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Tight House Vote Passes Deep Cuts in Taxes and Aid
A VICTORY FOR TRUMP — Rougher Road Expected As Domestic Agenda Goes to Senate
Matt Davis
May 23, 2025
Morning! As usual, we’ll get started after the ads below. ⬇️
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Today’s lead story by Catie Edmondson, Maya C. Miller and Robert Jimison focuses on yesterday’s passage by the House of Representatives of President Trump’s domestic policy bill.
Passage came after overcoming significant resistance within Republican ranks, with the final vote at 215 to 214. The legislation primarily aims to implement substantial tax cuts, increase funding for the military and border security, and yada yada yada help the rich f__k the poor, as Jerry Seinfeld might say.
To offset some costs, the bill proposes cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education, and clean energy programs, raising concerns about increasing federal deficits and the country’s uninsured population.
Speaker Mike Johnson played a crucial role in rallying support for the bill, facing ideological divisions among Republicans. He managed to negotiate concessions to gain the backing of various factions, including speeding up work requirements for Medicaid and increasing the state and local tax deductions. In the end, only two Republicans voted against the bill, with other key holdouts folding under pressure.
“This bill is a debt bomb ticking,” Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) said on the House floor ahead of the vote.
Democrats uniformly opposed the bill, criticizing it for undermining essential government programs to benefit the wealthy with tax breaks. They are expected to leverage this vote in their political strategy leading up to the midterm elections, arguing that Republicans have chosen party loyalty over the needs of working and middle-class Americans.
The bill’s passage through the House is just the beginning. It will now face significant hurdles in the Senate, where different priorities and stricter rules could lead to substantial changes. Fiscal conservatives within the Senate are likely to push for further adjustments to control costs and deficits, while more moderate legislators will work to preserve Medicaid and clean energy initiatives.
Here’s Johnson announcing the bill’s passage:
“After a long week and a long night and countless hours of work over the past year, a lot of prayer and a lot of teamwork, my friends, it quite literally is morning in America,” Mr. Johnson said after 6 a.m. following an all-nighter of a debate on the House floor. “After four long years of President Biden’s failures, President Trump’s America First agenda is finally here, and we are advancing that today.”
Mr. Trump had pressed hard for the bill’s passage, visiting the Capitol on Tuesday to pitch Republicans on the legislation, then meeting with conservative holdouts on Wednesday at the White House, the story reports.
Earlier on Wednesday, White House officials put out a statement saying that failure to pass the bill would be “the ultimate betrayal.”
He's sounding more dictatorial by the day, huh?
According to an analysis requested by Democrats, the budget office found that the legislation would leave the poorest Americans worse off while providing a lift to the richest. In 2027, the bottom 10 percent would lose the equivalent of 2 percent of their income largely because of the reduced benefits, while the tax cuts would provide the top 10 percent with a 4 percent increase to their income.
Critics, including Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, warn that the repercussions of this vote may come back to haunt Republicans in the next election cycle.
“I think that when the story is told of the 119th Congress, when the votes are ultimately cast on that first Tuesday in November next year,” Mr. Jeffries said, “that this day may very well turn out to be the day that House Republicans lost control of the United States House of Representatives.”
That assumes, of course, that his party can rally any kind of coherent opposition narrative by then. You’d think it would be easy. But nope.
Good news, too, for us New Yorkers. In a nod to the blue-state Republicans in the conference, G.O.P. leaders also included a larger increase to the $10,000 limit on the state and local tax deduction, a key demand from a small group of lawmakers from New York, New Jersey and California.
The legislation would set the cap at $40,000, an increase from the $30,000 limit in the earlier draft of the legislation. The size of the deduction would shrink for people making more than $500,000 a year, rather than the $400,000 level included under the previous version of the bill.
Heather Cox Richardson highlighted the increase in immigration and customs enforcement this morning, saying the bill “highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people.”
The measure roughly doubles the current annual budgets of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in what Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes is “the single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States.” It increases ICE’s detention budget from $3.4 billion a year to $45 billion through September 2029, a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis that would permit ICE to detain at least 100,000 people at a time.
And Robert Reich has 10 questions about why the bill is so awful. Suffice to say, it is. Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to.
Say, is there a story that might cheer me up a bit?
Sure. Let’s read about the Indiana Pacers, shall we? I had a Reggie Miller jersey as a teenager but only because it was on sale at Footlocker and I couldn’t afford a Michael Jordan one. True story.
Have a great weekend.
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
Standard disclaimer: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”