House GOP sprints toward finish line with Trump's agenda despite discontent in their ranks

House Republicans are nearly finished drafting President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” but months of simmering intraparty discontent could still boil over and ruin it.

Congressional Republicans have spent the entire year preparing to ram the president’s sweeping tax relief and spending cuts, border and defense funding, and energy policy changes through the House and Senate using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.

The House Ways and Means Committee wrapped up the fine-tuning of its tax package Wednesday morning after a nearly 17-hour markup, while the House Energy and Commerce and Agriculture committees were expected to finish their work Wednesday night.

They are on track to meet House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Memorial Day deadline to pass the package out of the House.

But hard-line Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus and moderate Republicans are threatening to vote against the final product. Their respective demands for changes to the Energy and Commerce panel’s healthcare policies and Ways and Means’ tax package are at odds with one another.

Republicans can’t afford to lose more than three votes, and there is enough anger on either side to blow through that cushion. However, Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, believed Republicans would see the light and coalesce around the final bill.

“When you have a bill this big, with this many pieces and this many components and this complex and comprehensive, virtually no one’s going to be 100% satisfied with every piece of the bill; it’s just not possible,” he said. “Everybody’s having to give a little, and they’re willing to do that because they know the stakes are so high.”

The lines in the sand that the disparate GOP factions have drawn aren’t new.

Freedom Caucus members are still upset about insufficient spending cuts. They claim the package is frontloaded with new spending, and the most significant spending cuts, like reforms to Medicaid, are enacted later on.

“I don’t want to see funding and gimmicks, and that’s what they did,” Rep. Eric Burlison, Missouri Republican, said. “They put together a big, huge package of funding gimmicks, and they said, ’But hey, we met the threshold.’”

GOP leaders promised conservatives the bill would include at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and be deficit-neutral after assuming $2.5 trillion in revenue would be generated from the package’s economic growth effects.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the package would cut spending by $1.6 trillion but increase debt by $3.3 trillion because of costly tax cuts and new spending on border security, defense and other policies. Subtracting projections for $2.5 trillion in revenues from economic growth leaves a $800 billion hole to plug to be deficit-neutral.

“I can’t support this in the current form,” said House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland. “It raises the deficit. I’ve said from the beginning, I can’t support a bill that raises the deficit.”

His main issues, echoed by fellow caucus members, are a four-year delay in work requirements for Medicaid and the lack of reduction to the 90% federal contribution to states that expanded Medicaid to able-bodied adults under Obamacare.

Meanwhile, Republicans from high-tax Democratic-run states such as New York, California and New Jersey are still demanding a larger increase in the cap on the federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes or SALT.

Months of negotiations yielded an offer to triple the SALT cap in the Ways and Means tax package, from $10,000 to $30,000, but most members of the SALT Caucus rejected the offering as insufficient tax relief for their constituents.

Raising the cap to $30,000 would primarily benefit high-income individuals, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

“We still are a ways apart,” Rep. Mike Lawler, New York Republican, said. “And you know, this is why this should have been dealt with months ago. We had been asking repeatedly for meetings, for conversations, for numbers, for information, and unfortunately, we’re not given it and basically presented with a take it or leave it.”

• Lindsey McPherson contributed to this story.