House Passes Sprawling Domestic Policy Bill, Sending it to Trump's Desk

• The Republican-controlled House on Thursday passed a multitrillion-dollar package of tax cuts and spending, sending the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk after a tense 24 hours of negotiations and arm-twisting.
• The mostly party-line vote of 218-214 came one day ahead of Trump’s July 4 deadline and caps an arduous process that lasted more than four months, rife with ideological clashes and acrimony between the House and Senate, where Republicans had little margin for error given their narrow majorities.
• In the end, the GOP largely unified to pack the bulk of Trump’s domestic agenda into a single measure, with just Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., voted against it. A bloc of Republican holdouts had initially opposed a procedural vote Wednesday to advance the bill, leading to an hours-long overnight standoff. But Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., managed to sway all but one of them, teeing up final passage in the House.
• Trump is now expected to sign the bill into law on Independence Day, marking the party’s biggest legislative accomplishment since taking full control of Washington in January.
• The 887-page package, dubbed the "one big, beautiful bill," extends the tax cuts Trump enacted in 2017, while temporarily slashing taxes on tips and overtime pay. It approves hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending on the military and to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans. And it partially pays for all that with steep cuts to Medicaid, food aid benefits and clean energy funding. That includes an estimated US$930.0Bn in spending reductions under Medicaid, violating Trump's promise not to cut the program.
• Overall, the bill is projected to increase the national debt by US$3.3T over a decade, with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office finding that the revenue losses of US$4.5T outstrip the spending cuts of US$1.2T. The bill also increases the debt ceiling by US$5.0T.
• Every Democrat in both chambers voted against the bill, blasting it as a tax cut for the wealthy that is paid for by cutting programs like Medicaid that benefit the working class. They plan to place a heavy focus on the bill in their message to voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, emboldened by polls showing that the legislation is unpopular.

(Source: Reuters)