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      What are rescissions – and why does Trump want Congress to approve them?

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      Congressional Republicans are pushing for passage of a rescissions package, legislation requested by Donald Trump that will claw back $9bn in funding intended for foreign aid programs and public broadcasting.The bill, which is part of the president’s campaign to slash government spending, passed the House last month, and is now being debated in the Senate. What is a rescissions package?Congress controls the power of the purse by approving a budget and then appropriating money. But under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the president may request the rescission of previously authorized funds, and Congress has 45 days to approve it, otherwise the money must be spent.Why are Republicans rushing to pass the rescissions package?The 45 days on Trump’s package of rescissions requests expires on Friday, hence the reason why the GOP is moving to quickly pass the bill. It also explains why the House speaker, Mike Johnson, on Tuesday pleaded with the Senate to “pass it as is” – meaning the version of the bill that passed his chamber last month.What funding does Trump want to cancel?The White House has proposed cancelling a total of $9bn in authorized funding, including $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, and about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs. On the chopping block is money meant for organizations affiliated with the United Nations and other international organizations, including the World Health Organization and the UN human rights council, as well as for refugee assistance and some USAID programs.Is the White House getting everything it wants?No. It initially proposed a rescissions package totaling $9.4bn, but the Senate decided to preserve $400m in funding for Pepfar, a program credited with saving millions of people from infection or death from HIV that was created in 2003, under the Republican president George W Bush.How controversial is the package among Republicans?Fairly controversial. Four Republicans voted against it in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate, three Republicans opposed it, requiring the vice-president, JD Vance, to show up and break the 50-50 tie vote that resulted.Which Republican senators voted no, and why?The Republican senators who opposed it were Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, along with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party’s former Senate leader who will retire after next year. All three complained that the White House did not provide enough details of exactly what funding would be canceled, while Collins and Murkowski, both moderates, also oppose slashing funding for public broadcasters.What happens after it passes the Senate?If changes are made in the upper chamber’s version it will return to the House for a final vote.Is this the end of the Trump administration’s plans to slash government funding?No. Further cuts to government departments and initiatives are expected in the forthcoming budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins on 1 October. More

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      Senate Republicans advance Trump bill to cancel $9bn in approved spending

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      Senate Republicans on Tuesday advanced Donald Trump’s request to cancel about $9bn in previously approved spending, overcoming concerns about what the rescissions could mean for impoverished people around the globe and for public radio and television stations in their home states.JD Vance broke the tie on the procedural vote, allowing the measure to advance, 51-50.A final vote in the Senate could occur as early as Wednesday. The bill would then return to the House for another vote before it would go to the US president’s desk for his signature before a Friday deadline.Republicans winnowed down the president’s request by taking out his proposed $400m cut to a program known as Pepfar. That change increased the prospects for the bill’s passage. The politically popular program is credited with saving millions of lives since its creation under then president George W Bush to combat HIV/Aids.Trump is also looking to claw back money for foreign aid programs targeted by his so-called “department of government efficiency” and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.“When you’ve got a $36tn debt, we have to do something to get spending under control,” said Senate majority leader John Thune.Republicans met with Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, during their weekly conference luncheon as the White House worked to address their concerns. He fielded about 20 questions from senators. There was some back and forth, but many of the concerns were focused on working toward a resolution, either through arrangements with the administration directly or via an amendment to the bill, said senator John Hoeven.The White House campaign to win over potential holdouts had some success. Senator Mike Rounds tweeted that he would vote to support the measure after working with the administration to “find Green New Deal money that could be reallocated to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption”.Some senators worried that the cuts to public media could decimate many of the 1,500 local radio and television stations around the country that rely on some federal funding to operate. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting distributes more than 70% of its funding to those stations.Maine senator Susan Collins, the Republican chair of the Senate appropriations committee, said the substitute package marked “progress”, but she still raised issues with it, particularly on a lack of specifics from the White House. She questioned how the package could still total $9 billion while also protecting programs that Republicans favor.Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she didn’t want the Senate to be going through numerous rounds of rescissions.“We are lawmakers. We should be legislating,” Murkowski said. “What we’re getting now is a direction from the White House and being told: ‘This is the priority and we want you to execute on it. We’ll be back with you with another round.’ I don’t accept that.”But the large majority of Republicans were supportive of Trump’s request.“This bill is a first step in a long but necessary fight to put our nation’s fiscal house in order,” said senator Eric Schmitt.Democrats oppose the package. They see Trump’s request as an effort to erode the Senate filibuster. They also warn it’s absurd to expect them to work with Republicans on bipartisan spending measures if Republicans turn around a few months later and use their majority to cut the parts they don’t like.“It shreds the appropriations process,” said senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats. “The appropriations committee, and indeed this body, becomes a rubber stamp for whatever the administration wants.”Democratic leader Chuck Schumer cautioned that tens of millions of Americans rely on local public radio and television stations for local news, weather alerts and educational programs. He warned that many could lose access to that information because of the rescissions.“And these cuts couldn’t come at a worse time,” Schumer said. “The floods in Texas remind us that speedy alerts and up-to-the-minute forecasts can mean the difference between life and death.”Democrats also scoffed at the GOP’s stated motivation for taking up the bill. The amount of savings pales compared to the $3.4trn in projected deficits over the next decade that Republicans put in motion in passing Trump’s big tax and spending cut bill two weeks ago.“Now, Republicans are pretending they are concerned about the debt,” said senator Patty Murray. “So concerned that they need to shut down local radio stations, so concerned they are going to cut off Sesame Street … The idea that that is about balancing the debt is laughable.”With Republicans providing enough votes to take up the bill, it sets up the potential for 10 hours of debate plus votes on scores of potentially thorny amendments in what is known as a vote-a-rama. The House has already shown its support for the president’s request with a mostly party line 214-212 vote, but since the Senate is amending the bill, it will have to go back to the House for another vote.Republicans who vote against the measure also face the prospect of incurring Trump’s wrath. He has issued a warning on his social media site directly aimed at individual Senate Republicans who may be considering voting against the rescissions package. He said it was important that all Republicans adhere to the bill and in particular defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.“Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement,” he said. More

