Winners and losers as House approves Trump's ‘big, beautiful bill'

Yahoo

22-05-2025

House Republicans on Thursday approved a massive legislative package comprising the major pieces of President Trump's domestic agenda, including tax cuts, an immigration crackdown and sharp cuts in Medicaid.
The vote defied the skeptics who thought it impossible to unite the feuding factions of the House GOP behind so large a bill. And it marked a huge political victory for Trump, whose approval rating is well underwater, and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has faced internal criticisms for his handling of major legislative debates since he took the gavel in 2023.
Here are the winners and losers from the hard-fought debate.
For a president who made campaign promises to extend tax cuts, clamp down on immigration and unleash domestic energy production, Thursday's vote marked a major victory for a simple reason: All of those policies are in the bill.
But the political implications of the vote might be even more significant, demonstrating that Trump has a firm grip over even the conservative, rabble-rousing wing of the House Republican Conference, whose members have frequently defied the legislative wishes of their own GOP leaders.
Indeed, ask any Republican in the Capitol who gets credit for nudging the package over the finish line and the answer is clear: President Trump.
'He's the one that's responsible for this,' Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a prominent Freedom Caucus member, said just after Thursday's vote. 'It would've never happened if he hadn't gotten involved.'
After remaining largely on the sidelines during the early stages of the debate, Trump dove in head-first during the final days leading up to the vote.
On Tuesday, he visited the Capitol to urge the GOP holdouts to quit their 'grandstanding' and back the bill. When that didn't work, he called members of the House Freedom Caucus to the White House on Wednesday, when he offered just enough to win the support of even the loudest critics.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) was one of them. He said he was swayed to support the bill largely after GOP leaders agreed to increase incentives to states that did not expand Medicaid under ObamaCare to stay the course. That, he said, 'came out of our meeting yesterday in the White House.'
Even Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of just two Republicans to vote against the package on Thursday, credited Trump's lobbying as the decisive factor in passing the bill.
'He was very persuasive,' Massie said. 'He made a decent effort at convincing me.'
Heading into the week, there were plenty of skeptics saying that Johnson's push to pass the legislation through the House by Memorial Day was a pipe dream. And there were points in the debate, the Speaker conceded, when he was almost forced to agree.
'There [were] a few moments over the last week when it looked like the thing might fall apart,' Johnson said Thursday morning.
Still, Johnson was relentless in his pursuit of meeting his own deadline, staging countless discussions with the two groups of holdouts — conservative spending hawks fighting for steeper Medicaid cuts and moderate blue-state Republicans vying to secure tax relief for their high-income districts — in search of an elusive deal.
In the process, he made a few bold gambles.
When the conservatives blocked the bill in the Budget Committee last Friday, he quickly staged a second vote on the same proposal late Sunday night, all but daring them to sink it again. (They didn't.)
And when Trump's warning for both groups to drop their demands didn't bear fruit, Johnson brought both camps back to his office with new offers that ultimately helped to win their approval.
'It was a tough process, it was a competitive process, but one that resulted in everyone being able to go back to their constituencies and say they have a win,' said Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), a Long Island centrist who was fighting to hike the cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction.
The debate, for now, seems to have put Johnson in the good graces of the competing wings of his diverse conference heading into negotiations with Senate Republicans over a final version of the party's domestic agenda. The Speaker gave plenty of credit to Trump and the many committee chairs who cobbled the package together. But he also leaned heavily on divine intervention.
'There's a lot of prayer that brought this together,' Johnson said after the vote.
Moderate Republicans from high-tax blue states made it clear from the start that they would go to the mat for a significant increase to the SALT deduction cap, threatening to tank the entire package if they did not get substantial relief.
In the end, they held the line — and it paid off.
The Trump agenda bill includes a $40,000 SALT deduction cap for individuals making $500,000 or less — quadruple the current $10,000 deduction cap adopted as part of the 2017 Trump tax law. The deduction cap and income limits would increase 1 percent per year over 10 years.
The final deal came after days of intense — and sometimes contentious — negotiations between leadership and members of the SALT Caucus, with the moderate Republicans digging in on their demands, a political gamble when working with such a sprawling package.
