President Trump is finally getting his “big, beautiful” bill.
The GOP-led House of Representatives passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in a 218-214 vote Thursday following 29 hours of arm-twisting and deliberation that included the longest floor speech and longest procedural vote in the body’s 236-year history.
In the end, just two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, voted against the measure after Trump held 11th-hour White House meetings Wednesday with more than a dozen holdouts.
The president will sign the package into law during a Friday evening event at the White House to mark the July 4 holiday.
Trump celebrated the OBBB’s passage as “a declaration of independence from a national decline” during an Iowa rally Thursday night.
“With this bill, every major promise I made to the people of Iowa in 2024 became a promise kept,” Trump said.
“We had a national decline. We were a laughing stock all over the world. We had a man as president who shouldn’t have been there,” he said.
“We really have independence now over the — if you look at it — the overtaxation, where we were being taxed out of our lives, independence from over-regulation, we have independence now from radical-left bureaucrats and independence from the largest alien invasion that I think any country has ever seen.”
The president also applauded House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune for getting the package over the line.
“A couple of us quite literally haven’t slept in two days, so I’m a danger to myself and others right now,” Johnson (R-La.) joked after the vote. “America was in deep trouble, and we knew that if we won [in 2024] — and we believed we would — if we knew that if we got in government, we’d have to quite literally fix every area of the absolute disaster of the Biden era.”
The act is intended to be Trump’s signature legislative achievement of his second term and includes an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, key provisions of which were set to expire at the end of the year; bolstered spending on border security, defense, and energy exploration; and reductions in discretionary spending.
Every House Democrat opposed the bill, in addition to the two Republican defectors. Massie, whom Trump is hoping to oust in the 2026 midterms, had rejected the legislation nearly every step of the way due to his deep concerns with its impact on the deficit.
Fitzpatrick turned against the bill after concluding that the Senate’s adjustments to Medicaid “fell short” of his standards.
Fiscal hawks and moderates alike had initially bristled at the Senate’s modifications to the 870-page bill, which cleared the upper chamber Tuesday in a 51-50 vote that required Vice President JD Vance to break a 50-all tie.
The final vote was further delayed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reading letters from constituents who expressed concern about their Medicaid benefits being stripped.
Jeffries used his so-called “magic minute” of debate to rage against the bill for almost nine hours, shattering the record previously held by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in expressing his opposition to the Build Back Better Act.
“It’s an utter waste of everyone’s time, but you know, that’s part of the system here,” Johnson groused to reporters about Jeffries’ tactics.
“It takes a lot longer to build a lie than to tell the simple truth,” the speaker later clapped back during a 24-minute floor speech that served as the last word before final voting began.
The House speaker went further during an appearance on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” arguing that Jeffries “embarrassed his party.”
“It was a performance art, and what Republicans are doing is delivering results, not performances,” Johnson told guest host Raymond Arroyo. “I think the contrast was clear for the American people.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) later mocked Jeffries over Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) dozing off in full view of the TV cameras during the Brooklyn congressman’s remarks.
“I hope America watched all of it, watched Democrats falling asleep behind their leader as he went on and on, trying to scare the American people with lies, with scare tactics, with depressing stories about things that will never happen unless Democrats keep running this country,” Scalise chided.
During the mad dash to pass the bill, Trump and GOP leadership were adamant that holdouts bite their tongue and vote “yea” to meet Johnson’s self-imposed Independence Day deadline.
“Congrats to everyone,” Vance cheered on X after the vote. “At times I even doubted we’d get it done by July 4! But now we’ve delivered big tax cuts and the resources necessary to secure the border. Promises made, promises kept!”
“Without these agreements [that] we came through last night, I was a hard no on this bill,” House Freedom Cacus leader Andy Harris (R-Md.) told reporters after the bill’s passage, without divulging what those deals entailed.
“These agreements are significant. They will become obvious over the next few months … [about] how we’ve got the administration to move in a direction that mitigates a lot of the issues with the Senate bill.”
One of the most prominent holdouts, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), hinted that some of the concessions revolved around executive actions to further target “Medicaid waste, fraud and abuse in states” and subsidies for environmental projects.
“We were also able to get some significant, I think, assurances on what they’re doing, on spending, things they can do as we’ve been talking about rescissions,” Roy added, “plus other things that I can’t quite get into at the moment that I think will have significant impact on spending.”
Johnson surmised that a lot of his members “just needed time to digest” the adjustments the Senate made and noted he “gave them the space” to parse through it.
Republicans packaged Trump’s key legislative agenda items into a budget reconciliation bill to bypass the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and spent months delicately balancing competing interests within their razor-thin majorities in both chambers of Congress.
The original House version of the bill, which passed by one vote May 22, was projected to increase the deficit by about $3 trillion over the next decade, while the modified Senate version that passed Thursday is set to add $3.9 trillion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
The Senate had revamped the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to make key business tax cut extensions permanent, including credits for research and development expensing.
Fiscal hawks fumed over the impact on the deficit, while moderates were vexed by the steeper cuts to Medicaid, which provides health insurance to 70 million low-income Americans.
Another sticking point was the $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions, which had been a key priority of blue state Republicans and was raised to $40,000 for most Americans making below $500,000 per year for the next five years.
Several Republican lawmakers hinted that there were discussions of pursuing another reconciliation bill later this year to address outstanding concerns.
“I don’t think it’ll be as big. I think there’ll be some targeted stuff,” Roy told The Post. “I think there’s a good chance of that.”
Johnson later confirmed that he’s aiming to pass “a second reconciliation package in the fall and a third one in the spring of next year, for the next two fiscal years.”
The House speaker also teased that rescission packages to cut spending identified as “waste and abuse” will soon be on the congressional agenda.
“The White House is sending us collections of items to claw back,” Johnson told Fox News. “And we’re going to appropriate at lower levels.”
“The Republican Party is the party to get us back to fiscal responsibility,” he added. “We can’t do it overnight … but we are on the right track.”
What’s in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
Here’s a brief rundown of what’s in the OBBA:
- Permanent extension of much of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
- Nearly $150 billion in additional border security spending, including $46.5 billion to construct a US-Mexico border wall and about $30 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
- Approximately $153 billion in additional defense spending, including $25 billion for the president’s space-based “Golden Dome” missile defense system and $29 billion to boost shipbuilding
- Debt ceiling increase by $5 trillion
- Deduction for qualified tip wages capped at $25,000 and overtime pay capped at $12,500 for individuals for three years
- Standard deduction gets increased by $750 for single filers, to $15,750
- Child tax credit increased to $2,200
- Car loan interest deduction of up to $10,000 for individuals making under $100,000 annually (couples under $200,000) who purchase US-made vehicles
- State and local tax deduction cap raised to $40,000 through 2029
- Excise tax on endowments goes up to 8% on wealthy colleges with at least 3,000 students, while imposing lower rates of 4% or 1.4% on institutions with fewer assets
- Millionaires are restricted from receiving unemployment benefits
- $50 billion in funding for rural hospitals in Medicaid
- Mandated 80-hour-a-month work requirement for able-bodied adults and adults with children ages 15 and older
- New “Trump” savings accounts for parents and guardians of children born between Jan. 1, 2024, and Dec. 31, 2028, with the feds providing an initial $1,000 seed money
- Restrictions on large abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funding
- Lifetime borrowing limit of $257,500 for federal student loans; borrowing for professional degrees capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 lifetime; for graduate students, unsubsidized loans capped at $20,500 per year and $100,000 lifetime
Additional reporting by Victor Nava and Steven Nelson
