Republicans tee up House vote for Trump agenda bill after unveiling changes to sway holdouts

WASHINGTON — After a marathon hearing, the GOP-led House Rules Committee advanced a sweeping package for President Donald Trump’s agenda Wednesday night, teeing it up for a vote in the full chamber.

Members of the committee met starting at 1 a.m. ET Wednesday and adjourned around 10:40 p.m. ET before they voted for the legislation along party lines, 8-4.

The vote came shortly after Republicans released a set of revisions to their massive bill, a product of last-minute negotiations to placate various factions of the party, including conservative hard-liners and blue-state Republicans, that were threatening to sink the measure.

The 42-page amendment to the multitrillion-dollar legislation includes moving up the enforcement of work requirements for eligible Medicaid recipients by two years, to the end of 2026, phasing out clean energy tax credits earlier and expanding the federal deduction for state and local taxes to $40,000 for people earning less than $500,000 annually.

It’s unclear exactly when the House will take up the package for a vote. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., navigating a narrow three-seat majority in the chamber, had said he hoped to hold the vote Wednesday night or Thursday morning.

Here are some of the biggest changes GOP leaders made to Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” Wednesday.

Medicaid changes

In a win for conservative hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus, the agreement speeds up the timeline when work requirements would kick in for able-bodied adults ages 18 to 64 to be able to receive Medicaid benefits.

The original legislation, adopted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called for work requirements to start at the beginning of 2029. But anti-spending hawks, led by Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, R-Md., pushed to have them begin “not later than Dec. 31, 2026,” so savings would take effect sooner.

The new language would also allow states to move the date to earlier if they chose to do so.

Shifting the start date sooner would mean millions of people could lose Medicaid benefits before the 2028 presidential election, and some could possibly lose them before the 2026 midterm election. That could be a political liability for Republicans up and down the ballot, though Trump and congressional GOP leaders say they are simply rooting out “fraud, waste and abuse.”

In another significant shift, states that declined the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act would get higher payments as an incentive to encourage them not to expand the program.

Clean energy credits

The Freedom Caucus notched another victory in its eleventh-hour negotiations: more quickly phasing out clean energy tax breaks from former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The measure would cut off production and investment tax credits for any facility if the construction began 60 days after the bill was enacted, or after 2028.

The revised bill would also unwind credits for wind and solar leasing arrangements for properties.

“We worked with the White House to get some important revisions to expedite the phase out,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told reporters. “Look, President Trump doesn’t want these, either, and so we worked with them to get really tight language to limit dramatically any new projects from starting.”

Boosting the SALT cap

Republicans who represent districts in high-tax blue states said their top priority in the package was raising the SALT cap, the amount federal taxpayers can deduct in state and local taxes.

The original legislation, passed out of the Ways and Means Committee, hiked the SALT cap to $30,000, up from the current $10,000 cap imposed in Trump’s 2017 tax cut law. But members of the SALT Caucus slammed that increase as insufficient.

The new bill would boost the SALT cap to $40,000 for people making less than $500,000 a year. Both the cap and the income level would increase by 1% annually for 10 years.

“This is the No. 1 federal issue for my constituents. If I do a bad deal, I would expect my constituents to throw me out. If I did a deal at $30,000, my own mother wouldn’t vote for me,” Rep. Nick LaLota, R-N.Y., said this week in the middle of the negotiations.

“Now is the time to make it right what we got wrong in 2017; now is the time to deliver on promises that we’ve made,” he added.

‘MAGA Accounts’ renamed to ‘Trump Accounts’

In a more trivial change to the bill, Republicans are renaming their tax-preferred savings accounts that parents could set up for children from “MAGA Accounts” to “Trump Accounts.”

The first line of the manager’s amendment reads, “Page 10, in the item relating to section 110115, strike ‘MAGA’ and insert ‘Trump’.”