House GOP leaders release changes to Trump agenda bill in bid to sway holdouts
WASHINGTON — Republicans released a package of revisions to their massive party-line bill for President Donald Trump’s agenda Wednesday night, with the hope of quickly bringing it to the House floor and passing it.
The 42-page amendment to the multitrillion-dollar legislation includes moving up the enforcement of work requirements for eligible Medicaid recipients by two years to the end of 2026, phasing out clean energy tax credits earlier and expanding the federal deduction for state and local taxes to $40,000 for individuals earning less than $500,000 annually.
The changes were a product of last-minute negotiations to placate various factions of the party, including conservative hard-liners and blue-state Republicans, that were threatening to sink the bill.
The House Rules Committee is debating the legislation as part of a marathon hearing and is expected to vote in the coming hours to send it to the full chamber, where Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is navigating a narrow three-seat majority.
Here are some of the biggest changes GOP leaders made to Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Medicaid changes
In a win for conservative hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus, the agreement speeds up the timeline when work requirements kick in for able-bodied adults, from age 18 to 64, to be able to receive Medicaid.
The original legislation, adopted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called for work requirements to start at the beginning of 2029. But anti-spending hawks, led by Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris, R-Md., pushed to have them begin “not later than Dec. 31, 2026,” so savings take effect sooner.
The new language in the bill also allows states to move the date to earlier if they choose to do so.
Shifting the start date sooner means millions of Americans could lose Medicaid benefits before the 2028 presidential election, and some could possibly lose them before the 2026 midterm election. That could be a political liability for Republicans up and down the ballot, though Trump and congressional GOP leaders say they are simply rooting out “fraud, waste and abuse.”
In another significant shift, states that declined the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act will get higher payments as an incentive to encourage them not to expand the program.
Clean energy credits
The Freedom Caucus notched another victory in their 11th-hour negotiations: more quickly phasing out clean energy tax breaks from former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The measure cuts off production and investment tax credits for any facility if the construction begins 60 days after the enactment of the bill, or after 2028.
The revised bill also unwinds credits for wind and solar leasing arrangements for properties.
“We worked with the White House to get some important revisions to expedite the phase out,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told reporters. “Look, President Trump doesn’t want these either, and so we worked with them to get really tight language to limit dramatically any new projects from starting.”
Boosting the SALT cap
Republicans who represent districts in high-tax blue states said their top priority in the package was raising the SALT cap, the amount federal taxpayers can deduct in state and local taxes.
The original legislation, passed out of the Ways and Means Committee, hiked the SALT cap to $30,000, up from the current $10,000 cap imposed in Trump’s 2017 tax cut law. But members of the SALT Caucus slammed that increase as insufficient.
The new bill boosts the SALT cap would be boosted to $40,000 for individuals making less than $500,000 a year. Both the cap and the income level would increase by 1% annually for 10 years.
“This is the No. 1 federal issue for my constituents. If I do a bad deal, I would expect my constituents to throw me out. If I did a deal at $30,000, my own mother wouldn’t vote for me,” Rep. Nick LaLota, R-N.Y., said this week in the middle of the negotiations.
“Now is the time to make it right what we got wrong in 2017; now is the time to deliver on promises that we’ve made,” he added.
‘MAGA Accounts’ renamed to ‘Trump Accounts’
In a more trivial change to the bill, Republicans are renaming their tax-preferred savings accounts that parents can set up for children from “MAGA Accounts” to “Trump Accounts.”
The first line of the manager’s amendment reads, “Page 10, in the item relating to section 110115, strike ‘MAGA’ and insert ‘Trump’.”