Northwest Republicans could be decisive votes on megabill that would add over $3 trillion to U.S. debt

WASHINGTON – Consider this scenario: A couple takes time off work to go on vacation with their kids, choosing to earn less money and spend more for a while to have some fun.

At the end of the vacation, the parents decide they don’t want to go back to work and they’d rather keep eating out every day, telling themselves it’s OK because their spending hasn’t changed from the previous month. Of course, that doesn’t change the mathematical reality of spending more money than they earn, so they have to borrow money to fund their lavish lifestyle, leaving their kids to deal with the long-term consequences of that debt.

As Republicans in Congress have rushed to pass the massive tax-and-spending bill the House took up on Wednesday, they have used similar reasoning to argue that extending the tax cuts they passed during President Donald Trump’s first term in 2017 wouldn’t increase the federal deficit because it would simply keep the government on the same fiscal path. That hasn’t convinced many conservative economists, who deploy analogies like the one above to explain just how far Trump’s signature domestic policy bill strays from the party’s fiscally conservative roots.

“This bill continues to increase our level of debt and deficits,” said Bill Hoagland, who worked for nearly 25 years on the Senate Budget Committee’s Republican staff and for former Senate GOP Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee.

“Republicans in the past have talked about debt and deficits, but I don’t get the sense that they have the same concerns today,” said Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It’s not the Republican Party that I remember.”

Some House Republicans, however, were concerned enough about what’s in the bill that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was forced to keep a vote open for more than seven hours – the longest vote in congressional history – while he sought to win over the holdouts on Wednesday. Like in the Senate, where Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote after three GOP senators opposed the bill, Johnson could afford to lose no more than three of the 220 members of his conference.

Late Wednesday night, a handful of GOP holdouts blocked a procedural vote, casting doubt on the bill’s future.

As Republicans haggled in closed-door meetings and on the House floor on Wednesday, the holdouts included Rep. Russ Fulcher, a fiscal conservative who represents North Idaho, and Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, Washington, who met with Trump, Vance and other officials at the White House on Wednesday morning to discuss the bill’s impact on Medicaid and other health care programs.

On one side of the ledger, the sweeping legislation cuts taxes by about $4.5 trillion and increases spending – on the military, immigration enforcement and an array of smaller projects – by $300 billion, for a total cost of $4.8 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. On the other side, it would cut spending on Medicaid, food assistance and other programs by $1.4 trillion, resulting in a net cost of $3.4 trillion over a decade to be financed by adding to the national debt, which exceeds $36 trillion.

Fulcher and Newhouse voted for the bill when House Republicans passed it in May, sending it to the Senate, where GOP senators made changes that required another vote in the House. Other Republicans, including Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Spokane and Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho Falls, said they intended to vote for the bill again.

In a brief interview at the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon, Fulcher said he was “certainly not excited” that the Senate bill was more costly than the original House version.

“I would rather we stick around for a few days and grind it out and see if we can’t make some changes,” he said. “I think we’d be better off to keep the negotiations going back and forth, and see if we can’t put a little bit more fiscal responsibility into this.”

Fulcher said he was considering opposing a procedural vote to block a final vote on the bill, but when that procedural vote finally took place late Wednesday night, he voted in favor, though that vote remained ongoing as of press time.

Newhouse was part of a small group of GOP moderates who went to the White House on Wednesday morning to meet with Trump, Vance and Mehmet Oz, the former TV host who serves as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In a brief interview, the congressman said there’s “a tremendous number of good things” in the bill for his district – pointing to provisions related to agriculture, border security and taxes – but he was “looking very closely at the Medicaid issue.”

“That’s the one that has a tremendous amount of attention, at least from people in my circle,” Newhouse said outside his office, where phones were ringing off the hook with calls from constituents about the bill. “And I want to make sure that what we do is not going to negatively impact my district, particularly, and the state of Washington.”

About a quarter of Washingtonians are enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program, known as Apple Health. While proponents of the GOP bill claim it will cut roughly $1 trillion in projected Medicaid spending over 10 years by reducing fraud and requiring able-bodied adults to work to qualify for the health insurance program for low-income people, Democrats and other critics say it will force eligible patients to lose health care if they fail to navigate onerous new paperwork, akin to filing taxes each month.

