House fiscal hawks aren’t immune to Trump’s big, beautiful demands

UPDATE (July 3, 2025, 2:38 p.m. ET): The House passed the Senate’s version of the GOP’s sprawling budget bill without changes. It now goes to President Donald Trump for his signature.

UPDATE (July 3, 2025, 11:30 a.m. ET): House Republicans cleared a major procedural hurdle early Thursday morning after hours of internal gridlock. The bill is now awaiting a vote on final passage.

After an unnecessary sprint that ended in a marathon slog, Senate Republicans passed their version of the massive budget bill to unlock funding for President Donald Trump’s biggest policy goals. Now the ball is back with House Republicans, who reconvened on Wednesday to send the bill to Trump’s desk. But the wildly expensive megabill isn’t sitting well with the House Republicans who made their careers screaming about the national debt and deficit spending — and that’s threatening the GOP’s self-imposed timeline to seal the deal.

The hodgepodge mess of a bill barely limped over the finish line in the Senate, needing a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance to succeed. One of the biggest challenges it will have to overcome in the House, where the margin of error is even smaller, is the price tag attached to it. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest analysis, released before Monday’s marathon of amendments, the “big, beautiful bill” would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years if enacted. That’s more than $500 billion more than the CBO’s last round of scoring for the House bill passed in May.

That was just one of the House Freedom Caucus’ complaints in a scathing three-page memo it issued on Wednesday. In short, the archconservative bloc wants major changes to the Senate bill — changes that would require sending it back across the Capitol. Importantly, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., only got his chamber’s version past the HFC and other fiscal hawks in May after he promised conservatives that if the bill’s tax cuts cost more than $4 trillion, there would be dollar-for-dollar spending cuts on top of the $1.5 trillion in cuts already included.

But the Senate’s bill ignored that deal entirely when several cost-saving measures failed to meet the chamber’s budget rules. Accordingly, House Republicans were already warning this weekend that there would be hell to pay if the Senate version came to the House floor unchanged. “If it gets through [the House Rules Committee], I don’t think it survives on the floor in the current form it’s in,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., told Fox News Digital.

Beyond the slashed spending and tax cuts, both the House and Senate bills also raise the debt ceiling. The U.S. is due to hit the so-called “X date” sometime in mid-August, meaning the Treasury will have run out of accounting tricks to keep paying America’s bills. While the House version raised the debt limit by $4 trillion, the Senate upped that to $5 trillion, the biggest increase in history. There was a time when that alone would be a nonstarter for Freedom Caucus members like Norman and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio — who in another timeline might have tried to kill this bill.

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Unexpected Republican ‘no’ votes add drama to procedural step for Trump’s budget bill July 2, 2025 / 02:19

Meanwhile, as has been the case throughout this affair, Medicaid spending also threatens to upend the delicate balance between GOP factions. Debate only began in the Senate when Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., agreed to back an amendment that would reduce the federal share of Medicaid costs for states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. The amendment from Sen. Rick Scott of Florida never came to a vote in the rush to finalize the bill — but Scott and other conservative would-be “no” votes like Wisconsin’s Sen. Ron Johnosn still voted “yes” anyway.

In fact, Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul was the lone GOP senator to vote against the bill on the grounds that the bill cost too much. (Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted against it too, but for different reasons.) It’s not certain that will be the case on the other side of the Capitol on Wednesday. After the bill’s passage, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., told White House adviser turned podcaster Steve Bannon she isn’t sure that the votes are there for the Senate bill.

The thing is, we’ve heard similar foot-stomping before from the far right, only to see them cave in the face of Trump’s demands. The president’s strong-arming may not always be successful, but it has brought the bill this far despite major complaints from the MAGA and moderate wings of the caucus alike. And while Trump may be wavering on his arbitrary July 4 deadline, there’s little chance he lets the bill die completely, even if momentum dwindles.

Leadership on both sides of the aisle benefit from these “take or leave it” bill packages. Nobody wants to be the one to stop the stuff everyone likes from passing. And while some provisions, like the surge in funding for Trump’s mass deportation program, are popular enough on the right to be spun off on their own, it would run into a Democratic filibuster once it reaches the Senate. It’s only the budget reconciliation process that’s letting this package dodge having to get 60 senators on board.

That means it will be hard for House holdouts to fully derail this train, even without a potential debt ceiling breach looming over the proceedings. But to be clear, I’m not trying to goad the Freedom Caucus and other fiscal hawks into staying firm. If conservatives tank the bill over the debt ceiling hike, or win out in their desire to make even deeper cuts, both outcomes are still extremely bad for the country. Instead, I’m merely questioning whether any of them even believe what they’re saying when they go on Fox News to advocate for destroying America’s social safety net.

If they do, sure, go nuts, keep fighting with your fellow Republicans. The intraparty squabbles are delaying further harms and may even help more people realize the cruelty contained in this legislation.

But if they do yield in the face of Trump’s desire for a win, I’d rather hope that their supposedly courageous stance can be finally seen for what it truly is — an utter betrayal of their constituents in the name of their own ambitions. Maybe if that finally hits home for the millions of voters kicked off their health insurance or who can no longer feed their families, maybe then they’ll be seen as the fiscal vultures they are, feeding on the pain of America’s most vulnerable.