The conservative House Freedom Caucus is demanding House GOP leaders delay plans to vote on President Donald Trump’s ‘one big, beautiful bill’ this week.
The group of GOP rebels is joining House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for a meeting at the White House later on Wednesday in an apparent bid to hash out differences on the massive piece of legislation, Fox News was told.
‘I don’t think it can be done today. I mean, the runway is short today,’ House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., told reporters in a press conference on Wednesday.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., said the group accepted an ‘offer’ from the White House on Tuesday night. He suggested the offer was not yet included in the broad-based bill that Republicans are hoping to pass via the budget reconciliation process this year.
‘We need to continue to work at that. We as members are at the table. We don’t want the deal to be ended,’ Perry said.
A House Freedom Caucus source told Fox News Digital that the speaker was still ‘digesting’ the agreement, though lawmakers at the press conference declined to say what the deal was, but a White House official pushed back in a statement to Fox News Radio.
‘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. ‘There was no deal. The HFC will meet with the president at 3pm to hopefully strike one.’
A House GOP leadership aide also told Fox News Digital that the White House only provided the Freedom Caucus with policy options rather than a deal.
Johnson had told reporters this week that the bill could see a chamber-wide vote as early as Wednesday. However, Harris said, ‘I’m not sure this can be done this week. I’m pretty confident it could be done in 10 days. But that’s up to leadership to decide.’
House conservatives have been pushing for the bill to include more aggressive cuts to Medicaid – specifically the expanded population who became eligible under the Affordable Care Act – and a full repeal of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and its green energy subsidies.
Allies of Johnson and other House GOP leaders have accused the GOP rebels of ‘moving the goal posts’ from their initial demands of needing at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts to offset the cost of new spending in the bill.
However, Harris challenged that notion during the press conference.
‘We’re saying work within the goalposts, rearrange it within the goalposts in accordance with what the president wants – end waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid, which is wasting dollars that should be spent on the truly vulnerable, and then end as much of the green new scam as possible,’ Harris said.
Earlier this morning, two key critics of the bill told Fox News Digital that negotiations between the House Freedom Caucus and House GOP leaders had regressed.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said talks went ‘massively south’ but declined to go into detail. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., similarly said in a text message to Fox News Digital, ‘THINGS ARE NOT GOING WELL!!’
There are several outstanding issues with the bill that have not yet been resolved – blue state Republicans pushing for a raise in state and local tax (SALT) deduction caps, and conservatives demanding stricter work requirement rules for Medicaid as well as a full repeal of green energy subsidies in the IRA.
Conservatives have been wary of the New York and California GOP lawmakers’ push, however.
The House Rules Committee, the final gatekeeper before most legislation sees a House-wide vote, has been debating the bill since 1 a.m. Wednesday. The debate is expected to go through the better part of the day.
Critically, Norman and Roy are members of the rules panel – but even if they both voted against it in committee, the numbers are still on Republicans’ side to advance it.
The House of Representatives, where Republicans can lose just three votes to pass anything along party lines, is another story.
Republicans are working to pass Trump’s policies on tax, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt all in one massive bill via the budget reconciliation process.
Budget reconciliation lowers the Senate’s threshold for passage from 60 votes to 51, thereby allowing the party in power to skirt the minority — in this case, Democrats — to pass sweeping pieces of legislation, provided they deal with the federal budget, taxation or the national debt.
House Republicans are hoping to advance Trump’s bill through the House and Senate by the Fourth of July.