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      Republicans may slash $9bn for public broadcasting and foreign aid in days

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      Senate Republicans may as soon as Tuesday move to pass legislation slashing up to $9bn in funds Congress had earlier approved for foreign aid programs and public broadcasting, as part of Donald Trump’s campaign of dramatic government spending cuts.The GOP is racing to meet a Friday deadline mandated by law for the bill, known as a rescissions package, to pass Congress, otherwise the Trump administration will be forced to spend the money. The House of Representatives approved the legislation last month by a narrow majority.The package will cancel $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, and about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs. But some Republicans have blanched at those cuts, and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he had agreed with demands to preserve $400m in funding for Pepfar, a program credited with saving millions of people from infection or death from HIV that was created under the Republican president George W Bush in 2003.“There was a lot of interest among our members in doing something on the Pepfar issue,” Thune told reporters. He added that he hoped for procedural votes on the bill to begin on Tuesday and “we’ll see how those come out”.Changing the bill will require it to again be voted on by the House, and earlier in the day, the speaker, Mike Johnson, urged Senate Republicans to pass the version his lawmakers sent them.“We’re encouraging our Senate partners over there to get the job done and to pass it as is,” he said at a press conference.Thune has described the rescissions package as “commonsense legislation” that will target “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending, a term Republicans have deployed repeatedly since Trump took office to criticize programs they seek to cut. Some cuts, he said, were recommended by the so-called “department of government efficiency” downsizing initiative that was previously led by Elon Musk.“My Democrat colleagues may not want to acknowledge it, but we have a serious spending problem in this country,” Thune said during a floor speech on Tuesday. “And the very least we can do in response is to target some of the egregious misuses of taxpayer dollars that we are addressing today in this bill.”While Democrats can use the Senate’s filibuster to stop the chamber from considering most legislation they oppose, a rescissions package can be passed with a simple majority. The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has warned that the bill is the beginning of a push by the Trump administration to reshape government services.“This package, as bad as it is, is a piece of a larger puzzle for Republicans. Their goal is to use rescissions, impoundment and pocket rescissions to eradicate any bit of bipartisanship out of appropriations, and that will pave the way for deeper and more serious spending cuts on things like healthcare, food assistance, energy and so many other areas,” he said.It remains unclear if the bill has the support it needs among Republican senators. Susan Collins, who represents blue state Maine and is expected to face a fierce re-election challenge next year, has criticized the package for slashing funds for important programs, rather than those identified as wasteful by the Trump administration.“This rescissions package, for the most part, has nothing to do with the lengthy list of questionable activities identified by the administration that were paid for with prior year funds,” she said late last month, as she chaired a Senate appropriations committee hearing into the request.In addition to opposing cuts to Pepfar, she signaled wariness to defunding public broadcasters.While Collins said she agreed with her fellow Republicans that programing on PBS and NPR had had “a discernibly partisan bent”, she believed there were “more targeted approaches to addressing that bias at NPR than rescinding all of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting”.Other Republicans from rural states, including Lisa Murkowski, a moderate representing Alaska, have expressed skepticism over targeting public broadcasters, arguing they provide an important source of information in the countryside. On Tuesday, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota announced his support for the bill after assurances that broadcasters in Indian reservations would continue receiving funds.“We wanted to make sure tribal broadcast services in South Dakota continued to operate which provide potentially lifesaving emergency alerts. We worked with the Trump administration to find Green New Deal money that could be reallocated to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption,” he wrote on social media.Butall four Democrats in North Carolina’s congressional delegation have signed a letter to Senate leaders warning of the consequences of cutting public broadcasting, which they said provides “trusted, accessible, and crucial communication tools during natural disasters” such as last year’s Hurricane Helene. More

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      Elon Musk’s proposed new political party could focus on a few pivotal congressional seats

