The U.S. Capitol as lawmakers worked into the night on the “big beautiful bill” on July 2, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans cleared the “big, beautiful bill” for President Donald Trump’s signature Thursday, marking an end to the painstaking months-long negotiations that began just after voters gave the GOP unified control of Washington during last year’s elections.
The final 218-214 vote on the expansive tax and spending cuts package marked a significant victory for Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who were able to unify centrist and far-right members of the party against long odds and narrow majorities.
But the legislation’s real-world impacts include millions of Americans expected to lose access to Medicaid through new requirements and slashed spending, and state governments taking on a share of costs for a key nutrition program for low-income families. If voters oppose Republicans at the ballot box in return, it could mean the GOP loses the House during next year’s midterm elections.
In the end just two Republicans in the House and three in the Senate opposed the measure, which the Senate approved earlier in the week with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
Trump posted on social media numerous times in the days leading up to the vote, thanking supportive Republicans who were praising the bill during interviews and threatening to back primary challenges against GOP lawmakers who stood in the way of passage.
“Largest Tax Cuts in History and a Booming Economy vs. Biggest Tax Increase in History, and a Failed Economy,” Trump posted just after midnight when it wasn’t yet clear the bill would pass. “What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!”
Trump told reporters while on his way to Iowa for an event that he would sign the bill at 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday, with military aircraft flying over the White House and Republican lawmakers in attendance.
Johnson said during a floor speech the legislation is a direct result of the November elections, when voters gave the GOP control of the House, Senate and the White House.
“That election was decisive. It was a bellwether. It was a time for choosing,” Johnson said. “And I tell you what — the American people chose, overwhelmingly, they chose the Republican Party.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks to reporters inside the Capitol building in Washington., D.C., on Wednesday, July 2, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
The package, he said, would make the country “stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before.”
“We’ve had spirited debates, we’ve had months of deliberation and now we are finally ready to fulfill our promise to the American people,” Johnson said.
Republicans were spurred to write the tax provisions in the legislation to avoid a cliff at the end of the year, created by the party’s 2017 tax law. But the legislation holds dozens of other provisions as well, spanning border security, defense, energy production, health care and higher education aid.
The bill raises the country’s debt limit by $5 trillion, a staggering figure that many fiscal hawks would have once balked at, but is enough to get Republicans past the midterm elections before they’ll have to negotiate another deal to raise the country’s borrowing limit.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s latest analysis of the measure projects it would add $3.4 trillion to deficits during the next decade compared to current law.
Jeffries: “It guts Medicaid’
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., called the health care provisions “reckless” during a speech that lasted nearly nine hours, forcing the vote to take place in the afternoon rather than early morning, and said the “bill represents the largest cut to health care in American history.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., set a record for the length of a floor speech on July 3, 2025, while speaking against Republicans’ reconciliation package. (Screenshot from House webcast)
“Almost $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid,” Jeffries said. “This runs directly contrary to what President Trump indicated in January, which was that he was going to love and cherish Medicaid. Nothing about this bill loves and cherishes Medicaid. It guts Medicaid.”
The speech broke the eight-hour-and-32-minute record that then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., set in 2021 when he sought to delay Democrats from passing a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. House leaders are allowed to exceed normal speaking limits through a privilege called the “magic minute.”
The nonpartisan health research organization KFF’s analysis of the package shows it would reduce federal spending on Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion during the next decade and lead to 11.8 million people becoming uninsured.
Republicans made numerous changes to the state-federal health program for lower income people and some people with disabilities, including a requirement that some enrollees work, participate in community service, or attend an educational program for at least 80 hours a month.
Medicaid patients will no longer be able to have their care covered at Planned Parenthood for routine appointments, like annual physicals and cancer screenings, for one year. Congress has barred federal taxpayer dollars from going to abortions with limited exceptions for decades, but the new provision will block all Medicaid funding from going to Planned Parenthood, likely leading some of its clinics to close.
