“Nothing good happens after midnight,” Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania recalled his late mother warning him. It’s a lesson that seemed to come true in the early hours of Wednesday morning, as a 1 a.m. hearing on President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill spiraled into disarray.
What was supposed to be a late-night procedural step toward delivering Trump’s signature domestic agenda—dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—instead exposed the deep and widening fractures within the House Republican conference. By Wednesday evening, more than 16 hours since the overnight hearing began, lawmakers were still debating the provisions of Trump’s bill—leaving the fate of the measure in flux as a few GOP holdouts continued to demand more immediate spending reductions in Medicaid and quicker phaseouts of clean-energy tax breaks.
In an attempt to bridge internal differences, Trump requested a meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson and some of those holdouts at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, a day after he tried to rally them behind his bill at the Capitol. Johnson told reporters after Wednesday’s meeting that he plans to hold a vote on the measure that night or on Thursday morning, despite demands from conservative hard-liners that they need more time to negotiate. He added that Republicans will only be making “minor” changes to the bill.
“There’s not much changing here, because the underlying product we thought was so well done,” he said after returning from the White House meeting he called “productive.”
“We’re excited. I believe we are going to land this airplane,” Johnson added, echoing a statement from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who described the meeting as “productive” and said Trump pressed for the bill’s quick passage.
Passage of the bill would be a major win for Trump, cementing a host of conservative priorities. But he’s operating under very tight margins: House Republicans have one of the thinnest majorities in history at 220-212, meaning Speaker Johnson can only afford to lose three members of his caucus if all Democrats are opposed. As of Wednesday evening, at least a half dozen GOP members do not support the current proposal.
House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican and one of the fiscal hawks threatening to sink the measure, told reporters that the White House offered a proposal late Tuesday on Medicaid and energy tax credits, but would not share the details of the proposal. “There’s broad agreement in the House Freedom Caucus that if that’s included in the package, I think it’s passed,” he said Wednesday, calling on leadership to “figure out” how to incorporate it into the bill. “I think this package is en route to get passed. I don’t think it can be done today.”
Trump and congressional leaders have set July 4 as the deadline for final approval of the legislation, with the Speaker insisting the House must pass the bill before Memorial Day, which is Monday. Some of the holdouts have taken issue with the timeline, saying they won’t be rushed into a deal without concessions.
“This is a completely arbitrary deadline set by people here to force people into a corner to make bad decisions,” Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, another member of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters Wednesday. “If today comes and goes…it doesn’t mean that prospect is off the table—it just means it might not happen today.”
Johnson has struggled to craft a bill that slashes enough spending to satisfy right-wing members of his party without losing support from GOP moderates, who are wary of cutting too much from widely used safety-net programs. Late Tuesday, he appeased one faction of the party by striking a deal with blue-state moderates for a more generous state and local tax (SALT) deduction of $40,000 annually—an increase from the current $10,000 cap and from Johnson’s initial offer of $30,000. But conservative hard-liners on the other side of the GOP have been less willing to budge.
“You have to work with every member and hear their concerns [to] try to meet the equilibrium point,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday.
Trump has grown increasingly impatient with Republican holdouts, labeling some of them as “grandstanders” who should leave the party. He even publicly threatened to support primary challengers for at least one Republican member of Congress who opposed his bill.
Four months into his presidency, Trump has largely avoided direct confrontations with Congress—leaning heavily on executive action to carry out his agenda. But his so-called big, beautiful tax and spending bill marks one of the few times he’s needed to plead with Congress to help deliver many of his campaign promises, making these negotiations a high-stakes test of the President’s hold over his party.
Trump’s legislation, at more than 1,100 pages, would permanently extend his 2017 tax cuts set to expire at the end of this year while introducing new policies like tax exemptions for tips and overtime wages. It also boosts spending on defense and border security, while reducing spending on Medicaid and food stamps. The measure would also roll back green energy tax credits from the Biden Administration, including the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit incentive.
Nonpartisan research groups studying the proposal have estimated that it would add more than $2.5 trillion to the federal debt over the next ten years. A senior White House official refuted those projections to TIME, claiming that the legislation would actually reduce the nation’s debt by generating an additional $2.6 trillion in revenue over the next ten years through increased economic growth.
But despite the Administration’s posturing on the debt impact, hardline conservatives are not convinced the legislation cuts spending enough. Some holdouts have complained that the bill should halt clean-energy tax breaks sooner than proposed, and that new work requirements for some Medicaid recipients should start earlier than 2029.
Democrats have warned that the measure would force millions of low-income Americans off Medicaid and food assistance programs, to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. “The structure of this bill is such that low- and middle-income households bear the brunt, while the wealthy reap significant benefits,” says Daniel Hornung, the former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden.
An analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released Tuesday shows that the wealthiest households are expected to gain from the bill, while the lowest-income households would lose out on resources because of the spending cuts. A separate CBO report estimated that the proposed changes to Medicaid could leave 7.6 million Americans without insurance.
“President Trump promised to lower the high cost of living in America. He has failed,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement on Wednesday. “Costs aren’t going down, they are going up. The GOP Tax Scam will make life more expensive for everyday Americans and it’s his toxic legislation that represents the ultimate betrayal.”
By Wednesday evening, House members were still waiting for Republican leaders to release a revised bill, even though the House Rules Committee had started debating it at 1 a.m.. The bill would need to pass the committee before heading to a full vote in the House.
— With reporting by Chad de Guzman and Brian Bennett
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