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      The new US political party that Elon Musk has boasted about bankrolling could initially focus on a handful of attainable House and Senate seats while striving to be the decisive vote on major issues amid the thin margins in Congress.Tesla and SpaceX’s multibillionaire CEO mused about that approach on Friday in a post on X, the social media platform which he owns, as he continued feuding with Donald Trump over the spending bill that the president has signed into law. On Saturday, without immediately elaborating, the former Trump adviser announced on X that he had created the so-called America party.“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,” wrote Musk, who is the world’s richest person and oversaw brutal cuts to the federal government after Trump’s second presidency began in January. “Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring they serve the true will of the people.”Musk did not specify any seats which he may be eyeing.In another post on Friday, when the US celebrated the 249th anniversary of its declaration of independence from the UK, Musk published a poll asking his X followers whether he should advance on his previously stated idea of creating the America party to challenge both Republicans and Democrats. More than 65% of about 1.25m responses indicated “yes” as of Saturday morning.“Independence Day is the perfect time to ask if you want independence from the two-party (some would say uniparty) system!,” Musk also wrote in text accompanying the poll, which he promoted several times throughout Friday.Musk on Saturday then posted on X: “Today, the America party is formed to give you back your freedom.”He also wrote: “By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party, and you shall have it! When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.”One of the replies to Musk’s announcement that he reposted showed a picture of a two-headed snake near the word “uniparty” as well as the logos of the Democratic and Republican parties.“End the Uniparty,” the reply said. Musk in turn responded to the reply with: “Yes.”New political parties do not have to formally register with the Federal Election Commission “until they raise or spend money over certain thresholds in connection with a federal election”.Musk’s posts on Friday and Saturday came after he spent $277m of his fortune supporting Trump’s victorious 2024 presidential campaign. The Republican president rewarded Musk by appointing him to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, which abruptly and chaotically slashed various government jobs and programs while claiming it saved $190bn.But Doge’s actions may also have cost taxpayers $135bn, according to an analysis by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan non-profit dedicated to studying the federal workforce.Musk left Doge at the end of May and more recently became incensed at Trump’s support for a budget bill that would increase the US debt by $3.3tn. He threatened to financially support primary challenges against every member of Congress who supported Trump’s spending bill – along with promising to “form the America Party” if it passed.The House voted 218 to 214 in favor of the spending bill, with just two Republicans joining every Democrat in the chamber in unsuccessfully opposing it. In the Senate, the vice-president, JD Vance, broke a 50-50 deadlock in favor of the bill, which Trump signed on Friday hours after Musk posted his America party-related poll.The Trump spending bill’s voting breakdown illustrated how narrowly the winning side in Congress carries some of the most controversial matters.Trump has warned Musk – a native of South Africa and naturalized US citizen since 2002 – that directly opposing his agenda would be personally costly. The president, who has pursued mass deportations of immigrants recently, publicly discussed deporting Musk from the US as well as cutting government contracts for some of his companies.“Without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head to South Africa,” Trump posted on his own Truth Social platform.The president also told a group of reporters in Florida: “We might have to put Doge on Elon. Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible.” More

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      No one wanted Trump’s devastating budget bill. Of course it passed | Moira Donegan