Overnight drama
House passage followed several frenzied days on Capitol Hill as congressional leaders and Trump sought to sway holdouts to their side ahead of a self-imposed Fourth of July deadline.
The Senate, and then later the House, held overnight sessions followed by dramatic votes where several Republicans, who said publicly they didn’t actually like the bill, voted to approve it anyway.
GOP leaders didn’t have much room for error amid a narrow 53-seat Senate majority and a 220-212 advantage in the House. That delicate balance hovered in the background during the last several months, as talks over dozens of policy changes and spending cuts in the bill appeared deadlocked.
Any modifications meant to bring on board far-right members of the party had to be weighed against the policy goals of centrist lawmakers, who are most at risk of losing their seats during next year’s elections.
The House passed its first version of the bill following a 215-214 vote in May, sending the legislation to the Senate, where Republicans in that chamber spent several weeks deciding which policies they could support and which they wanted to remove or rework.
The measure changed substantially to comply with the complex rules for moving a budget reconciliation bill through the upper chamber. GOP leaders chose to use that process, instead of moving the package through the regular legislative pathway, to avoid having to negotiate with Democrats to get past the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster.
In the end nearly every one of the 273 Republicans in Congress approved the behemoth 870-page bill.
Maine’s Susan Collins, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis voted against it in the Senate and Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie opposed passage in the House.
Fitzpatrick wrote in a statement that while he voted to approve the House’s original version of the bill, he couldn’t support changes made in the Senate.
“I voted to strengthen Medicaid protections, to permanently extend middle class tax cuts, for enhanced small business tax relief, and for historic investments in our border security and our military.” Fitzpatrick wrote. “However, it was the Senate’s amendments to Medicaid, in addition to several other Senate provisions, that altered the analysis for our PA-1 community.”
Massie posted on social media that he couldn’t vote for the measure because it would exacerbate the country’s annual deficit.
“Although there were some conservative wins in the budget reconciliation bill (OBBBA), I voted No on final passage because it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates,” Massie wrote.
GOP holdouts delay passage
Floor debate on the bill in the House, which began around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Thursday and lasted 11 hours, was along party lines, with Democrats voicing strong opposition to changes in the package and GOP lawmakers arguing it puts the country on a better path.
GOP leaders didn’t originally plan to begin debate in the middle of the night while most of the country slept, but were forced to after holdouts refused to give their votes to a procedural step.
When the House did finally adopt the rule, Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick was the sole member of his party to vote against moving onto floor debate and a final passage vote.
Fitzpatrick had posted on social media earlier in the day that he wanted Trump “to address my serious concern regarding reports the United States is withholding critical defense material pledged to Ukraine.”
“Ukrainian forces are not only safeguarding their homeland—they are holding the front line of freedom itself,” he wrote. “There can be no half-measures in the defense of liberty. We must, as we always have, stand for peace through strength.”
Tax breaks and so much more
House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., made significant promises to middle-class Americans during floor debate about the tax provisions in the bill that many voters will be watching for in the months ahead.
“Households making under $100,000 will see a 12% tax cut compared to what they pay today. The average family of four will see nearly 11,000 more in their pockets each year,” Smith said. “Real wages for workers will rise by as much as $7,200 a year. A waitress working for tips will keep an extra $1,300, a lineman working overtime after a storm will keep an extra $1,400.”
Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Richard Neal, ranking member on the tax writing panel, said the legislation’s benefits skew largely toward the very wealthy.
“If you made a million dollars last year, you’re going to make a plus of $96,000 in the next tax filing season,” Neal said. “If you made under $50,000 last year, you’re going to get 68 cents a day in terms of your tax relief.”
The extension of the 2017 tax law would predominantly benefit high-income earners. The top 1% would receive a tax cut three times the size of those with incomes in the bottom 60% of after-tax income, according to analysis from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Some other tax incentives that critics say skew toward wealthier families include a $1,000 deposit from the federal government for babies born between 2024 and 2028, known as a “Trump account.” The program would track a stock index and gain interest accordingly and families with disposable income could contribute additional funding.
