The multi-trillion-dollar tax bill that carries much of President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda passed its final committee hurdle late Wednesday night after a rare overnight and all-day congressional meeting, teeing up a vote for final House passage.
The House Rules Committee voted 8-4 along party lines to advance Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” to the House floor after gaveling in a hearing at 1 a.m. Wednesday, to the gripes of various lawmakers about the timing and lack of bill text, and working almost nonstop until 10:40 p.m.
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The hearing began without the so-called manager’s amendment that included last-minute deals with GOP lawmakers on trimming Medicaid spending and increasing the SALT cap on state and local tax deductions.
The updated bill text was released Wednesday night —a little over 19 hours after the hearing began —and contained language to appease holdouts by moving up Medicaid work requirement implementation to Dec. 2026 and raising the SALT deduction cap to $40,400 for people making under $505,000, with a 1% annual increase over eight years. This amendment provided final changes to policy areas included in the megabill that each of the House’s 11 committees took up and passed over the last month.
“This is a historic moment, we believe it’s a generational opportunity to reclaim the American promise, to renew the American spirit, and restore America’s greatness,” said Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) at the hearing.
“Let’s give the voters what they asked for today,” he added.
The committee vote keeps Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on track to meet his self-imposed deadline of voting on final passage before the Memorial Day holiday. To get the bill over the finish line, he invited President Donald Trump to the House on Tuesday to stress to Republicans the importance of getting his agenda passed. Johnson and Freedom Caucus members then traveled to the White House on Wednesday to hash out final differences.
The legislation would renew Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and make good on his various campaign promises to offer tax breaks on tipped wages, overtime pay, car loan interest, and Social Security beneficiaries, as well as increase the child tax credit and the standard deduction.
To pay for the tax breaks, the bill reduces spending on Medicaid and SNAP food benefits and imposes work requirements on the safety net programs for lower-income Americans.
As the committee waited on the final version of the bill, Democrats laid into Republicans for holding the meeting in the “dead of night,” with Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) labeling the session “DC after dark.”
“If you guys really think these are such great, awesome things to do, like Trump keeps saying, then why not hold this hearing at 1 p.m. and not 1 a.m.,” Rules Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-MA) said in his opening statement as he tried unsuccessfully to adjourn the hearing.
“Americans may have just woken up and they don’t know what’s happening but let me tell you, it’s a nightmare, we are living through a nightmare,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM) said at one point in the hearing.
The final passage of the bill is not guaranteed with a very slim GOP majority. Fiscal hawks have been vocal that their support for the bill hinges on finding enough cuts to offset the tax breaks. They have wanted deeper Medicaid cuts, which Trump has not backed, and a full repeal of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Holdout Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Ralph Norman (R-SC)—who sit on both the Budget and Rules committees—both expressed their distaste Tuesday about holding the hearing in the middle of the night.
“I don’t think that’s the right way to do business,” Roy said, who skipped the House Rules vote and has raised many fiscal concerns about the bill.
Norman and Roy were two of four “present” votes to pass the bill out of the Budget Committee late Sunday night as negotiations on concessions continued with House leadership.
“It’s fair to let it go to the floor,” Norman told the Washington Examiner Tuesday afternoon.
House leadership passed a procedural rule Tuesday afternoon allowing them to surpass the 24-hour hold that is typically placed on a bill after it passes out of the Rules Committee before it can hit the floor for final passage. That means the final House vote comes to the floor Wednesday night or Thursday morning.
Trump met with the GOP conference Tuesday morning in an effort to sway both centrist and fiscal conservative holdouts. While the president did not have immediate success with unhappy members from either faction of the party, he ultimately helped shake loose an agreement with blue state Republicans to raise the cap on SALT deductions from $10,000 to $40,000.
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The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, previously estimated, before the final amendments, that the “big, beautiful bill” would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade. The independent Congressional Budget Office projected the proposal would pile on some $3 trillion over the next decade to the national debt, which already stands at an eye-popping $36 trillion.
Leger Fernandez underscored the concerns of fiscal hawks on the committee, saying the bill “increases the deficit.” But Rep. Jodey Arrington, chairman of the House Budget Committee, dunked on CBO at a different point in the hearing, citing various times when the cost projections were off.
“They are wrong often, and sometimes they’re wrong in an order of magnitude, in one case, by a trillion dollars,” Arrington (R-TX) said.
Democrats also pointed to a new CBO analysis on the wealth gap that found the bill’s tax cuts and reductions to healthcare and food benefits would decrease resources by 2% for the poorest households in 2027, while increasing resources by 4% for the wealthiest households.
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The White House argues the bill will produce more economic growth and boost wages. Not renewing Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts would amount to a financial blow for families, Republicans say.
“The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ is our answer to the American people’s mandate from November,” Rules Committee Chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said at the hearing.
“It’s a clear, full-throated response to the millions of hardworking men and women across the entire nation who demand a serious course correction from the last four years.”
If the bill passes the House with a razor-thin majority of just three votes to lose, it still has to go through the Senate, where many more changes are expected to be made.