WASHINGTON (States Newsroom) — U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson plans to hold a vote on Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” overnight Wednesday or at the latest on Thursday morning, following a meeting at the White House with GOP lawmakers opposed to the reconciliation package.
Johnson, speaking to reporters at the Capitol after the huddle with far-right members of the party and President Donald Trump, said that lawmakers had “a good discussion” and that he believes the GOP is “in a very good place.”
“I think that all of our colleagues here will really like this final product, and I think we’re going to move forward,” Johnson said.
The Louisiana Republican said he expects to send a detailed amendment known as a manager’s package to the House Rules Committee later Wednesday evening that will make some changes to the massive bill, though he didn’t detail what those would be.
Johnson said members of the Freedom Caucus, who argue the legislation doesn’t go far enough to restructure Medicaid and reduce federal spending, may end up supporting the bill, in part because Trump plans to address their other concerns through unilateral actions.
“You will see how all this is resolved. But I think we can resolve their concerns and it’ll be probably some combination of work by the president in these areas as well as here in Congress,” Johnson said. “So there may be executive orders related to some of these issues in the near future.
“And, you know, this is a commitment the president has made. He wants to go after fraud, waste and abuse.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a written statement saying the “meeting was productive and moved the ball in the right direction.
“The President reiterated how critical it is for the country to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill as quickly as possible.”
Republicans are using the complex reconciliation process to move the package through Congress with simple majority votes in each chamber, avoiding the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster, which would otherwise require bipartisanship.
Reconciliation measures must address federal revenue, spending, or the debt limit in a way not deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian. That means the GOP proposals must carry some sort of price tag and cannot focus simply on changing federal policy.
Republicans are using the package to extend the 2017 tax law, increase spending on border security and defense by hundreds of billions of dollars, overhaul American energy production, restructure higher education aid and cut spending on Medicaid.
A new Congressional Budget Office analysis released late Tuesday projected the massive reconciliation package would decrease resources for low-income families over the next decade while increasing resources for top earners.
Freedom Caucus wants more
Earlier Wednesday, members of the Freedom Caucus told reporters following a different meeting with Johnson that they believed negotiations were moving in the right direction, but were skeptical of trying to approve the entire package this week.
Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris, chairman of the group, said they wanted the legislation to go further in terms of addressing “waste, fraud and abuse” within Medicaid, though he declined to elaborate.
The Medicaid changes now included would cut $625 billion in federal spending during the next decade, under a CBO analysis. Democrats have warned the result would be millions of vulnerable people losing access to the health program for lower income people and some people with disabilities.
Harris also said the group wanted to see additional changes to how the bill rolled back clean energy provisions in Democrat’s climate change legislation from several years ago, which he referred to as the “green new scam.”
“I’m not sure this can be done this week,” Harris said. “I’m pretty confident it can be done in 10 days, but that’s up to leadership to decide.”
Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy said during that same impromptu press conference that leadership and members of the Freedom Caucus had made “significant progress” toward a final agreement.
“We’re trying to deliver so that the people who are actually out there working hard can actually get the health care that they want to get, that they can get, and get it the best way possible,” Roy said. “That’s what this is all about; changing a broken system, making sure we’re saving taxpayer dollars and being able to provide a better environment for people to be able to thrive.”
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry, who used to chair the Freedom Caucus, said that holding a House vote before Memorial Day was a made-up timeline and that if negotiations needed to last longer, they should.
“This is a completely arbitrary deadline set by people here to force people into a corner to make bad decisions,” Perry said. “It’s more important to get this right, to get it correct, than to get it fast. We are sitting at the table to do that.”