And while Republicans included an extension of the child tax credit to $2,200 per child, it requires the parents to have a Social Security number to claim the tax credit.
The bill will give the president more than $170 billion to carry out his campaign promise of mass deportations of people in the country without permanent legal status. The package would give the Department of Homeland Security $45 billion for the detention of immigrants and give its immigration enforcement arm another $30 billion to hire up to 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Food aid, higher education
The legislation will overhaul federal loans for higher education and how states pay for food assistance that roughly 42 million low-income people rely on, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
The bill would cap federal graduate loans to $100,000 per borrower and $200,000 per borrower who is attending law school or medical school. It would also cap the ParentPLUS loans to $65,000.
Under the SNAP changes, the package would require states to shoulder more of the burden in food assistance. Currently, the federal government covers 100% of the cost. The legislation tightens eligibility for SNAP, requiring parents with children aged 6 and older to meet the work requirements when they were previously exempt.
Current estimates from CBO show that changes in federal nutrition programs including SNAP would reduce federal spending by roughly $186 billion over 10 years.
The GOP megabill cuts clean energy tax credits and claws back some of the funding in former president Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act.
Some of those cuts to clean energy tax credits include terminating at the end of September a nearly $8,000 rebate for the purchase of an electric vehicle, ending a tax credit by December for energy efficient home upgrades such as solar roof panels and heat pumps.
The package rescinds funds to help local governments and states adopt zero emission standards, and eliminates environmental justice block grants that communities used to address health impacts due to environmental pollution, among other things.
In Maryland, Harris relents, Democrats dig in
Rep. Andy Harris (R-1st), the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, who vowed as recently as Wednesday to delay a vote on the budget reconciliation bill in order to negotiate a compromise somewhere between the House and Senate versions, wound up voting for the unamended Senate version Thursday.
That version of the bill gave conservatives pause earlier in the week, both because of its price tag and because the Senate had removed provisions limiting spending on renewable energy programs and Medicaid funding of family planning services and gender-affirming care, among others.
Without giving details, Harris said the caucus was able to make the bill better “at every stage.” He told the Baltimore Sun that his change of heart came after the White House agreed to address many caucus concerns about the Senate bill through executive action, after the bill passed. He said it was up to the administration to decide what those changes would be and that “it’s on their timetable.”
Other members of the Freedom Caucus and their allies echoed Harris, claiming credit for what they saw as the successes in the bill, while asserting that they had been able to secure “meaningful commitments” from the White House to restore the restrictions on domestic programs.
There were no changes to the bottom line on the bill, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates could add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade.
The rest of the Maryland delegation joined 212 Democrats and two Republicans to oppose the measure. Democrats in the delegation and beyond attacked what Gov. Wes Moore (D) called a “direct and heartless assault on the American people.”
Many called the One, Big Beautiful Bill the “big, ugly bill.” Maryland Democratic Party Chair Steuart Pittman said there is nothing beautiful about the bill that he said would “blow a hole in state and local budgets,” putting government services at risk.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-8th) said the “disastrous bill” would throw “17 million Americans off their health care coverage and millions of Americans off their SNAP food benefits.” Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-2nd) called it a “real-life nightmare for working families written into law.” Rep. Sarah Elfreth (D-3rd) accused Republican leadership of rushing a vote on the massive bill for President Donald Trump, “all so he can have a photo op on the Fourth of July.”
Maryland House Speaker Adrienne Jones (D-Baltimore County) said in a statement that she was “deeply disheartened and outraged” by the vote.
“We are supposed to care for the sick and the elderly, but Trump’s bill will make them suffer longer,” Jones’ statement said. “We are supposed to feed the hungry, but Trump’s bill will leave them without a meal. We are supposed to make life more affordable, but Trump’s bill will raise costs for all Marylanders.”
Trump is expected to sign the bill at 5 p.m. Friday.
by Jennifer Shutt and Ariana Figueroa, Maryland Matters
July 3, 2025
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: [email protected].
