The House Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, muscled through a multitrillion-dollar budget framework that paves the way for Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, a day after a rightwing rebellion threatened to sink it.
The resolution passed in a 216-214 vote, with just two Republicans – fiscal conservatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana – joining all Democrats in opposition.
“I told you not to doubt us,” Johnson said of the vote – another major victory for the speaker as Congress prepares to depart Washington for a two-week Easter recess, during which Republicans are expected to again face constituents furious over the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal agencies and unnerved by the president’s escalating trade war.
Johnson had abruptly pulled a planned vote on the resolution on Wednesday, after failing to reach an agreement with a band of holdouts who continued to resist Trump’s pressure to “close your eyes and get there”. By Thursday morning, their opposition had melted.
In a rare joint press conference shortly before the vote, Johnson and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, sought to placate conservatives who vowed to oppose the plan unless they extracted guarantees for deeper spending cuts.
Senate Republicans narrowly approved the resolution on Saturday over the strong objections of Democrats and two notable Republican dissenters. The measure calls for a minimum of $4bn in spending cuts, which is far less than a previous version passed by the House that mandated $1.5tn in cuts.
On Thursday, the Republican leaders both committed to slashing $1.5tn in federal spending. Democrats have accused Republicans of laying the groundwork to make major cuts to popular safety net programs in order to pay to offset the cost of extending Trump’s signature tax cuts that they say disproportionately benefit the rich.
“I can tell you that many of us are going to aim much higher and find those savings because we believe they are there,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill, referring to their deficit-reduction targets. “We want to make government more efficient, effective and leaner for the American people.”
The speaker insisted that it was possible to achieve the savings without major cuts to “essential programs” such as Medicaid. But budget experts and Democrats say the scale of the GOP’s cost-cutting goals makes it nearly impossible to achieve without significant reductions to critical programs and services.
Thune, who had helped Johnson to persuade House Republican holdouts on Wednesday night, said the Senate was “aligned with the House in terms of what their budget resolution outlined in terms of savings”.
“The speaker’s talked about one and a half trillion dollars. We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum, and we’re certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter,” he said.
Approval by both chambers unlocks a special budget process that will allow Republicans to bypass the Senate filibuster, and approve Trump’s sweeping tax cut and border enforcement package without Democratic votes.
But passing the blueprint – rocky as it was – was the comparatively easy part. Now Republicans in both chambers need to come together to actually write the legislation and lay out the spending cuts they have promised to pay for the plan. Nonpartisan analysts have found that the Republican plan could add up to $5.8tn to the federal deficit over the next decade.
Speaking ahead of the vote, Hakeem Jeffries warned of the “catastrophic consequences” of the Republican blueprint to slash federal spending, as Trump’s trade war rattles the global economy and his administration continued its dramatic downsize of the federal workforce.
“President Trump and House Republicans told us that you were going to deliver the ‘Golden Age of America’. But over the last several months, we haven’t witnessed the golden age of America,” the House Democratic leader said. “We witnessed a rotten age. You are crashing the economy in real time, driving us toward a Republican recession that’s going to hurt children, hurt families, hurt seniors, hurt everyday Americans, hurt veterans and hurt people across the land.”
The Democratic leader repeated his challenge to Johnson to debate the GOP budget plan on the floor of the House chamber.
Trump celebrated the House vote in a social media post on Thursday, claiming that it “sets the stage for one of the Greatest and Most Important Signings in the History of our Country. Among many other things, it will be the Largest Tax and Regulation Cuts ever even contemplated. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