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      The budget reconciliation bill that passed the US House of Representatives on Thursday and was promptly to be signed into law by Donald Trump represents the particular perversity of national politics in America: seemingly no one wants it, everyone hates it, and it is widely agreed to be devastating for staggering numbers of Americans. And yet, the bill felt inevitable: it was a foregone conclusion that this massive, malignant measure was something that everyone dreaded and no one had the capacity to stop.They didn’t really even try. In the Senate, a few conservative Republicans made noise about the bill’s dramatic costs: the congressional budget office estimates that the bill will add $3.3 tn to the deficit over the coming decade, and the senator Rand Paul, a budget hawk from Kentucky, declined to vote for it for this reason. But other Republicans, who used to style themselves as fiscally responsible guardians against excessive government spending, engaged in a bit of freelance creative accounting in order to produce an estimate that falsely claimed the cost of the bill would be lower. Most of them quickly found themselves on board.Moderate Republicans, or what remain of them, also quickly quit the field. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina facing down an uncertain re-election bid, expressed concerns about the bill’s massive cuts to Medicaid, the federal low-income healthcare program on which many Americans – and many of his constituents – rely. When Donald Trump threatened to secure a primary challenge to Tillis in retaliation, the senator announced that he would not seek re-election after all; he voted against the bill, but also ended his political career. Susan Collins, of Maine – she of the perennial “concern” about the sadistic Republican agendas that she continues to support – made a rare departure from her usual formula and voted against the bill, a move that came close on the heels of polling showing her dismal approval rating among her constituents. That left just Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, who agreed to play ball: she would vote for the bill, which she had publicly disparaged, in exchange for some money for her state. The result was that Alaska will be exempted, at least temporarily, from new rules associated with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Snap, which helps low-income Americans buy enough food to keep themselves alive. Republicans threw in a tax deduction for Alaskan whaling captains – of all things – and with that, her vote was secured.When the bill was sent to the House, a handful of Republicans threatened to withhold their votes over budget and Medicaid concerns. But no one believed them. They were always going to cave, abandon their stated principles and follow Trump’s orders, and they did. Trump, after all, had said that he wanted the bill passed in time for the Fourth of July; it passed on the third. He says jump, and the Congress asks: How high?They do so even when the demands that Trump makes are morally grotesque. The bill will devastate Americans. Its massive cuts to Medicaid, combined with expiring Obamacare subsidies, will result in an estimated 17 million Americans losing health coverage over the next 10 years, effectively undoing the expansion of healthcare coverage that was achieved with Barack Obama’s health law. Cuts to Snap are so profound that they cannot be made up with additional state spending; some people who are eating today because they have food assistance will go hungry in the future. There are deep cuts to federal loans and grants for college students, and a near-reversal of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act’s investments in green energy, with tax breaks now going to climate-damaging sectors like coal and oil instead. Because the bill creates a dramatic budget deficit, law requires that Medicare, the healthcare program for seniors, will face cuts, too.All of this is to say nothing of the downstream effects of the legislation. The steep cuts to Medicaid, in particular, will devastate America’s already fragile and partial healthcare system. Planned Parenthood is now excluded from federal Medicaid dollars, meaning that about 200 of its roughly 600 clinics will probably have to close, making abortion less accessible even in states where it is legal, and putting contraception and STD and cancer screenings out of reach for untold numbers of American women. Many rural hospitals will likely have to close, too, along with nursing homes. Those healthcare clinics that remain will have longer wait times and more crowding, and offer more expensive care. Ultimately, fewer people will be going to the doctor, and more of them will suffer and die needlessly of treatable and preventable conditions.But the bill does have winners. It has been called, among other things, the largest tax cut in the nation’s history, although the benefit is disproportionately to billionaires. The budget of Ice, Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police force, is also expanded exponentially: from $3.5bn to $48.5bn, making it the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, though still no more accountable.The bill, in other words, steals from the sick, the elderly, the hungry and the curious, and gives that plundered loot to billionaires and jackboots. It will warp American life – already sickly and impoverished by the standards of our peer nations – in cruel and enfeebling ways. It will make us sicker, poorer, more fearful, more ignorant and more endangered. It will make the rich, meanwhile, even richer.Why are Republicans voting for a bill that will hurt their own constituents? A bill that undermines their stated values and threatens their careers and will immiserate people they care about – if only themselves?One of the more confounding aspects of the Trump era is his ability to vacate what the constitution’s authors – and indeed most reasonable adults – would have assumed would be a defining feature of the contest among the branches: self-interest. Republicans will follow him anywhere, even to unpopular votes, even to self-sabotage, and frequently to the diminishment of their own branch’s relevance. Some say that now, he is leading them to a midterm defeat. Democrats made a show of their opposition to the bill – in the minority, shows are about all they can accomplish – with the minority leader Hakeem Jeffries delivering an eight-and-a-half-hour, filibuster-style speech on the floor telling the stories of Americans who will be hurt by the legislation, laying out the bill’s cruelty and recklessness. But you could also detect a hint of pleasure in his voice as he read out the testimonies of Americans who live in what the Democrats see as particularly vulnerable districts for Republicans in 2026.The bill is unpopular now, and it is likely to become much more so as the full breadth of its cuts to social services, and its impacts on Americans seeking to get healthcare, buy food, secure an environmentally livable future or go to school, become clear. Many of the politicians who ultimately voted for it criticized it sharply just days or hours before. They will be attacked about this in the midterms: the suffering that the bill will cause will be cut into television and social media ads and played incessantly on networks in what the Democrats believe are winnable districts. But it is unclear, in the end, if hurting Americans, including their own voters, really will come back to bite the Republican party. It hasn’t for a long time.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      House passes Trump’s major tax-and-spending bill, sending it to president to sign into law – live updates

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      House Republicans passed Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” in a 218-214 vote that was almost entirely along party lines on Thursday. The bill next goes to the president for his signature. The White House has said Trump is expected to sign the bill on Friday at 5pm EST.

      The Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, prolonged the vote with a record-setting speech in which he decried provisions in the bill that would slash social safety net programs in order to offset the cost of making Trump’s tax cuts permanent.

      Only two House Republicans voted against the measure, for different reasons that showed the ideological span of the party’s wafer-thin majority. Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning fiscal hawk who has drawn Trump’s wrath for opposing his agenda, and Pennsylvania congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, who was opposed to the Medicaid cuts.

