Major win for Trump as Congress passes 'big, beautiful bill'
After a gruelling session on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 218 to 214 on Thursday afternoon. It was passed by the Senate on Tuesday by one vote.
Trump had given the Republican-controlled Congress a deadline of 4 July to get a final version of the bill to his desk to be signed into law.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill could add $3.3tn to federal deficits over the next 10 years and leave millions without health coverage - a forecast that the White House disputes.
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It also makes savings through rolling back tax breaks for clean energy projects and making cuts to a food benefits programme.
The spending package delivers on many of Trump's campaign promises, including making his 2017 tax cuts permanent, as well as legislating new tax breaks for tips, overtime and Social Security recipients - at a cost of $4.5tn over 10 years.
About $150bn (£110bn) will be spent on border security, detention centres and immigration enforcement officers. Another $150bn is allocated for military expenditures, including the president's "gold dome" missile defence programme.
The fate of the so-called 'big, beautiful bill' hung in the balance for much of Wednesday as Republican rebels with concerns about the impact of the bill on national debt held firm - prompting a furious missive from Trump.
"What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT'S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!," he wrote on Truth Social just after midnight local time on Thursday.
Both chambers of Congress are controlled by Trump's Republican Party, but within the party several factions were at odds over key policies in the lengthy legislation.
In the early hours of Thursday, Republican leadership grew more confident, and a procedural vote on the bill passed just after 03:00 EDT (07:00 GMT).
The bill's passage into law was delayed by Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries', who delivered the longest speech in the chamber's history.
His "magic minute" address, which is a custom that allows party leaders to speak for as long as they like, ran for eight hours and 45 minutes.
Jeffries pledged to take his "sweet time on behalf of the American people", decrying the bill's impact on poor Americans.
His speech was watched by a field of tired eyes sitting around him, and proved to be Democrats' final move before the bill became law.
A look at the key items in Trump's sprawling budget bill
Fact-checking three key claims about Trump's mega-bill
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A Texas House panel on Saturday advanced a draft congressional map aimed at adding five new Republican districts next year over protests from Democrats that the proposal would suppress the votes of people of color. The chamber's redistricting committee approved the map on party lines, 12 to 6, after spending much of Friday hearing testimony from U.S. House Democrats from Texas and members of the public largely opposed to the plan. The map could be considered by the entire state House as early as next week. Earlier in the hearing, GOP lawmakers said that they are redrawing the state's congressional map to advantage Republican candidates, setting aside a legal justification offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and making their political motivations explicit for the first time. "Different from everyone else, I'm telling you, I'm not beating around the bush," Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican carrying the bill, said about the goal of the map. "We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance." Texas Republicans launched the redistricting effort after pressure from President Donald Trump's political operatives, who demanded state leaders redraw the map to help Republicans maintain their slim House majority ahead of a potentially difficult midterm election. The House redistricting committee released its proposed redo of the map Wednesday. It slices up districts in the Houston, Austin and the Dallas areas, yielding five additional districts that would have voted for Trump by at least 10 percentage points in 2024. In 2024, Trump won 56.2% of votes in Texas. Under the current lines, Republicans hold 66% of Texas' 38 House seats. The new map aims to push that share to 79%. "Political performance does not guarantee electoral success — that's up to the candidates," Hunter said. "But it does allow Republican candidates the opportunity to compete in these districts." Gov. Greg Abbott, in adding redistricting to the special session agenda, cited a letter from the Justice Department claiming that four Texas districts were unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. But on Friday, state Republicans were unequivocal that their goal was not to fix racial gerrymandering — which several have testified under oath does not exist in the current map — but to give the GOP the greatest chance of controlling as many as 30 congressional districts. "These districts were drawn primarily using political performance," Hunter said, citing Republican gains made across the state since the Legislature last redistricted in 2021, especially among Latino voters. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that states can draw electoral maps on partisan grounds. But under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the map cannot diminish the voting power of people of color. At Friday's hearing, Democrats argued that the proposed map unconstitutionally packed voters of color into some districts while spreading them throughout others to reduce their ability to elect their preferred candidates. "Every citizen should have equal access to choose their representation, instead of crowding Black people to the point that all the Black people in the state only have two representatives, and all the Latinos in the state are crowded up to the extent that their voting power is diminished," U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas told state lawmakers during the hearing. Though people of color make up most of Texas and have driven almost all of the state's population growth in recent years, the new map creates 24 districts that are majority-white — two more than the current map, which is under trial for possibly violating the Voting Rights Act. 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