The US House of Representatives has passed a budget bill that includes trillions of dollars in cuts to both taxes and government spending, despite opposition from Democrats and Republican hard-liners.
The spending plan is a key plank in Donald Trump’s legislative agenda and he has called it a “big, beautiful bill”.
After the 216-214 vote on Thursday, Trump posted on social media: “Congratulations to the House on the passage of a Bill that sets the stage for one of the Greatest and Most Important Signings in the History of our Country.”
However the House bill has deeper spending cuts than the one passed by the Senate, and the two versions must be merged into one bill for Trump to sign into law.
The merger process is called “reconciliation” – and further legislation will be needed to enact the bigger tax cuts that Trump has asked for.
The House plan, currently a broad blueprint with many details still to be worked out, would cut taxes by about $5 trillion (£3.9 trillion).
Over the next decade, it would also add $5.7 trillion to the US government’s debt, according to Reuters. The Treasury reports that US debt currently stands at around $36 trillion.
The possibility of ballooning government debt led a number of Republican hard-liners to initially oppose the bill and demand deeper spending cuts.
Earlier in the week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Republican, had to push off a vote on the bill for fear that it would not pass in a chamber that is only narrowly controlled by his party.
On Thursday the Republican “no” votes had been whittled down to two: Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Victoria Spartz of Indiana.
The Senate version of the bill was passed on Saturday and calls for a minimum of $4bn (£3.1bn) in spending cuts – a fraction of the $1.5 trillion in cuts that the House has demanded.
Republican leaders in the Senate have described the $4bn figure as a minimum.
“We’ll certainly do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible,” said John Thune, the party’s leader in the chamber.
The scale of the spending cuts laid out in the bill would be many times greater than those already made under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency – which claims to have saved $150bn so far, although that figure has been disputed.
The budget measure will also slash the money coming into the US federal government. If it eventually passes, the bill will extend tax cuts that were passed during Trump’s first term in 2017.
President Trump has also asked for additional tax cuts on tips – to make good on a campaign promise to end income taxes on tips for service-industry workers – as well as on overtime wages and Social Security retirement benefits.
Those tax cuts, if passed, would further increase US government debt.
The White House has said that money collected through tariffs will help plug the gap, however that plan is far from certain as Trump’s tariff plans continue to evolve with changing rates and dates for taking effect. There is also the possibility that high tariffs may lead to lower imports and, in turn, fewer goods to tax.
In a statement after the House vote, the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said: “This vote is more than a budget win; it’s a statement of purpose and strength, which affirms the Trump administration’s commitment to delivering growth and opportunity.”
A rise in federal borrowing requires another vote by Congress to increase the debt ceiling. Although such measures have been contentious, Bessent said during a cabinet meeting on Thursday that he was confident that Congress would raise the ceiling again later this year.
However the leader of the House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries, called the budget bill a “disgrace” and criticised potential cuts to Medicaid, the US government program that funds health care for low-income Americans.
“House Democrats are going to aggressively push back every day, every week, every month, so we bury this reckless Republican budget resolution in the ground, never to rise again,” he told reporters.