The House on Thursday narrowly adopted a Republican budget blueprint for slashing taxes and government spending, after hard-line conservatives concerned that it would balloon the nation’s debt ended a revolt that had threatened to derail President Trump’s domestic agenda.
Approval of the plan, which was in doubt until nearly the very end, was a victory for Republican leaders and Mr. Trump. It allowed them to move forward with crafting major legislation to enact a huge tax cut, financed with deep reductions in spending on federal programs, and pushing it through Congress over Democratic opposition.
“President Trump’s promises will be fulfilled,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters just off the House floor shortly after the vote, “and we’re really excited that today we took a big step in getting that done.”
But approval came only after a mutiny on the House floor on Tuesday night that underscored the deep divisions Republicans still have to bridge in order to push through what Mr. Trump has called his “big, beautiful bill.” It forced Mr. Johnson to delay a planned vote on the measure after he spent more than an hour Wednesday night huddled with the holdouts, trying without success to persuade them to support it.
The vote on Thursday was 216 to 214, with two Republicans opposing the measure. All Democrats present voted against the plan, which they said would pave the way for cuts to Medicaid and other vital safety net programs that would harm Americans, all to pay for large tax cuts for the wealthiest.
“You target earned benefits and things that are important to the American people, like Medicaid,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said, addressing Republicans. “And what are you doing it for? What is it in service of? All to pass massive tax breaks for your billionaire donors like Elon Musk.”
The measure’s fate had been in doubt for days before the vote, as anti-spending House Republicans warned that the plan would add too much to the nation’s debt and defied Mr. Trump’s entreaties to fall in line behind it.
The plan the Senate passed over the weekend directed committees in that chamber to find about $4 billion in spending cuts over a decade. That is a fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that were approved by the House, and conservatives there feared that if they agreed to the Senate’s measure, they would ultimately be forced to accept far smaller spending cuts than they want.
In the end, even though the skeptics had complained that the resolution violated their core principles, they were loath to cross Mr. Trump and set back his top legislative priority just months after their party won a governing trifecta. A defeat would have dealt party leaders a significant rebuke and sent them back to the drawing board to find another way to push through their fiscal plan.
“There was a lot of concern about the length of time that would add,” Representative Lloyd K. Smucker, Republican of Pennsylvania, said about changing the resolution. “The speaker has been saying that it is critical that we move forward now to meet his deadline, and all of our deadline, on passing the final reconciliation bill.”
The holdouts relented despite having failed to force any modifications to the measure. They agreed to support it after Mr. Johnson and Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, said it was his conference’s “ambition” to find at least $1.5 trillion in cuts.
“We have got to do something to get the country on a more sustainable fiscal path,” Mr. Thune said at a news conference at the Capitol on Thursday morning with Mr. Johnson. “We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum,” he continued, referring to the $1.5 trillion target.
In the end, Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana were the only two Republicans to vote “no.”
“The big, beautiful bill cuts taxes while keeping spending on an increasingly unsustainable trajectory,” Mr. Massie said, explaining his vote.
It was the latest instance of House Republicans caving to Mr. Trump on a critical issue. But in the days before the vote, normally reliable Trump allies displayed a remarkable degree of resistance to passing a measure that would allow their party to get started on his agenda. After a meeting that Mr. Trump hosted at the White House on Tuesday failed to flip a critical number of holdouts, he began stepping up the public pressure on Republicans to back the blueprint.
“Close your eyes and get there; it’s a phenomenal bill,” Mr. Trump told lawmakers on Tuesday night at a fund-raising dinner in Washington. “Stop grandstanding.”
To move along the reconciliation process, which Republicans plan to use to push their budget and tax legislation through Congress strictly along party lines, the House and the Senate must adopt the same budget resolution.
But in addition to demanding more spending cuts than the Senate approved, conservatives in the House also were deeply skeptical of the Senate’s insistence that extending the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing, because doing so maintains the status quo. Senate Republicans adopted that approach so they could extend the tax cuts indefinitely without appearing to balloon the deficit.
The holdouts said they were reassured after receiving the pledge from Mr. Thune and Senate Republicans that their chamber would produce deeper spending cuts than those laid out in the text of the resolution.
Representative Chip Roy of Texas said in a lengthy statement that he had “reluctantly voted” for the measure only after receiving promises from Mr. Trump and party leaders that their budget legislation would include deep cuts to federal entitlement programs, including “a minimum of $1 trillion in real reductions in mandatory spending.” He said that Mr. Trump had committed to “fully repeal” President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act as part of the plan, and to implement reforms to Medicaid “addressing eligibility, waste, fraud, abuse and the disastrous money laundering schemes pervasive in the program.”
Mr. Roy also said that Mr. Johnson had “made a specific commitment to guarantee the House framework tying tax cuts to spending cuts.”
In the House, Republicans pledged that if they ultimately found less than $2 trillion in spending to eliminate, they would shrink their planned $4.5 trillion tax cut by the amount of the shortfall. For instance, if Republicans cut only $1.5 trillion in spending — the floor set in the budget outline — the tax cut could ultimately drop to $4 trillion.
How that is achieved in the Senate remains an open question. House Republicans have directed that a huge amount of savings come from the committee in charge of Medicaid. But a number of Senate Republicans have been publicly squeamish about supporting cuts to the program, teeing up a potential clash.
Michael Gold, Maya C. Miller, Robert Jimison and Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.
