The House Just Passed Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" — Here's What Happens Next

Hot Topic
🔥 Full coverage and conversation on Politics

WASHINGTON ― Republicans pushed their giant bill cutting taxes and Medicaid through the House on Thursday, sending the legislation to President Donald Trump to sign into law.

Millions of Americans will lose health insurance as a result of the bill, while tax cuts favoring the wealthy will further swell the national debt. The bill will also supercharge Trump’s efforts to round up, detain, and deport millions of immigrants lacking legal authorization to remain in the country.

The bill passed by a vote of 218-214, with all Democrats and two Republicans, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), opposed.

“Republicans in Congress have succeeded in our mission to enact President Trump’s America First agenda,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a statement after the bill passed. “And importantly, we did it in record time, so that the effects of this nation-shaping legislation can be felt by the American people as soon as possible.”

Hot Topic
Let's chat about all things Politics
See our Politics Discussions

With its advantageous tax treatment for rich households, its fiscal irresponsibility, and a remarkably slapdash legislative process, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill bears the hallmarks of Republican governance in the Trump era. And, of course, several Republicans said they’d vote no but caved amid threats from Trump.

The big bill rolls back expansions of the federal safety net recently enacted by Democratic presidents and entrenches the temporary tax cuts Trump signed into law during his first term. The $4.5 trillion cost of the tax cuts is only partially offset by more than $1 trillion in cuts to federal food and health programs, with reductions in Medicaid spending potentially imperiling hospitals around the country, especially in rural areas.

“This is about taking from the most vulnerable to pay off the already powerful,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said on the House floor before the vote on Wednesday. “It is about pleasing one man who is holding this Congress hostage with primary threats and social media tantrums. This bill is cruel, it is cowardly, it is a betrayal of everything this country is supposed to stand for.”

After warning for years that widening federal budget deficits and the growing national debt could destroy America, Republicans have just given their blessing to an extra $3.4 trillion in debt, at least. Citing fantastical economic growth forecasts, they’ve said the budget experts are all wrong and the tax cuts will pay for themselves. They claimed that failing to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts before they expire at the end of the year posed a major threat to the economy.

“If we do nothing, the Trump tax cuts, the most pro-growth tax reforms in generations, will expire. That means higher taxes on nearly every American,” Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) said Wednesday.

Though the tax cuts wouldn’t expire for another six months, Republicans gave themselves an arbitrary July 4 deadline for finishing the bill, and the House stayed in session all night to get the bill done. It wasn’t pretty.

For about six hours, five Republicans ground all business to a halt by voting against a procedural step to begin debate on the bill. Another eight Republicans refused to cast votes at all. They were protesting changes made to the bill by the Senate, which added about a trillion dollars to the original House bill’s cost. All but one of them, Fitzpatrick, relented just before 3:30 a.m., having won no changes to the bill. 

“Don’t ever lecture us about fiscal responsibility,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) said in a record-setting, nearly nine-hour floor speech before the final vote.

Jeffries said the bill amounted to an assault on health care and would “effectively end Medicaid as we know it.”

Several moderate Republicans said they had qualms about the bill’s Medicaid cuts, but Fitzpatrick was the only one who followed through. For one, Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.), who said Saturday, “I will vote no,” voted yes. 

Johnson and other top Republicans insisted the bill does not cut Medicaid, that it merely reduces “waste, fraud and abuse,” in patently untrue statements.

The biggest Medicaid cut comes in the form of new “work requirements” targeting nondisabled adults, who will have to prove to state Medicaid administrators they’re either working, volunteering, or in training at least 20 hours per week. Despite the idea that the requirement would prod people into jobs, the Congressional Budget Office said it’s unlikely they’ll land the kind of employment that comes with health insurance.

“Few of those disenrolled from Medicaid because of the policy would have access to and enroll in employment-based coverage,” the CBO told lawmakers earlier this month. 

The bill would roll back future spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, including by requiring states that make high rates of erroneous SNAP payments to share a portion of the cost of the food benefits, creating a strong incentive for states to trim SNAP enrollment. But as Senate Republicans rushed to lock down votes, they changed the provision to exempt states with high error rates, such as Alaska, to win over Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). The resulting provision creates a perverse incentive for states to make even more improper SNAP payments. 

The Medicaid changes will mostly take effect starting in fiscal year 2027, but immigration authorities will immediately get $150 billion for Trump’s mass deportation agenda, including $45 billion for new detention centers and $29 billion for new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The money for detention centers alone is more than five times the annual budget of the US Bureau of Prisons. The cash infusion comes as Trump openly muses about deporting native-born US citizens.

“We are talking about ICE being turned into a full-scale paramilitary force,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told HuffPost. “This is absolutely something that we should be taking as a profound threat to our society and to American citizens.”

In a remarkable social media post on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance stated that the vast majority of the 900-page bill’s various policy changes, which affect vast resources and the nation’s fiscal future, are meaningless in comparison to mass deportation. Vance wrote, “Everything else ― the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy ― is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.