The House Budget Committee will meet late Sunday night to try once again to advance President Trump’s domestic policy bill toward a floor vote after a handful of fiscally conservative Republicans blocked the measure on Friday over concerns about the ballooning national deficit.
The remarkable revolt among hard-right lawmakers has threatened to upend Republicans’ goal of approving the legislation before the Memorial Day recess. G.O.P. leaders have been searching for a way to pacify the holdouts.
Five Republican representatives — Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, and Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania — joined Democrats to block the legislation on Friday. The vote was 16 to 21 on a motion to advance the bill.
“This bill falls profoundly short,” Mr. Roy said.
Mr. Smucker, who changed his “yes” vote to a “no” at the last minute, said he did so for procedural reasons. Because he voted against the bill, he will be able to ask to call the legislation back up for consideration.
But it was unclear what changes Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team could come up with to win enough votes.
Without the support of Republican hard-liners, the bill cannot advance. Any changes to win their backing could alienate the more moderate Republicans whose votes will also be needed to pass the measure on the House floor.
One group of moderate holdouts from New York and other higher-tax states is threatening to withhold votes unless the bill includes an increase to the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction.
Republicans can only lose three votes if the bill goes before the full House, assuming all members are present and all Democrats vote against it.
President Trump, who returned on Friday from a trip to the Middle East, is expected to lobby Republican members of the committee hard, putting pressure on them to let the bill go forward.
The legislation, which Mr. Trump and his allies call the “one big, beautiful bill,” would make the 2017 tax cuts permanent and eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay, fulfilling Mr. Trump’s campaign promise. It would also raise spending on the military and immigration enforcement. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for clean energy would offset part of the price of the bill, though they would not cover the entire cost of $3.8 trillion over 10 years.
Some Republicans, including Representative Nick LaLota of New York, have floated the idea of letting the tax cut lapse for the top income bracket, jumping back to 39.6 percent from the reduced rate of 37 percent.
“It’s a fiscally responsible move that reflects the priorities of the new Republican Party,” Mr. LaLota wrote in a social media post. “Protect working families, address the deficit, fix the unfair SALT cap, and safeguard programs like Medicaid and SNAP, without raising taxes on the middle class.”
The fiscal hard-liners are unhappy that a work requirement for Medicaid recipients does not kick in until 2029 and that the bill does not immediately eliminate a slew of clean energy tax credits created under the Inflation Reduction Act in the Biden administration.
Catie Edmondson and James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting.
