Budget Committee advances reconciliation bill 17-16 on second try

The House Budget Committee met on Friday, May 16, 2025, for a markup to combine reconciliation legislation from 11 House committees into a single package under H. Con. Res. 14. Under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the Budget Committee can't rewrite the underlying bills. It stitches them together and votes to report the combined package to the full House. Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington (R-TX) opened the markup calling it a historic step toward enacting President Trump's agenda.

The vote on May 16 failed 21-16. Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Ralph Norman (R-SC), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), and Josh Brecheen (R-OK) joined all 16 Democrats to sink the bill. Their core complaint: 📖Medicaid 📖work requirements wouldn't take effect until 2029, years away, and they wanted the green energy tax credit phaseouts accelerated.

After the May 16 failure, Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republican leadership spent the weekend negotiating with the four holdouts. The Budget Committee's vote was technically ceremonial. It can't amend the underlying bill. But that procedural constraint gave the four conservatives maximum leverage: they could extract concessions from leadership without putting anything in writing in the legislation itself.

On Sunday evening, May 18, House Republicans called a second markup. The four holdouts voted present instead of no, and the committee advanced the bill 17-16, the bare minimum needed to move forward. Budget Committee Chair Arrington issued an after the vote.

The key concession was the 📖Medicaid work requirement start date. Under the original bill, able-bodied adults without dependents would have had to document 80 hours per month of work, job training, or community service to keep 📖Medicaid coverage, but not until 2029. Republican leaders committed to moving that start date to December 31, 2026, shaving roughly 2.5 years off the delay. Rep. Ralph Norman told reporters he was excited about the changes. Leadership also agreed to , another demand from the four conservatives.

The reconciliation package advanced by the Budget Committee included several major components. On taxes: the bill permanently extends individual income tax rates from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which were set to expire at end of 2025, and raises the SALT deduction cap from $10,000 to $40,000 for households earning under $500,000. On healthcare: the estimated approximately $800 billion in total 📖Medicaid reductions over 10 years, driven by 📖work requirements, provider tax restrictions, and changes to ACA expansion eligibility.

On nutrition: the House-passed bill included approximately $295 billion in 📖SNAP reductions, the largest 📖SNAP cut in the program's history, by extending 📖work requirements to adults 55-64 and shifting some benefit costs to states. On border and immigration: the bill allocated $46.6 billion for border wall construction.

The CBO released its of the House version on May 21, 2025, three days after the committee vote. CBO estimated the bill would add $2.4 trillion to deficits over 2025-2034, before accounting for debt service costs of $551 billion, bringing the total fiscal impact to approximately $3.0 trillion. CBO also projected that 13.7 million people would lose health insurance coverage under the bill's 📖Medicaid and ACA provisions.

The debt ceiling provision would raise the statutory ceiling by $4 trillion, enough, Treasury estimated, to cover federal borrowing needs through 2028.

The present vote is a specific parliamentary maneuver. Under House committee rules, a member voting present neither adds to the yes count nor to the no count. With 21 Republicans and 16 Democrats on the Budget Committee, a no from any Republican keeps the majority from reporting the bill. A present vote effectively removes that member from the calculation of whether the bill passes.

The four conservatives' shift from no to present changed the outcome from 16-21 (fail) to 17-16 (pass) without requiring them to cast an affirmative vote for a bill they still publicly criticized. Roy said afterward the bill lays the foundation for much needed tax relief and spending reductions, while acknowledging it didn't meet all his demands.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) condemned the bill's advance, saying Republicans were choosing billionaires over working families. Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-PA-2) called the bill a devastating attack on working families' health care. Democratic members offered multiple motions to recommit and to strip 📖Medicaid and 📖SNAP cuts, all of which failed on party-line votes. The 16 Democrats voted unanimously against the bill in both the May 16 and May 18 markups.

Progressive advocacy groups including the released same-day analyses warning that 📖Medicaid and 📖SNAP cuts would disproportionately harm rural communities, many in Republican-held districts, since rural hospitals and food banks depend heavily on 📖Medicaid reimbursements and 📖SNAP enrollment.

The reconciliation process is designed to bypass the Senate filibuster. Under reconciliation rules, the Senate needs only 51 votes rather than the 60 votes required to invoke cloture on regular legislation. That makes reconciliation one of the few tools a party with a narrow Senate majority can use to pass sweeping fiscal legislation over unified opposition. The tradeoff is the 📖Byrd Rule: provisions without a direct budgetary effect can be stripped by the Senate parliamentarian.

The Budget Committee vote sent H.R. 1 to the House Rules Committee, which incorporated the 📖Medicaid start-date and clean energy concessions the four holdouts had extracted. The full on May 22, 2025.

The 17-16 vote exposed the arithmetic reality of governing with a thin majority. Republicans held 220 seats in the 119th 📖Congress, giving leadership almost no margin for defections. Every conservative who threatened to vote no on the Budget Committee held real leverage. A second failed committee vote would have signaled the bill couldn't pass the floor.

After passing the full House and then the Senate (51-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote on July 1, 2025), President Trump signed the bill into law on July 4, 2025. The 📖Medicaid 📖work requirements, the specific concession that flipped the Budget Committee, took effect starting January 1, 2027, exactly as the four holdouts had demanded.