      Democrats led by Jeffries assailed the bill as “an all-out assault on the American people”. Meanwhile, Democratic groups were vowing to hammer Republicans for their support of a bill that projections say would lead millions of Americans to lose their health insurance.
      Donald Trump, who is on his way to Iowa for a rally, just told reporters that, just weeks after the military parade on his birthday, he is staging an air show with advanced air force bombers at the White House on Friday to celebrate his signing into law the massive tax-and-spending package that passed the House on Thursday.“We’re going to have B-2s and F-22s and F-35s flying right over the White House”, Trump said. “So we’ll be signing with those beautiful planes flying right over our heads.”The Fourth of July bill signing comes on the sixth anniversary of Trump’s 2019 independence day speech, in which the president claimed, according to the official transcript, that, during the war of 1812, the US army “took over the airports; it did everything it had to do”.The US supreme court on Thursday granted a Trump administration request to pause a lower court’s order that had blocked the Department of Homeland Security from deporting eight migrants to politically unstable South Sudan, clearing the way for the men with no ties to that nation to be moved from a military base in Djibouti where they have been held for weeks.Last month, the court had put on hold an injunction issued in April by a US district court judge in Boston, Brian Murphy, which requiring migrants set for removal to so-called “third countries” where they have no ties to get a chance to argue that they are at risk of torture there, while a legal challenge plays out.By a vote of 7-2, with the liberal justice Elena Kagan joining the court’s six conservatives, the court granted the administration’s request to clarify that its decision also extended to Murphy’s separate ruling in May that the administration had violated his injunction in attempting to send a group of migrants to South Sudan.The US state department has urged Americans to avoid the African nation “due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict.”In her concurring opinion, Kagan wrote: “I continue to believe that this Court should not have stayed the District Court’s April 18 order enjoining the Government from deporting non-citizens to third countries without notice or a meaningful opportunity to be heard.”“But”, she added, “a majority of this Court saw things differently, and I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.”Two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the decision.“What the Government wants to do, concretely, is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death”, Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Jackson.“Today’s order clarifies only one thing: Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial”, she added.Among the Democrats expressing dismay at the passage of Trump’s tax-and-spending bill are the party’s two previous nominees who ran against him for president, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.“Republicans in Congress have voted to devastate millions of people across our nation — kicking Americans off their health care, shuttering hospitals, eliminating food assistance, and raising costs”, Harris said in a social media post on Thursday. “This is Project 2025 in action”, she added, reminding voters that cuts to Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits were both part of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term that she had railed against during her abbreviated campaign for the presidency last year.“The Republican budget bill is not only reckless — it’s cruel”, Biden posted about 30 minutes before Harris. “It slashes Medicaid and takes away health care from millions of Americans. It closes rural hospitals and cuts food assistance for our veterans and seniors. It jacks up energy bills. And it could trigger deep cuts to Medicare while driving up the deficit by $4 trillion. All of this to give a massive tax break to billionaires. Working people deserve better.”

      House Republicans passed Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” in a 218-214 vote that was almost entirely along party lines on Thursday. The bill next goes to the president for his signature. The White House has said Trump is expected to sign the bill on Friday at 5pm EST.

      The Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, prolonged the vote with a record-setting speech in which he decried provisions in the bill that would slash social safety net programs in order to offset the cost of making Trump’s tax cuts permanent.

      Only two House Republicans voted against the measure, for different reasons that showed the ideological span of the party’s wafer-thin majority. Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning fiscal hawk who has drawn Trump’s wrath for opposing his agenda, and Pennsylvania congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, who was opposed to the Medicaid cuts.

