House committees began consideration Tuesday of the biggest pieces of the “one big, beautiful bill,” including sweeping tax cuts and reforms to low-income health care and food benefit programs.
With Republicans working behind closed doors to iron out their intraparty concerns about the bill, the public markups served mostly as a forum for Democrats to register objections.
Dozens of protesters also joined in on the action as the House Energy and Commerce Committee gathered to fine-tune legislation that includes Medicaid cuts.
The U.S. Capitol Police arrested 26 people for illegally demonstrating inside the Rayburn House Office Building, where the committee had begun a marathon markup of its portion of the sweeping tax and spending bill.
Many of the protesters expressed fears that the bill, which includes billions in cuts to Medicaid spending over the next decade, would strip away their health care coverage.
The Congressional Budget Office projects the committee’s portion of the GOP bill would save $912 billion over the next decade, and at least 8.6 million people would be booted from benefit rolls during that time.
Danny Saenz, an advocate with disability rights group Adapt of Texas who flew in from Austin, Texas, balked at the GOP’s claims that the Medicaid cuts are geared toward rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the program that is used by over 72 million Americans.
“It’s our lives,” he said.
Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie, Kentucky Republican, said his party’s priority is “strengthen and sustain Medicaid for those whom the program was intended to serve — expectant mothers, people with disabilities and the elderly.”
The GOP’s proposed Medicaid changes include requiring able-bodied adults to work at least 80 hours per month to stay enrolled; clawing back federal match money from states with undocumented migrants on the benefit rolls; preventing Medicaid funding from being used on “gender-affirming care”; and halting funding to Planned Parenthood.
Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the panel, said the bill had little to do with rooting out fraud and waste in the program and urged lawmakers to understand what the protesters were pushing against.
“The people feel very strongly because they know they’re losing their health care, and the cruelty that comes from the Republican proposal,” he said.
Republicans are using the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to pass sweeping tax and spending cuts and other party priorities, like border and defense funding and energy policy changes.
The Energy and Commerce Committee was tasked with finding at least $880 billion in spending cuts — the most out of any other House panel — to help pay for the tax cuts.
The tax portion of the bill is estimated to cost $3.8 trillion, falling under the ceiling provided to the Ways and Means Committee.
The exact amount of budget room leftover will depend on how much spending cuts Republicans achieve in other parts of the bill, but the committee should have at least $200 billion that could be used to pay for additional priorities. That could include a more generous federal deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, that blue-state Republicans are demanding in exchange for their support.
“There’s a little bit of wiggle room there to try to deliver additional priorities, but it’s very small wiggle room within that instruction,” said House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, Missouri Republican. “But we’ll get it done.”
Mr. Smith’s comments came at a brief press conference ahead of his panel’s markup of the tax bill that began Tuesday afternoon.
The committee’s product has won praise from Republicans because it makes President Trump’s first-term tax cuts permanent and delivers on his second-term pledges of no tax on tips and overtime income and provides breaks for seniors on Social Security.
But some Republicans remain opposed to the bill, including a handful of blue-state Republicans who want a more generous SALT deduction than the committee proposed.
The Ways and Means bill would triple the current $10,000 cap on the SALT deduction to $30,000 for most taxpayers, with reductions in the amount for anyone earning above $400,000.
A contingent of New York and California Republicans has said that’s not high enough to provide relief for their constituents who have faced disproportionate impacts from the SALT cap.
Mr. Smith said House Speaker Mike Johnson is leading negotiations with Republicans demanding a higher cap, among other issues that various GOP factions raised with select parts of the package.
“There is going to be bumps along the road throughout this process, but we’re going to get it done and we’re going to get agreement,” Mr. Smith said.
Republicans are running into issues on other parts of the bill, such as conservative hardliners demanding steeper spending cuts.
“We cannot continue down the path we’ve been going down — and we will need SIGNIFICANT additional changes to garner my support,” Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy wrote on X.
Mr. Roy and other conservatives have said Medicaid cannot be truly reformed without reducing federal spending on able-bodied adults who were enrolled in Medicaid through the Obamacare expansion.
They sought to reduce the 90% federal contribution to states that expanded Medicaid to better match the federal-state cost-sharing formulas used for the base Medicaid population. But Moderate Republicans balked at changing the cost-sharing arrangement.
