After Speaker Mike Johnson released a series of changes aimed at winning over holdouts, the House voted to open debate on the bill, paving the way for a final vote around dawn.
The House voted early Thursday morning to begin debating Republicans’ sweeping domestic policy bill, as party leaders raced to unify their fractious ranks and lock down enough votes to pass the main elements of President Trump’s agenda over unified Democratic opposition.
Speaker Mike Johnson and his deputies waged an intensive effort to win over holdouts with concessions and a final pressure campaign by Mr. Trump. But several G.O.P. lawmakers were still expressing dissatisfaction with the sprawling tax and spending cut package ahead of a vote expected around dawn.
Even after a meeting with Mr. Trump and fiscal conservatives at the White House, it was uncertain whether Mr. Johnson had the votes in hand to pass the bill. He spent Wednesday evening briefing lawmakers on a list of changes he had negotiated with a wide spectrum of factions across his conference.
They included speeding up new work requirements for Medicaid, increasing the state and local tax deduction, expanding a rollback of clean energy tax credits created by the Biden administration in the Inflation Reduction Act, and providing additional money to reimburse states for immigration enforcement efforts.
“Let me tell you something: It is truly big and beautiful,” said Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, echoing Mr. Trump’s effusive moniker for the bill, which Republicans have adopted as their own. “It is a clear, full-throated response to the millions of working men and women across who believe that America is due for a serious course correction.”
It was not clear whether those concessions would be enough to flip Republican opponents of the bill, whose ranks appeared to be growing on Wednesday as the negotiations dragged on, or whether they might alienate others whose votes would be needed to pass the measure.
With his razor-thin margin of control in the House, Mr. Johnson can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes on the legislation if all Democrats oppose it, as expected, and every member votes. The speaker has insisted the bill must pass before Memorial Day.
Mr. Trump has publicly called on House Republicans to pass the bill quickly. White House officials released a statement urging its immediate passage, with an implicit threat to lawmakers who opposed it.
“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises, and failure to pass this bill would be the ultimate betrayal,” said the statement from the Office of Management and Budget.
Democrats, on the other hand, denounced the measure as a disastrous package that would pay for tax cuts for the wealthy by slashing social programs that Americans depend on.
“Let’s call this what it is: theft,” said Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee. “Stealing from those with the least to give to those with the most. It’s not just bad policy; it’s a betrayal of the American people.”
Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas and a ringleader of right-wing opposition to the bill, said in an interview on a conservative podcast that the deal had moved in the right direction, citing the further eliminations of the Biden-era clean energy tax credits.
But those concessions threatened to cost the measure support among more moderate lawmakers who have been fighting to preserve the energy tax breaks.
Emerging from Mr. Johnson’s office on Wednesday evening, Representative Andrew Garbarino, Republican of New York, would not commit to supporting the bill, saying, “It is not what I had hoped it would be.” He said he had informed G.O.P. leaders that they needed to “change some of the things they were thinking, because we need this energy produced.”
And Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, had suggested earlier on Wednesday in an interview with Newsmax that conservatives were unhappy with concessions that Republican leaders had made to a group of blue-state Republicans to increase the limit on the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, which is currently set at $10,000. The changes Mr. Johnson put forward on Wednesday night would raise the cap to $40,000, an increase from the $30,000 level that had been in the bill.
“Raising the SALT deduction is a bailout for Democrat governors — paid for by red states with low taxes,” Representative John W. Rose, Republican of Tennessee, wrote on social media. He declared that he was opposed to the measure “in its current form.”
Mr. Trump visited Capitol Hill on Tuesday to pressure Republicans to unify around the wide-ranging package, which would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of it with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education and clean energy programs. He summoned fiscal conservatives and House G.O.P. leaders to the White House on Wednesday in a bid to lean on remaining holdouts to drop their opposition and back the bill.
The sprawling legislation would largely keep current tax rates in place, extending the 2017 tax cut while temporarily making new reductions like Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to not tax tips or overtime at the federal level.
The bill, which is expected to face substantial changes in the Senate, is a reflection of competing Republican factions with disparate priorities. A number of fiscal conservatives have demanded structural changes and cuts to Medicaid and other programs to hold down the overall cost of the bill and rein in deficits. More moderate and politically vulnerable lawmakers have sought to protect Medicaid, demanded larger tax breaks for their constituents and fought to preserve clean energy tax credits.
The legislation is projected to cause around 10 million Americans to become uninsured, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Republican leaders opted against more aggressive options they had considered to cut Medicaid, bowing to more moderate Republicans, mostly from politically competitive districts, who warned that they could not accept such reductions. Mr. Trump has also opposed such cuts.
But they added a new requirement that childless adults prove they worked or volunteered 80 hours a month or qualified for an exception to enroll in Medicaid. That was initially scheduled to take effect in 2029, after the next presidential election, but the package of changes Mr. Johnson proposed on Wednesday would accelerate it to the end of 2026.
The legislation was expected to add trillions to the national debt, which is already at a level that many economists and Wall Street investors find alarming. In a preliminary analysis of an earlier version of the bill, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the legislation would add roughly $2.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
In a separate analysis requested by Democrats, the budget office found that the legislation would leave the poorest Americans worse off while providing a lift to the richest. In 2027, the bottom 10 percent would lose the equivalent of 2 percent of their income largely because of the reduced benefits, while the tax cuts would provide the top 10 percent with a 4 percent increase to their income, the budget office estimated.
The self-imposed Memorial Day deadline for passage has created significant — if artificial — pressure, leading to fevered, down-to-the wire negotiations and an often nocturnal legislative schedule.
The Rules Committee began meeting at 1 a.m. on Wednesday and did not complete its action until 10:40 p.m. The vote to open floor debate on the measure came long after midnight on Thursday, and a final vote was expected later in the morning.
Democrats criticized Republicans for the scheduling, accusing them of trying to hide parts of their signature legislation from the public and push through changes while most Americans were sleeping.
“We should recess and give everyone the time needed to understand these changes,” Mr. McGovern said after the package of changes was released late Wednesday night. “This is a big deal. This is consequential. And we’re moving forward with major changes, and we’re just supposed to take your word for it.”
Maya C. Miller, Robert Jimison, Andrew Duehren and Margot Sanger-Katz contributed reporting.