      Democrats led by Jeffries assailed the bill as “an all-out assault on the American people”. Meanwhile, Democratic groups were vowing to hammer Republicans for their support of a bill that projections say would lead millions of Americans to lose their health insurance.
      Maryland congressman Andy Harris, chair of the far-right House Freedom caucus, told reporters on Capitol Hill: “If winning is caving, then I guess we caved.”Harris repeatedly cited unspecified “agreements” with the Trump administration for persuading himself and other hardliners to drop their objections to the bill. He declined to divulge any details about the “agreement” brokered at the White House, telling reporters to “ask the president”.“This is a very good Republican product,” he added. “It’s going to move the president’s agenda forward. It’s going to actually seriously deal with spending and, of course, not provide a tax increase to middle-class America.”The bill is projected to add trillions to the national debt.Democrats and liberal activists have assailed the bill, warning that they will hold Republicans who voted for it accountable in next year’s midterm elections.“This budget is as cruel as it is corrupt. House Republicans just voted to gut Medicaid, kick millions off Snap, rip free school lunches from kids, and pour billions into Ice – all so their donors can rake in more tax breaks,” said Indivisible’s co-founder and co-executive director Ezra Levin. “Trump just made every single Republican more vulnerable – and while they’ll try to spin this disastrous bill, they know exactly how deep the hole they’ve dug is. But when Trump snaps his fingers, they fall in line – no matter how many families they throw under the bus. That spineless loyalty will be their downfall.”Congressman Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who was one of the conservative holdouts, told reporters on Capitol Hill that Trump understands the art of a deadline.“I believe that’s why they called the vote last night, because that put everybody at the table, and they said, ‘This is the deadline,’” he said, explaining how the president and leaders eventually quelled their short-lived revolt.Major changes to the bill, which they had demanded, would have required Senate approval, which Burchett did not believe they would get again. “It would have died, it would have never it would have never passed. If it went back to the Senate, [Alaska senator Lisa] Murkowski – we would never get her vote again.”The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has told reporters that Donald Trump plans to sign the colossal tax and spending bill at 5pm EST on Friday, the Independence Day holiday. It will come as the White House is preparing to hold a Fourth of July picnic to mark the nation’s 249th birthday.At a signing ceremony on Thursday afternoon, Mike Johnson joked that he was operating on such little sleep after marathon days of voting that “I’m a danger to myself and others”.“We knew that if we won, and we believed we would, we knew that if we got unified government, we’d have to quite literally fix every area of public policy,” Johnson said. “Everything was an absolute disaster under the Biden-Harris, radical, woke, progressive Democrat regime, and we took the best effort that we could, in one big, beautiful bill, to fix as much of it as we could.”Johnson then signed the legislation that will be sent to the White House.Massie, the other Republican who has consistently opposed the bill, said he voted against it on Thursday because of the harm he believes it would do to the nation’s finances.“I voted No on final passage because it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates,” he wrote on X.Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, one of only two Republicans who voted against the president’s megabill, has issued a statement explaining his decision.
      As I’ve stated throughout these negotiations, with each iteration of legislative text that was placed on the House floor, I’ve maintained a close and watchful eye on the specific details of these provisions, and determined the specific district impact, positive or negative, on our PA-1 community.
      I voted to strengthen Medicaid protections, to permanently extend middle class tax cuts, for enhanced small business tax relief, and for historic investments in our border security and our military. However, it was the Senate’s amendments to Medicaid, in addition to several other Senate provisions, that altered the analysis for our PA-1 community. The original House language was written in a way that protected our community; the Senate amendments fell short of our standard. I believe in, and will always fight for, policies that are thoughtful, compassionate, and good for our community. It is this standard that will always guide my legislative decisions.
      Fitzpatrick represents a competitive, heavily suburban Pennsylvania district.The White House is celebrating passage of the president’s domestic policy bill.Republican leaders are taking a victory lap, heaping praise on “our leader”.“They doubted us,” said Representative Lisa McLain of Michigan, the House GOP conference chair. “But here we are again! What are we? Six and zero?”“We delivered on our promises to the American people – no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, tax relief for seniors, enhanced childcare tax credits, elimination of the death tax, more Ice agents – we’re finishing the border wall and funding the golden dome.”Representative Tom Emmer, another member of leadership, repeated the Republican claim that the bill cuts only “waste, fraud and abuse” from Medicaid. According to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill cuts roughly $1t from Medicaid, a joint federal and state health insurance program for disabled and low-income Americans. It would result in an estimated 11.8 million people losing health insurance over the next decade.“To put it simply,” Emmer said, “this bill is President Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda. Being codified into law from Minnesota to Texas and Maine to California, there are wins in this legislation for every single American.”Here’s a breakdown of what’s in the tax cut and spending bill that just passed the House, and next goes to Trump for his signature.The bill is largely the same version as the one Senate Republicans narrowly passed, with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. Trump has imposed a 4 July deadline for the legislation to be on his desk.In a vote of 218-214, Republicans passed Trump’s megabill, sending it to the president’s desk by his self-imposed Independence Day deadline. Republicans burst into chants of “U-S-A!”In the end, two Republicans voted against the bill: Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning fiscal hawk who has drawn Trump’s wrath for opposing his agenda, and Pennsylvania congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, who was opposed to the Medicaid cuts.The 15-minute voting window has now closed – though that matters little. It will remain open for as long as Republican leaders believe they need.So far, two Republicans are recorded as voting against the bill, though nothing is final until the vote officially closes. One Republican – conservative Ralph Norman, has yet to vote, according to CSPAN.Passage would amount to a remarkable feat for Johnson, who has navigated, in his own words, “so many dire straits” since assuming the gavel.Johnson, once a relatively unknown congressman from Louisiana, came to power after the historic ouster of former speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was toppled by hardliners in his own party. Many expected Johnson – soft-spoken, deeply religious and lacking leadership experience – would meet a similar fate.Yet, in the months since, Johnson has surprised both his critics and colleagues by holding together one of the narrowest House majorities in modern history. He has overcome the threat of rebellion from the hard-right faction of his party and mollified moderates uneasy with aspects of the president’s agenda.One critical factor in his success so far: Trump’s support. The president’s backing has largely helped insulate Johnson from the kind of rightwing backlash.The House has officially started voting on final passage of Trump’s so-called “one big, beautiful” bill – more than 24 hours after it the reconciliation package was first brought to the floor. It is expected to narrowly pass, with all Democrats opposed.Johnson closed his remarks with a plea to members to help pass Trump’s megabill, though his cheery delivered made clear he no longer had any doubts about the outcome.“The president of the United States is waiting with his pen. The American people are waiting for this relief,” Johnson said. “We’ve heard enough talk. It’s time for action. Let’s finish the job for him, vote yes on the bill.” More

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      Twisted arms and late-night deals: how Trump’s sweeping policy bill was passed

