Senate GOP passes Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ after scramble to win over holdouts, setting up high-stakes House fight

By Sarah Ferris, Alison Main, Lauren Fox and Tami Luhby, CNN

(CNN) — Senate Republicans narrowly approved President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending cuts package Tuesday after a dayslong grind to secure the support of key holdouts.

Some of the hardest work may still lie ahead, however, as Trump and GOP leaders must now muscle the bill through the deeply divided House.

With the chamber set to return to Washington on Wednesday, Republicans expect Trump will need to lean heavily on the House GOP to back his plan. Weeks of bitter GOP infighting in the Senate culminated in a standoff with critical GOP swing votes, with leadership unable to win the support of Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky — despite last-minute changes to the legislation.

Vice President JD Vance was ultimately called in to break the legislative logjam and cast the tie-breaking 51st vote.

Both Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson have been working furiously to deliver Trump his first major legislative win, so the president can sign it in a special ceremony on the Fourth of July.

The multitrillion-dollar bill would unlock tax cuts and increase funding for national security, partly paid for by the biggest cut to the federal social safety net in decades.

Vote fluid just hours before passage

Senate Republicans hurtled toward a final vote on the bill Tuesday after more than 24 hours of painstaking, overnight negotiations over changes to the package.

The vote at times appeared to be in flux, and Thune was routinely measured in his responses to reporters when asked whether he had won the needed support from his conference. “I’m of Scandinavian heritage. Always a bit of a realist. So we’ll see what happens,” he said just ahead of the vote.

Sen. Lindsey Graham quipped to reporters he believed the bill was going to fail 12 different times in the last 24 hours.

“Vampires are hard to kill. This bill is hard to kill. But there were a couple of times when I thought it was slipping away,” the South Carolina Republican told CNN. But ultimately, he said, “We didn’t want to fail. I think that motivated everybody.”

Anticipating some GOP defections, Vance arrived on Capitol Hill earlier Tuesday morning, ready to tie-break on several final changes to the legislation, including the massive package of negotiated changes from Senate GOP leadership known as the “substitute” amendment.

The burst of movement from the Senate GOP midmorning Tuesday came after a record “vote-a-rama” that featured hours of intense negotiating on and off the floor between Thune, Vance and the GOP holdouts, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Vance had been the latest senior Republican to try to personally woo Murkowski to back the massive agenda package. GOP leaders had spent days lobbying the Alaska centrist with a lineup of policy sweeteners catered specifically to her state.

On Tuesday, she suggested they finally reached a deal. “It’s in the hands of the people that operate the copy machine,” Murkowski told reporters when asked whether the vote was in with the Senate parliamentarian.

Earlier, the parliamentarian — the chamber rules referee — determined that a food stamps-related carveout meant to win over Murkowski could remain in the legislation without running afoul of the chamber’s strict budget rules, while ruling that a provision meant to change federal cost sharing for Medicaid to benefit states like Alaska and Hawaii was not compliant.

Late changes to win critical support

Senate GOP leaders made several last-minute changes to controversial provisions in their megabill in hopes of winning over more votes, according to a draft obtained by CNN.

The latest version of the president’s agenda package doubles the size of the rural hospital fund sought by centrists to $50 billion, which would be doled out between 2026 and 2030, two years earlier than initially planned.

The Senate’s original language would have created a $25 billion fund for rural health providers, which senators such as Collins and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said was inadequate. A leading hospital industry group also warned that the Medicaid cuts in the bill would have an impact on all Americans’ ability to access health care.

In another notable change to the Medicaid provisions, Republicans dropped a measure that would have penalized states that have expanded Medicaid and offer state-funded coverage to undocumented immigrants. Some 14 states plus the District of Columbia cover at least some undocumented residents through these initiatives. The original bill would have reduced the federal matching funds that expansion states receive from 90% to 80%.

The latest version also removes the ban on gender-affirming care in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The House-passed bill does not include a rural hospital fund, but it does contain the two Medicaid provisions on undocumented immigrants and gender-affirming care.

The Senate also tweaked the controversial provider tax measure, clarifying that it applies to such taxes levied by both states and local governments. However, the bill would still cap the level of taxes that expansion states or local governments in those states could impose on certain providers — namely, hospitals — at 3.5%, down from the current 6%. And it puts a moratorium on new provider taxes for all states and local governments.

“This makes it significantly better,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey told CNN in a phone interview, adding that he pushed hard for the change, which he said would dramatically help providers in his state. “It’s a very big deal for the hospitals.”

However, Medicaid policy experts caution that adding the local government language would not benefit hospitals.

“The technical language changes just clarify that the damaging provider tax restrictions in the bill apply to both states and local governments using these provider taxes to finance Medicaid. I don’t see how that’s a benefit to hospitals,” said Edwin Park, research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

All states except Alaska, and some local governments, levy at least one provider tax and use the revenue to boost provider rates, finance their Medicaid expansion and fund health-related initiatives, among other things. But some Republicans claim the provider tax is a scheme by states to get more federal matching funds.

The new version of the package also delays the requirement that states with high payment error rates start contributing to the cost of food stamp benefits. The original measure would make states with error rates of 6% or higher pick up between 5% and 15% of the tab. But the states with the largest error rates would get another year or two to implement the provision, said Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Ten states, including Alaska, have error rates that would qualify for the delay.

This provision benefits Murkowski, who also won changes in the work requirement for food stamps. Alaska, as well as Hawaii, got two other carveouts: One would allow these states to waive all work requirements based on high unemployment rates. For other states, the package limits such waivers. The other carveout would allow either state to request a temporary waiver for residents from the work requirement if the US Department of Agriculture secretary determines the state is making a “good faith” effort to implement the mandate.

But the amendment removed the two Medicaid provisions aimed at Alaska that the parliamentarian ruled did not meet with the rules of budget reconciliation, which Republicans are using to get the package through the Senate without any Democratic support.

Also, in the latest version of the bill, Republicans removed a last-minute excise tax on wind and solar projects that energy experts and business groups said would have been a potential “killer” to the renewable energy industry.

The tax would have increased the price of new wind and solar projects and significantly decreased the amount of clean energy put on the US electrical grid.

Possible turbulence ahead

Now, the narrowly divided House will need to pass the Senate’s exact version of the bill, though dozens of the chamber’s Republicans dislike it.

House GOP leaders have been privately telegraphing to the Senate for weeks that it should have simply adopted the House version — rather than largely rewritten it. Still, the House plans to vote Wednesday on the measure.

It’s a rapid turnaround for House lawmakers, who are scattered across the country for the holiday recess, but multiple GOP sources said they believed they could meet the president’s end-of-week deadline.

The House Rules Committee set the process in motion Tuesday afternoon, taking up the Senate’s version of the bill. The meeting could last hours.

Behind the scenes, some House Republicans are privately discussing whether to block the bill from coming to the floor at all, which they could achieve by voting down the so-called rule vote that comes before final passage in the House, according to two people familiar with the discussions. But it’s not yet clear whether they can withstand pressure from Johnson and Trump himself.

So far, multiple key House lawmakers are refusing to say how they’ll commit to the Senate bill. The House is expected to return Wednesday for a final vote, and Johnson believes he can land the votes, but it will take a ferocious whip effort — and likely help from the president.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Annie Grayer, Ella Nilsen, Arlette Saenz, Aileen Graef, David Wright and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.

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