House Republicans on Wednesday pushed forward with major legislation to deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda, moving over the opposition of Democrats to advance significant cuts to taxes and Medicaid after slogging through all-night drafting sessions.
The votes in two key committees, and a third that was expected later Wednesday, were a crucial step for what Mr. Trump has labeled the “big beautiful bill” that Republicans hope to push through the House by the end of next week. The approvals sent the main pieces of the legislation to the full House, where G.O.P. leaders are racing to pass it before a Memorial Day recess.
The measure would extend Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cut and temporarily enact his campaign pledges not to tax tips or overtime pay. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for clean energy would partly offset the roughly $3.8 trillion cost of those tax measures, as well as increased spending on the military and immigration enforcement.
“The American people are counting on us to get this done and get it done quickly, and we are on target to do it,” Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday morning at a news conference at the Capitol.
Even as the committees approved their slices of the plan in party-line votes, House Republican leaders faced dissent in their ranks that could delay or derail passage. Conservative lawmakers have argued the proposed cuts to Medicaid, which stopped short of an overhaul in an effort to protect vulnerable Republicans, do not go far enough.
And Republicans from high-tax states like New York were furious about a provision that would increase the limit on the state and local tax deduction to $30,000 from $10,000, a cap they regard as far too low and which was still being negotiated.
The plan is also facing Republican opposition in the Senate. Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin have said the current bill is fiscally irresponsible. Senator Susan Collins of Maine has said she opposes at least one Medicaid provision in the legislation. And Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, described the bill’s changes to government health program for the poor as a nonstarter, saying they amounted to “taxing the poor to give to the rich.”
“This is real Medicaid benefit cuts,” he said in an interview with CNN Wednesday, pointing to several specific policies in the bill.
“I can’t support that,” Mr. Hawley continued. “No Republican should support that. We’re the party of the working class. We need to act like it.”
Republicans are using a process known as budget reconciliation to shield the measure from a filibuster and push it through Congress with a simple majority. With all Democrats opposed, they can afford to lose no more than three votes in the House and three in the Senate.
Democrats have aimed most of their criticism at the bill’s health care provisions, which they believe will be politically damaging to Republicans who back them. More than eight million Americans are estimated to lose insurance coverage if the bill becomes law.
In three simultaneous committee meetings beginning on Tuesday, lawmakers extensively debated the major elements of the sprawling legislation.
The Ways and Means Committee approved the tax provisions of the bill, estimated to cost $3.8 trillion over a decade, just after 8 a.m. on Wednesday after a session that lasted more than 17 hours. The Agriculture Committee, which is considering major cuts to food assistance programs, took a break from debate on Tuesday evening and reconvened later on Wednesday for a session that stretched into the evening.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, whose portion of the bill includes major funding cuts and policy changes to Medicaid, plowed ahead through Tuesday night and into Wednesday afternoon before approving their part of the package. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the committee’s proposed changes, which are concentrated on health care programs, would save more than $900 billion over the next decade.
Debate on the Medicaid provisions began after midnight on Wednesday. By the time lawmakers began discussing those proposals, the committee had approved parts of the bill that rolled back Biden-era energy and environmental policies.
The overnight session was contentious, including an extended debate about whether lawmakers should be allowed to mention one another by name. A decision not to use names led to the partial censorship of a poster describing high Medicaid enrollment in certain Republican congressional districts. (Later in the morning, Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the committee, broke the rule. “I know I’m not supposed to say it,” he said, before naming Representative John Joyce, Republican of Pennsylvania.)
Much of the discussion centered on work requirements that the bill would impose on adult Medicaid beneficiaries without children, the centerpiece of the Republican proposal. The policy, which would begin in 2029, is expected to push millions of Americans off the program and achieve significant spending reductions. Under the provision, Medicaid beneficiaries would need to submit paperwork every month showing that they worked at least 80 hours or qualified for an exception.
Republicans defended the requirements, noting that they were generally supported by the public and arguing that they would create incentives for work.
“We don’t want people to be on this program for forever,” Representative Cliff Bentz, Republican of Oregon, said on Wednesday morning. “And this is a really good way to get off it and get a job.”
But Democrats assailed the provisions, arguing that its complex reporting rules would cause eligible people to lose health coverage. Republican committee aides were asked to answer detailed questions about what would happen if a person failed to file required paperwork while hospitalized for a psychiatric issue, or whether someone could lose coverage for failing to work a year ago.
Many of the details of the work requirement were modeled on a program in Georgia, which has resulted in low enrollment and high administrative costs. Studies suggest that most Medicaid beneficiaries who would be subject to the new rules already work, and previous state experiments with work requirements nevertheless resulted in large coverage losses.
Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said that Republicans had “crafted this bill carefully to avoid the issues” that Georgia had faced.
“We absolutely don’t want people who qualify for Medicaid to not receive Medicaid because of red tape, particularly when they’re trying to work,” Mr. Guthrie said.
Debate also focused on a new co-payment requirement for when some Medicaid patients go to the doctor, a change that some Democrats characterized as a “sick tax” that would prevent low-income people from seeking care.
The final committee vote on the legislation came after 4 p.m. on Wednesday, more than 26 hours after debate began and divided on party lines.
“We’ve been here a long time,” said Lizzie Fletcher, Democrat of Texas, near the end of debate. “I know we have said a lot of things over and over, but I hope that repetition has registered.”
After the gavel fell on the final vote, Mr. Guthrie announced there would be birthday cake for “our colleague from Alabama,” referring to Gary Palmer, a Republican who could not be named under the rule he had imposed many hours earlier.
Though debate on the tax provisions wrapped up relatively more quickly, at least one of its major elements — the state and local tax deduction — remained unresolved. Mr. Johnson has been negotiating with New York Republicans to raise the cap their party established in 2017 on the amount of state and local taxes Americans can write off on their federal returns.
“This is clearly an unfinished product,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. “There is a long way to go.”
Michael Gold and Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.
