Senate Takes Up Trump’s Policy Bill, as G.O.P. Scrounges for Votes to Pass It

 

Senate Takes Up Trump’s Policy Bill, as G.O.P. Scrounges for Votes to Pass It

 

Republican leaders barely scaled a key procedural hurdle to bring up the bill, but Democrats delayed its consideration and it was unclear whether the G.O.P. had the votes to pass it.

 

Catie Edmondson Brad Plumer Andrew Duehren Margot Sanger-Katz

By Catie Edmondson Brad Plumer Andrew Duehren and Margot Sanger-Katz

Reporting from Washington

June 28, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/us/politics/senate-republicans-reconciliation.html

 

The Senate on Saturday narrowly voted to begin debate on the sprawling domestic policy package carrying President Trump’s agenda, clearing a key procedural hurdle after Republican leaders cut a series of deals with holdouts in hopes of winning the votes to pass it.

 

The vote to take up the bill was 51 to 49, after party leaders held the vote open for more than three hours in a suspenseful scene while they haggled with holdouts, both on the Senate floor and behind closed doors, to secure their support.

 

Two Republicans, Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted with Democrats to block consideration of the measure.

 

Even as the vote unfolded on Saturday night, a clutch of hard-right Republicans, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, were demanding that G.O.P. leaders insert even deeper spending cuts into the bill in exchange for their support. Ultimately, they all voted in favor, with Mr. Johnson switching his vote from “no” to “yes” in the final moments.

 

It was still not clear whether G.O.P. leaders had enough support to pass the measure and send it to the House for final approval in time to meet the July 4 deadline Mr. Trump has set. Democrats demanded a line-by-line reading of the bill, a procedural protest that was expected to take more than a dozen hours and likely push any final action in the Senate into Monday at the earliest.

 

But the test vote on Saturday night put the measure on track, even as it reflected the considerable angst among Republicans about their party’s signature bill.

 

Mr. Tillis, who is up for re-election in 2026, said in a lengthy statement explaining his vote that he opposed the legislation because “it would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.”

 

“This will force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands in the expansion population, and even reducing critical services for those in the traditional Medicaid population,” Mr. Tillis said.

 

Hours later, Mr. Trump unleashed a lengthy social media broadside against him, calling his opposition a “BIG MISTAKE” and saying he would meet with candidates seeking to challenge Mr. Tillis, who is up for re-election in 2026, in a Republican primary.

 

A 940-page version of the legislation that Republicans released just after midnight contained key changes aimed at winning over G.O.P. skeptics. They included the creation of a $25 billion fund to help rural hospitals expected to be hit hard by the Medicaid cuts the legislation would impose, a faster phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar projects, and an increase in the cap on the state and local tax deduction demanded by lawmakers in the House.

 

There were also a number of parochial changes aimed at placating some of the most vocal Republican opponents of the legislation, including several for Alaska, home to Senator Lisa Murkowski, who has said the measure would hurt her state. That appeared to have won her support, though she waited more than 90 minutes after the vote began to cast her “aye,” after huddling in intense conversation with party leaders on the floor.    

 

White House officials ratcheted up pressure on Republicans to fall in line behind the measure, issuing an official policy statement saying that failure to do so by Independence Day “would be the ultimate betrayal.” Mr. Trump spent part of his day golfing with Republican senators and meeting with holdouts.

 

Party leaders are trying to appease two flanks of their conference. Some, including Mr. Tillis, have said they could not support it without greater reassurances that the Medicaid cuts it contains would not hurt rural hospitals in their states. And fiscal hawks, like Mr. Paul and Mr. Johnson, have said they do not want to back legislation that would only increase the deficit. Mr. Paul was among the president’s golfing partners on Saturday, and Mr. Johnson among those he met with.

 

The core of the bill remains the same. It would extend tax cuts passed by Republicans in 2017 and add some new ones Mr. Trump campaigned on, while slashing spending on safety-net programs, including Medicaid and food assistance. The biggest tax cuts and the biggest changes to those anti-poverty programs remained intact. Taken together, the bill would most likely increase federal debt by more than $3 trillion over the next decade, though lawmakers were still shaping the bill and awaiting an official estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

 

With Mr. Trump demanding quick action, Republicans in Congress have intensified their efforts to push it through to enactment even as many of them — including several who voted for it in the House — have been open about their reservations about a measure they are concerned could be a political loser.

 

The revisions released early Saturday were designed to allay some of those concerns.

 

Some Republican senators, including Mr. Tillis and Susan Collins of Maine, had pressed for the inclusion of a rural hospital fund to to help health care providers absorb the impact of a provision that would crack down on strategies that many states have developed to finance their Medicaid programs. Despite their pushback, that provider tax change remains in the bill, though lawmakers have delayed its implementation by one year.

 

It was unclear whether the $25 billion compensation fund added late in the process would be enough to win their votes. Ms. Collins had suggested that she wanted to provide as much as $100 billion to ensure that rural hospitals, which operate on thin margins, were not adversely affected.

 

But it appeared to be enough to win over at least one Republican holdout who had expressed concern about the Medicaid cuts, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said he would vote for the bill despite his concerns about the impact of those reductions.

 

“We cannot be a working-class party if you are taking away health care for working-class people,” he said, denouncing the Medicaid changes in the bill as “bad.”

 

A new provision allowing “individuals in a noncontiguous state” to be exempt from enforcing new work requirements imposed on SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, appeared aimed at mollifying Ms. Murkowski of Alaska. Her state would be hit with billions of dollars in nutrition assistance costs as a result of the legislation, and she had cited the provision as one of her chief concerns. The bill also includes new health provisions designed to benefit Alaska, as well as new tax benefits for fishermen in the state’s waters.

 

Some of the changes were aimed at appealing to members of the House, where Republicans from high-tax states like New York had threatened to sink the bill if it did not include a substantial increase in the state and local tax deduction, currently capped at $10,000. Senate Republicans were skeptical of the deduction but ultimately decided to match the House plan to lift the cap to $40,000. But while the House would make the increase permanent, the Senate would keep it for only five years, allowing it to snap back to $10,000 in 2030.

 

The newest draft makes even sharper cuts to subsidies for wind and solar power, something that Mr. Trump and other conservatives had explicitly called for this week. It remains to be seen whether those changes could cause friction with Republicans who have publicly supported green-energy credits, including Mr. Tillis, Ms. Murkowski and Senator John Curtis of Utah.

 

Previously, the Senate proposed allowing companies that were building wind and solar farms to claim a tax credit worth at least 30 percent of their costs if they started construction this year, with a phaseout over two years. But the revised bill would require companies to place their projects “in service” by the end of 2027 to claim the tax break.

 

The bill also would impose additional taxes on renewable energy projects that receive “material assistance” from China, even if they do not qualify for the credit. Because China dominates global supply chains, those new fees could affect a large number of projects.

 

The new Senate measure would more quickly end tax credits for electric vehicles, doing away with them by Sept. 30. It would also slow the phaseout of a lucrative tax credit to make hydrogen fuels, allowing such projects to qualify if construction starts by the end of 2027, instead of by the end of this year.

 

Annie Karni and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

 

Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.

 

Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.

 

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

 

Margot Sanger-Katz is a reporter covering health care policy and public health for the Upshot section of The Times.