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      Just a few months ago, analysts predicted that Republicans in Congress – with their narrow majorities and fractured internal dynamics – would not be able to pass Donald Trump’s landmark legislation.On Thursday, the president’s commanding influence over his party was apparent once again: the bill passed just in time for Trump’s Fourth of July deadline.But while the GOP may call the budget bill big and beautiful, the road to passing the final legislation has been particularly ugly. Arm-twisting from Trump and last-minute benefits targeting specific states cajoled holdouts, despite conservative misgivings over transformative cuts to Medicaid and the ballooning deficit.Here’s the journey of the sprawling tax-and-spending bill.The first hurdleThe initial version of the mega-bill passed by the House in May extended tax cuts from 2017.It also increased the debt limit by about $4tn, and added billions in spending on immigration enforcement while adding work requirements to Medicaid and requiring states to contribute more to Snap nutrition assistance. The Budget Lab at Yale estimated the House bill would add $2.4tn to the debt over the 2025-34 period.Several conservative Republicans balked at several aspects of the bill during long debate sessions. Mike Lawler, a congressman representing New York, wanted a larger Salt deduction – which concerns offsetting state and local taxes – while the California congressman David Valadao was concerned about the Medicaid cuts, which his district heavily relies on for healthcare.Then Trump traveled to Capitol Hill in late May to help assuage the holdouts. At his meeting with lawmakers, “he was emphatic [that] we need to quit screwing around. That was the clear message. You all have tinkered enough – it is time to land the plane,” the South Dakota congressman Dusty Johnson told reporters.“Ninety-eight per cent of that conference is ready to go. They were enthused. They were pumped up by the president, and I think with the holdouts, he did move them. I don’t know that we are there yet, but that was a hugely impactful meeting.”In the end, there were only two House Republicans who voted against the bill: Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, both of whom are fiscal hawks concerned about the federal deficit. The bill moved on to the Senate.The bill lands in the SenateThe Senate version of the budget bill passed on a 50-50 vote with JD Vance, the vice-president, breaking the tie. Until the final stages, however, all eyes were on the Republican senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, both noted moderates, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky, both noted fiscal conservatives.The bill’s authors added tax provisions to benefit Alaska’s whaling industry to win the support of Murkowski. They also tried to add provisions protecting rural hospitals from Medicaid cuts in “non-contiguous states”, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the amendments would violate restrictions on what the bill could contain without triggering the 60-vote filibuster.Murkowski acquiesced after winning new tax revenues from oil and gas drilling leases for Alaska, provisions protecting clean energy tax credits, and delays on Snap changes.View image in fullscreen“Do I like this bill? No,” Murkowski said as she stared down an NBC reporter who had just relayed a comment by the Kentucky Republican Rand Paul describing her vote as “a bailout for Alaska at the expense of the rest of the country”.Other changes to the Senate bill were made in the final days of negotiations, including the striking of a 10-year federal ban on state regulation of AI. A record number of amendments were proposed.Tillis, who announced he would not run again in his politically competitive state, gave a rousing speech about the perils of Medicaid cuts and voted against the bill. Collins and Paul remained in opposition.With few other options, Democrats tried to delay the vote by requiring the entire bill to be read out loud on the floor the night before the vote.But in the end, with Murkowski’s vote, the Senate had a tie, allowing Vance to cast the deciding vote.The last mileGiven the total opposition of Democrats to the bill’s passage, Republicans in the House could lose no more than three of their own to get the bill to the finish line.On Wednesday, the last push still felt dubious. Even the procedural vote that is required to move to an actual vote was delayed for hours, as some Republicans considering holding their vote.Ralph Norman of South Carolina told C-Span after voting against the bill in committee that he opposed the Senate version’s inclusion of tax credits for renewable energy and its failure to restrict Chinese investment in American property.“We have one chance, one moment to curb the spending that has plagued this country and will take this country down if we don’t get it under control,” he said. “What I see right now, I don’t like.”Victoria Spartz of Indiana had withheld support over concerns about increases in the federal debt.“I’ll vote for the bill, since we need to make it happen for our economy & there are some good provisions in it. However, I will vote against the rule due to broken commitments by Speaker Johnson to his own members,” she wrote on X on Wednesday. “I’m on Plan C now to deal with the looming fiscal catastrophe.”Spartz referred to a promise Johnson made to fiscal conservatives that he would not bring a budget bill to a vote if it increased the debt beyond a certain amount. Spartz said this bill exceeded the agreed-upon amount by about $500bn.Shortly before midnight there were five Republicans voting no on the procedural rule. But deals were still being made – executive orders promised and other negotiations done on the floor.Once again Trump stepped in, joining the speaker, Mike Johnson, in coaxing the party members to cast their final approval. The president called several House members and posted on his Truth Social account. “What are the Republicans waiting for??? What are you trying to prove??? MAGA IS NOT HAPPY, AND IT’S COSTING YOU VOTES!!!” he wrote early on Thursday morning.View image in fullscreenJohnson held the vote open for seven hours, the longest vote recorded. And it worked. On Thursday morning, Norman voted yes to advance the bill.So did Andrew Clyde of Georgia, a notable second amendment rights activist in Congress, who failed in his push for an amendment to the bill to remove the registration requirement for firearms suppressors, short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns from the National Firearms Act, creating a path for legal civilian use without registration and paying a federal tax.The holdouts fell into line, and the House voted early on Thursday morning 219-213 in a procedural vote to move forward.There was still a way to go. Johnson had expected to open the vote at 8am. But the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, commandeered the dais for more than eight hours – setting a record previously held by the Republican Kevin McCarthy – in a marathon stemwinder of a speech attacking the perils of the legislation and delaying the vote.But Johnson remained confident after a night of promises and threats.Massie remained the face of conservative holdouts on the bill. He has faced withering personal attacks from Trump on social media, the creation of a Super Pac to fund a primary challenge and local advertisements attacking his stance on the bill.In the end it was only Massie and Brian Fitzpatrick, a congressman in Pennsylvania who voted for Kamala Harris last year, who voted against a bill that will now rewrite the American political landscape. More

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      Trump’s tax-and-spending bill passes Congress in major win for president

