Trump takes victory lap as House GOP passes 'big, beautiful' budget reconciliation

WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump struck a celebratory tone Thursday morning after the House narrowly passed a sweeping budget package containing large swaths of his legislative agenda.

And the president, who lauded House Republicans for pulling the bill together after weeks of infighting, called on the Senate to quickly approve the measure and send it to the White House.

The lower chamber passed the GOP’s so-called budget reconciliation bill early Thursday morning, capping off a marathon session which saw lawmakers in several congressional committees pull all-nighters to get the measure on the floor this week. The House Rules Committee, the last line of defense for a bill headed to the chamber floor, was in session for nearly 24 hours on Wednesday debating the 1,000-page legislation and hundreds of amendments.

Despite initial opposition from a handful of Republican spending hawks, lawmakers were able to reach a consensus which saw most holdouts support the reconciliation measure. The legislation, coined the “big, beautiful bill” by Trump, passed the House Thursday morning on a narrow 215-214 margin.

The House Freedom Caucus, whose members formed the backbone of Republican opposition to the measure, said in a statement that the version they ultimately supported was “much more conservative” than the bill first proposed in January. They said that negotiations had yielded five times more spending cuts than initially prescribed and pointed to expanded provisions blocking the use of Medicaid for gender-affirming care.

“[T]he changes we secured are indisputably for the better,” the Freedom Caucus said.

Following the vote, Trump also took a victory lap in a post on X.

“This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!” the president proclaimed.

If made law, the sweeping budget package would permanently ink a slate of tax cuts implemented in 2017 during the first Trump administration and would cut federal spending by roughly $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

The bill would also add new budget space for defense and border security measures and enact Trump’s much-vaunted provision to remove taxes on tips and overtime wages.

Trump congratulated House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republican leaders for getting the bill across the finish line. GOP leadership had said that it would pass the measure before Congress’ Memorial Day recess — failure to meet that self-imposed deadline would have been an embarrassing loss for Johnson.

Now, though, the president has turned his attention to Senate Republicans, who will likely take up the reconciliation bill after Memorial Day.

“[I]t’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!” Trump wrote. “There is no time to waste.”

It’s unclear whether the budget reconciliation measure has enough Republican support to pass in the upper chamber. Some Senate lawmakers have expressed reservations about funding cuts laid out in the bill. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson has said he wants government spending to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Unlike many pieces of legislation that go before the Senate, the budget reconciliation package will not need any Democratic votes to pass. The reconciliation process overrides the upper chamber’s usual 60-vote threshold for cloture, meaning that a united Senate GOP majority will be enough to clear the measure and send it to the White House.

Democrats, though, have slammed the Republican spending package as a tax break for the ultra-wealthy and argued that the proposed spending cuts would kick millions of Americans off of federal health care and nutrition programs.

Lawmakers have also criticized the GOP for forging ahead with its proposed reconciliation bill in overnight sessions largely out of the public eye — the House Rules Committee began debating the measure at 1 a.m. Wednesday.

“They don’t want anybody looking inside this monstrosity,” Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin said on the House floor Thursday. “There’s nothing beautiful or big about stripping 14 million Americans of their health care or removing food security from 11 million people, including 4 million kids.”

The Congressional Budget Office, the government’s nonpartisan spending watchdog, reported this week that tax provisions laid out in the GOP’s reconciliation package would hike the federal deficit by nearly $4 trillion over the next 10 years. The CBO also concluded that low-income Americans would lose resources under the plan while high-income Americans would gain.

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