House Republicans are facing the possibility of missing their self-imposed, “artificial” deadline to get the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill to President Donald Trump’s desk.
As negotiations drag in the Senate, House leaders and key caucus gamemakers face a reality that they may not get the bill — which calls for trillions of dollars in cuts, an extension to the 2017 tax cuts, and repeals of key Biden-era provisions — to the White House by the end of next week.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters Friday he had a “long discussion” with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Trump at the White House Thursday evening regarding the deadline.
“We are very, very close, and Leader Thune has confidence that they could get the job done by this weekend, and we certainly are hopeful for that,” Johnson said. “We would still like to meet that July 4, self-imposed deadline, and the president likes that idea. I certainly like that idea.”
“So we’re gonna wait and see posture in the House right here,” the speaker added, “and we’ll see what happens.”
Trump said the July 4 deadline is “important” but that it’s not the “end all.”
“We can go longer, but we’d like to get it done by that time, if possible,” the president said during a press briefing Friday morning.
However, after the briefing, Trump said in a social media post that he wants the bill before July 4.
“The House of Representatives must be ready to send it to my desk before July 4th — We can get it done,” the president wrote. “It will be a wonderful Celebration for our Country, which is right now, ‘The Hottest Country anywhere in the World’ — And to think, just last year, we were a laughingstock.”
The president’s ambitious deadline has irritated many GOP fiscal hawks who have accused leadership of jamming the major bill through.
“That’s always the way of this place, right?” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner. “Hurry up and rush to an artificial deadline, but we’ll see. I mean, if the Senate moves this weekend, they might have 72 hours over here.”
“If they make a lot of changes, we’re gonna have a lot we’ve got to look through,” he added. “Obviously, they’re making changes on the fly right now, trying to deal with all the Byrd issues, so we’ll see what happens.”
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) agreed, stating it’s the nature of Capitol Hill to wait until the eleventh hour on contentious legislation.
“That’s what Washington is good at, is kind of jamming people last minute, giving you something you haven’t had time to read, haven’t had time to get reflection input from your district,” he said. “And so, yeah, it’s not, it’s not ideal.”
The parliamentarian’s ruling against provisions in the Senate Finance Committee’s portion of the bill — including cuts to healthcare provider taxes, federal Medicaid reimbursements, and immigrant eligibility for Medicaid — has complicated the path forward, as GOP leaders are reworking some of the language to preserve certain areas.
But fiscal hawks aren’t willing to budge an inch, particularly after the Freedom Caucus celebrated victory in securing over $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and moving up the effective deadlines for Medicaid and Inflation Reduction Act energy credits.
“We negotiated in good faith that we were going to not end up in a situation where — look, we’ve given them a lot of latitude,” Burlison said. “They can find spending reductions, they can find cuts, they just need to be reciprocal and pay for them. That was our agreement.”
Burlison referred to the commitment Thune gave just hours before the House voted on the budget resolution, after some Freedom Caucus members said they wanted a concrete agreement from the top Senate Republican that he’d adhere to the spending cuts as a floor and not a ceiling.
“That’s where I’m going to give them the grace to say, hopefully they remember that and that they know that anything that doesn’t really meet that, we mean it when we say it’s not going to fly [in the House],” Burlison said.
Democrats have spent the last few months campaigning against the bill, highlighting Medicaid cuts specifically, and they have expressed frustration and distaste with the quick timeline.
“It’s a disservice to the American people,” Rep. Gabe Amo (D-RI) told the Washington Examiner. “If it’s so beautiful, why rush and do this to force a vote before the Fourth of July holiday?”
The railroading from Republicans mirrors a similar attempt from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in which Democrats were trying to get Obamacare over the finish line in 2010. Republicans have cemented her infamous line, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”
As part of a deal to give former Rep. Kevin McCarthy the speaker’s gavel in 2022, he agreed to adhere to a 72-hour rule that allows members time to review the bill so there can’t be any claims that there were hidden rules or measures inside contentious packages.
That hasn’t stopped some Republicans from claiming that they didn’t know certain provisions were in the bill. Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) told constituents at a town hall he didn’t know the bill would limit judges’ powers to hold people in contempt for violating court orders. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said she was unaware the megabill would block states from regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years.
“Full transparency, I did not know about this section,” Greene said on social media, calling it a violation of states’ rights. She added that she “would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.”
But with last-minute changes via the Byrd Rule, which determines what policies could trigger the 60-vote filibuster threshold, and negotiations across chambers, Republicans are pushing themselves into a possible repeat situation in which Congress rushes a bill and is left to deal with the fallout from constituents, particularly those in swing districts.
As with other contentious legislation, Republican leadership may need to rely on Trump to get personally involved in the reconciliation fight. Trump called holdouts personally during the initial stages of the tax bill’s development and also told Republicans to stop “grandstanding” in several posts on social media.
The last time Republicans held a trifecta was during Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2019. During that time, one of the crowning achievements of his administration was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and Republicans are moving quickly to try to use the first two years of Trump’s second term to renew the tax cuts and pass more of his agenda before Judgment Day (also known as the midterm elections) on Nov. 3, 2026.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said he hopes the president gets involved but that he’s unsure if it’s time to throw in the towel just yet on the July 4 deadline when asked if he’s still optimistic it can be reached.
“When we don’t have anything, it’s like the wind: Which way is it going to blow? Nothing has come back to us,” Norman said.
Johnson can only afford to lose three votes and still pass the bill along party lines, with that number fluctuating based on Democrats’ attendance. Over a dozen members are still unsure of the bill, but many are waiting to see the Senate’s version before making any decisions.
“I’m letting the dust settle here, so then we can analyze and look at where things fall and what it actually is going to look like,” Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) told the Washington Examiner.
Among the holdouts are members of the SALT Caucus, who have been adamant that any deal from the Senate that does not match the one that passed the House is dead on arrival. The White House is nearing a “tentative” deal on the state and local tax deduction in coordination with some House Republicans, but the Senate has not agreed to it yet.
Republican members of the SALT Caucus have been offered a deal to raise the deduction’s cap to $40,000 for five years, as outlined in the House-passed bill. The cap would then snap back to $10,000, the limit in the Senate’s draft bill.
Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY), one of the most vocal SALT members, rejected the deal outright on Friday.
“That just affirms everything I’ve been against for so long,” he said.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) has said she wants the SALT cap to remain at the $40,000 that came out of the House Ways and Means Committee, but she acknowledged that the eventual deal will not likely satisfy every House Republican.
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“I think they will do something that is reasonable,” Malliotakis said. “At the end of the day, whether it’s going to satisfy every member, probably not, and at the end of the day, that’s what a negotiation is. It’s a give and take.”
“So you’re going to have members of the SALT Caucus and low-sodium members that are probably both going to be upset or not completely satisfied with the outcome,” she added.
Lauren Green contributed to this report.