats look to pounce — and giving leadership an incentive to hand him a win for his voters back home.