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      The US House of Representatives passed Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill on Thursday, handing the president the first major legislative victory of his second term and sending to his desk wide-ranging legislation expected to supercharge immigration enforcement and slash federal safety net programs.The 218-214 vote came after weeks of wrangling over the measure that Trump demanded be ready for his signature by Friday, the Independence Day holiday. Written by his Republican allies in Congress and unanimously rejected by Democrats, the bill traveled an uncertain road to passage that saw multiple all-night votes in the House and Senate and negotiations that lasted until the final hours before passage. Ultimately, Republicans who had objected to its cost and contents folded, and the bill passed with just two GOP defections: Thomas Massie, a rightwing Kentucky lawmaker, and Brian Fitzpatrick, who represents a Pennsylvania district that voted for Kamala Harris in last year’s election.“We’ve waited long enough, some of us have literally been up for days now, but this day – this day – is a hugely important one in the history of our nation,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said, just before voting began.“With one big, beautiful bill, we are going to make this country stronger, safer and more prosperous than ever before, and every American is going to benefit from that.”The legislation is expected to speed up and expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations, and will probably make Trump’s longstanding desire for a wall along the border with Mexico a reality.It also strikes a blow against the US government’s efforts to fight the climate crisis by phasing out tax incentives created under Joe Biden that were intended to spur investments in electric cars, wind and solar power and other green energy technologies.The bill’s centerpiece is a permanent extension of tax cuts made in 2017, during Trump’s first term, as well as the creation of new, temporary exemptions for tips, overtime pay and car loan interest that the president promised voters during last year’s campaign.The government will lose trillions of dollars in revenue from those provisions, and to offset their costs, Republicans approved an array of cuts to Medicaid, the federal program providing health insurance coverage to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap).Those changes are expected to cost millions of people their benefits, but the bill remains expensive, with the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saying it will add $3.3tn to the country’s debt through 2034.Massie explained his decision to vote against the bill in a post on X, writing that “it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates”.Fitzpatrick issued a statement saying “it was the Senate’s amendments to Medicaid, in addition to several other Senate provisions, that altered the analysis” for his district and made him vote no.Democrats blasted the proposal as “one big, ugly bill” that dismantles anti-poverty programs to fund tax breaks for the wealthy. Analyses have shown that high earners benefited most from Trump’s tax policies.The Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, made a last-ditch effort to halt the bill’s passage by delivering a floor speech that lasted eight hours and 44 minutes, the longest ever.“This is extraordinary. This assault on everyday Americans, assault on children, veterans, seniors, people with disabilities. It’s incredible to me, all of this in this one, big, ugly bill,” Jeffries said.“Ripping food out of the mouths of vulnerable Americans – that’s extraordinary that that’s what we’re doing, extraordinary. And all of this is being done, this unprecedented assault on everyday Americans, is being unleashed on the American people, Mr Speaker, on the most vulnerable among us, all of this is being done to provide massive tax breaks to billionaire donors. Shame on this institution. If this bill passes, that’s not America. We’re better than this.”Trump has described the bill as crucial to the success of his second term, and congressional Republicans made its passage their top priority. It was a tall task – the GOP won small majorities in both the House and Senate in last November’s election, and could afford no more than three defections in either chamber.The party’s lawmakers broadly support Trump but were divided on a host of other issues. There were lawmakers who wanted big spending cuts, rapid phase-outs of green energy incentives and an expanded deduction that would mostly benefit taxpayers in Democratic-led states. Their demands butted against others who sought to moderate the bill, but over the course of weeks, Republicans leaders managed to forge a compromise.Trump appears to have also offered some concessions to hard-line holdouts from the Republican House freedom caucus at a meeting at the White House on Wednesday and in subsequent discussions, as his advisers rushed to ensure the bill passed without returning to the Senate.The details of Trump’s concessions – possibly coming in the form of executive actions at a later date – were not immediately clear, and House freedom caucus chair Andy Harris declined to describe their discussions with Trump.“When we looked at this entire package, the significant agreements we got with the administration in the last 24 hours made this package a much, much better package,” Harris told reporters after the vote. “The agreement is with the president. If you want to know, ask the president.”The bill is only able to affect revenue, spending and the debt limit, under the rules of budget reconciliation that allowed the GOP to avoid a filibuster by Democrats in the Senate. Under Biden, Congress’s then Democratic majority had used the same procedure to pass legislation to spur the economy’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and curb US carbon emissions.Trump’s bill allocates $45bn for Ice detention facilities, $14bn for deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire 10,000 new agents by 2029. An additional $50bn will go towards the border wall and other fortifications.Enrollees of Medicaid and Snap will face new work requirements, and states will be forced to share part of the cost of the latter program for the first time ever. The CBO estimates the bill’s Medicaid changes could cost as many as 11.8 million people their healthcare, and the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities forecasts about 8 million people, or one in five recipients, may lose their Snap benefits.The legislation also forces changes to provider taxes, which states use to finance their share of Medicaid spending. That is expected to further increase the financial stress of hospitals in rural areas, and when the bill was in the Senate, a $50bn fund was added to support those facilities.Some in the GOP were openly nervous about the cuts to safety net programs that their constituents rely on. Thom Tillis, a senator who represents swing state North Carolina, refused to support the bill for those reasons, leading Trump to announce he would support a primary challenger when he stands for re-election next year. Tillis then made public his plans to retire, a potential boost for Democrats’ hopes of claiming his seat.“It is inescapable this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made,” Tillis said on the Senate floor.“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there any more, guys?” More