First, top lawmakers proposed a $30,000 deduction cap with a $400,000 income limit, which the group vocally rejected. The group then floated a $62,000 deduction cap for individual filers and a $124,000 deduction cap for joint filers — highlighting the gulf between the two groups. When leadership returned to the table with an offer that would decrease the deduction cap from $40,000 to $30,000 after four years, they demurred. Finally, a palatable offer arrived.
The group is claiming victory, already looking to use the provision to their advantage when seeking reelection in their purple districts. LaLota, a vocal supporter of increasing the SALT cap, said he 'agreed to a number that I can sell back at home.'
'A number that makes 92 percent of my constituents completely whole,' he added. 'This is going to lead to welcome tax relief for Long Island middle-class families.'
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who is eyeing a gubernatorial bid, was pithier: 'Promises made, promises kept,' he wrote on the social platform X.
Conservative spending hawks drew a sharp red line at the launch of the debate, warning that they wouldn't support a package that added to deficit spending.
Then they crossed it.
The package approved by the House on Thursday is estimated to increase deficits by trillions of dollars over the next decade. And while some Republicans have dismissed those projections as wildly off base, others — including some of Congress's most vocal spending hawks — are readily acknowledging that the package falls far short of their fiscal goals.
'The consequences of this bill will add to the debt, and if we don't get the bond market under control, then we're going to be paying a whole lot of money,' Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), a Freedom Caucus member, said after the vote. 'We're already close to a trillion dollars in debt payments now. That is a real concern. It ought to be a concern of more people in Washington that this is an unsustainable path. We've got to get that under control.'
Norman agreed, saying conservatives fought their best fight for more savings but in the end were forced to give in to the inertia of the massive bill.
'That's what bothers me. We just don't have the courage to handle it,' he said. 'It's going to hit, and I hate it when it hits.'
Massie opposed the bill for that very reason, warning colleagues before the vote that the package is 'a debt bomb ticking.'
'I'd love to stand here and tell the American people, we can cut your taxes and we can increase spending and everything's going to be just fine,' he said. 'But I can't do that because I'm here to deliver a dose of reality.'
A central feature of the Republican bill is a gutting of the green-energy agenda adopted under former President Biden.
Under the proposal, tax credits offered to climate-friendly energy projects will end altogether beginning in 2029, and companies hoping to take advantage of those benefits before then will have to begin construction within 60 days of the legislation becoming law.
Roy said the expedited rollback of those credits will save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars — and was a major factor in securing his vote.
'The solidification of the Inflation Reduction Act tightening … was massive,' he said. 'By that, we're constraining the hell out of wind and solar, which is good.'
The GOP bill would also slash federal programs designed to fight pollution, allocate billions of dollars to the strategic petroleum reserve and eliminate a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of electric vehicles.
The proposal drew howls from Democrats and environmental activists, who are warning that the effects on the climate will be far-reaching.
Trump, during his visit to the Capitol, was adamant that Republicans should not touch Medicaid benefits and should focus instead on 'waste, fraud and abuse' under the low-income health care program.
Conservative hard-liners, however, weren't convinced. And much of the last-minute wrangling centered on their demands to expedite the timeline for implementing new Medicaid eligibility restrictions.
Those proposed changes, including new proof-of-employment requirements for certain adult beneficiaries, are estimated to cause more than 7 million people to become uninsured over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Democrats have pounced on the projections, accusing Republicans of slashing health care benefits for the poorest Americans in order to underwrite tax cuts for the wealthiest.
It's unclear if the Medicaid cuts will survive in the Senate, where a handful of GOP senators — including conservative Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — have warned that they'll oppose any package that cuts health benefits under the program.
Scaling back the Medicaid cuts, however, would complicate passage when the bill returns to the House, where conservatives are already warning that they won't swallow an erosion of their hard-fought, deficit-cutting victories.
'They've got a lot they still need to do to make it better, and they can't unwind what we achieved,' Roy said. 'Those are going to be red lines. If the SALT guys think they've got red lines, just wait until you see what's coming out of us.'
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