GOP leaders tee up high-stakes vote on Trump domestic policy bill after president’s personal pitch to holdouts

By Sarah Ferris, Manu Raju and Lauren Fox, CNN

(CNN) — House GOP leaders are barreling ahead with a vote on President Donald Trump’s agenda in the coming hours Wednesday, after Trump privately implored key holdouts not to derail the major tax and spending cuts package.

The president had summoned members of a key wing of the Republican Party to the White House at a moment of crisis for Speaker Mike Johnson: A half-dozen conservatives were vowing to defy their own party leadership because of spending cuts – mostly to clean energy programs and Medicaid – they still wanted to see in the bill.

But as of Wednesday evening, Johnson and his leadership team appeared confident that Trump had helped get the bill back on track. With members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus mostly silent following the meeting, however, it was not yet clear if they would indeed back the legislation.

“We’re going to vote tonight,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said after emerging from the White House, though he couldn’t say what time that would happen and did not detail whether there was any formal agreement with the hardliners.

Summing up the meeting, Scalise said House GOP hardliners had pushed Trump and party leaders to make key changes to the bill – but that leadership ultimately explained why those changes wouldn’t get enough support on the floor.

“None of this is easy because we’re in a narrow majority,” Scalise said, stressing the “very delicate balance” that party leaders have had to strike with their diverse GOP conference. “We talked about the political dynamics and the realities of the members in our conference who aren’t for those things.”

The resistance by the GOP hardliners – including Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and others – would be enough to block Trump’s massive domestic policy bill from reaching the floor. But Johnson and his team have made a big gamble that those conservatives are not willing to defy Trump.

One day earlier, Trump made an impassioned appeal to the full House GOP conference that they should stop pushing for changes and simply accept the current version of the bill. But the conservatives – led by Roy and Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris – trekked to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue to meet face-to-face with Trump just hours after they declared they would oppose the bill without more changes.

After the meeting, Johnson told reporters that the GOP would “land the airplane” and pass the bill. He did not say exactly what changes to Trump’s bill had been discussed but predicted that GOP leaders would “resolve” the concerns of the Freedom Caucus, potentially with the help of executive orders.

“There may be executive orders relating to some of these issues in the near future,” he said. “This is a commitment the president has made. He wants to go after fraud, waste and abuse. He wants to make government leaner and work more efficiently and effectively for the people.”

The GOP hardliners have been demanding, including overnight into Wednesday, that Johnson make key changes, such as bigger cuts to clean energy programs, which they’ve dubbed the “Green New Scam,” and changes to Medicaid state financing. But while people in those talks said the White House had been amenable to those changes in late-night meetings, multiple people close to leadership said a formal deal was not reached.

GOP leaders believed they came much closer to a deal after Trump’s impassioned plea to their conference at the US Capitol Tuesday – and did manage to win over a handful of recalcitrant Northeastern moderates who’d been seeking more generous state and local deductions for their home states. That progress, however, seemed to stall overnight, after Roy and other Freedom Caucus members met with White House staff.

The talks had gone so sideways that some of the GOP hardliners were even privately floating to leadership that they abandon the “one big, beautiful bill” path and instead attempt to pass two separate bills – saving the harder tax policy for later this year, according to one of those people.

By Wednesday morning, Roy and other holdouts told reporters they would not advance the bill unless the changes to Medicaid and the clean energy credits were made: “For the bill to move off of the floor, these issues have to be addressed.”

Some of those conservatives were still seeking major changes to Medicaid that Johnson had already ruled out, such as lowering the federal government’s match rate to state Medicaid payments, known as the federal medical assistance percentage or FMAP.

Asked whether FMAP remained on the table, Rep. Keith Self of Texas told CNN: “For me it is.”

A White House official told CNN that talks with the House Freedom Caucus had not yet yielded progress, but that the meeting was on the books to “hopefully strike” a deal.

“There was no deal. The White House presented HFC with policy options that the administration can live with, provided they can get the votes, but they cannot get the votes,” the official said.

The meeting at the White House on Wednesday afternoon lasted just under two hours, as key lawmakers on the House Rules Committee pressed ahead with a marathon meeting to advance the bill.

Democrats had filed 500 amendments in that meeting and made clear they were prepared to use whatever delay tactics were in their power.

This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Alayna Treene, Morgan Rimmer and Alison Main contributed to this report.

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