Republican holdouts on the Senate-passed version of the party’s “big, beautiful bill” are huddling with House GOP leaders, who are holding open a vote to move the legislation forward as they negotiate.
The procedural vote remained stuck more than 90 minutes after it was first called. Seven Republicans have yet to vote, and several of them are gathered in a room off the House floor where Speaker Mike Johnson and other top leaders have been shuffling in and out.
Placating those hard-line fiscal hawks could be the final test of whether Republicans can send the massive domestic-policy bill to President Donald Trump’s desk before his arbitrary July 4 deadline.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, said his fellow holdouts on the megabill are deciding between “voting it down and sending it back [to the Senate] or getting our questions answered from the White House and supporting it.”
He added that discussions surround “what the administration can do” to implement the Senate bill in ways that would assuage the concerns conservatives have put forth.
White House Budget Director Russ Vought arrived at the room around 3:45 p.m. to walk through how the White House could find future spending cuts and how the administration plans implement the policies in the megabill — especially around rollbacks to federal food aid and clawbacks of clean-energy tax credits.
A key GOP holdout, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, said in a Fox News interview that he was “trying to go through the bill and understand it” after railing against a number of the Senate’s changes.
“I will note that I have now gotten a little bit more information on some of the Medicaid stuff that I feel like it’s a little bit better than I originally anticipated, but I still have concerns,” he said, citing “massive reservations about the Green New Scam subsidies and the overall spending levels.”
The Capitol huddle follows meetings earlier in the day at the White House where Trump participated.
“I think all of the momentum is in the right direction,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican who attended some of the White House meetings.
“The president did a really good job of noticeably moving members toward ‘yes.’”
There is GOP angst about the Senate’s deeper cuts to Medicaid than were in the bill the House passed weeks ago. There are also concerns from House lawmakers about their districts being able to access funds specifically earmarked for rural hospitals — an issue that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Director Mehmet Oz tried to soothe at a White House meeting earlier in the day.