Rep. Kim Schrier, a Democrat and physician whose district stretches from Wenatchee to the Seattle suburbs, said the legislation would undermine the nation’s health care system not only for the low-income, pregnant and disabled Americans who rely on Medicaid. By choosing to extend tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the very wealthy instead of extending subsidies for private health insurance plans that expire at the end of the year, she said, the Republican plan would raise health care costs and strain the nation’s hospitals.

“This bill is a massive wealth transfer from regular people, and people most in need, to billionaires who do not need any assistance,” Schrier said. “It is morally bankrupt, the policy is bad and it is going to hurt all of our constituents, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican.”

Asked about his meeting at the White House, Newhouse described it as “kind of a more listening than talking opportunity” but said he had “brought up the Medicaid stuff.” He didn’t say whether the meeting had assuaged his concerns but emphasized that Medicaid funding is on an unsustainable path and the program needs to be reformed.

“If you had some magic sauce to put into this stew that we’re making, that would be where we’d go,” he said, underlining how challenging the bill’s Medicaid provisions are. Asked how he would vote on the bill, he replied, “I’ll know when it’s time.”

The reality facing rank-and-file Republicans is that by putting nearly all of Trump’s domestic policy priorities into a single bill – using a process called budget reconciliation that lets a majority party bypass the filibuster rule, which normally requires support from the minority party in the Senate – leaders can force them to take a single, fateful vote for or against a president who dominates the party. Democrats used the same procedure to pass their own massive bills in 2021 and 2022.

Schrier, a moderate Democrat who often works across the aisle, said she estimates from her conversations with Republicans that about half of House GOP members are “thrilled” about the bill and the other half don’t like it but are afraid to anger Trump and his supporters.

“Right now, the January Sixers are in every one of our communities,” she said, referring to the people convicted of crimes related to the 2021 Capitol riot, whom Trump pardoned in one of his first acts when he returned to the presidency. “All Trump has to do is send out a dog whistle to his personal army out there, and I believe that they have a real reason to fear. We just saw a political assassination in this country.”

In June, a gunman killed Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and seriously wounded two others in what prosecutors allege were politically motivated attacks. Trump himself survived two attempts on his life in 2024, with a sniper’s bullet striking his ear during a rally in Pennsylvania.

Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Bellevue, put the dynamic in different terms, saying that “the Republicans have officially become a Donald Trump cult and they will not, in the end, go against him.”

“How many Republicans out there, for years, have screamed about the debt and the deficit? And now they’re going to vote for a bill to add $3.4 trillion to the debt and the deficit,” Smith said. “I wish I could say they’re going to stand up for their own principles. I see no evidence of that. They will cave to Trump because this is no longer a political party in any meaningful sense of the word.”

Some Republicans, including Baumgartner and Simpson, see the GOP bill as an important – if imperfect – part of enacting Trump’s campaign agenda, including making the 2017 tax cuts permanent along with several new, temporary tax cuts. In a brief interview, Baumgartner said he had sought the advice of the Republican chairmen of several committees, all of whom praised the bill.

While Baumgartner acknowledged that the bill adds to the deficit “on paper,” he concluded that “the bill is still a really great piece of legislation that grows our economy, secures the border and makes America safer.”

“It is not a silver bullet for the structural spending imbalance that America has,” he said. “I think groups like the American Enterprise Institute would say that the supply-side economics is important but not sufficient in this bill.”

Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow who studies tax policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the easiest way to understand the GOP bill is that “it is cutting taxes by much more than it is cutting spending, so the net effect is going to be an increase in borrowing.”

Pomerleau said dealing in “alternate realities” on fiscal policy is nothing new for Trump, who has repeatedly promised to balance the federal budget while his policies have done the opposite.

“I think it is, however, notable that this has been adopted by congressional Republicans in such in such a way,” he said. “That’s a little bit different than the early Trump years.”

Simpson, the Idaho Republican who leads a subcommittee responsible for federal spending, said he thinks the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the GOP bill’s impact on deficits “is kind of a phony number.”

“I agree with the president that growth in the economy is what’s going to address this,” he said. “You know the reason we have economists? They make astrology look respectable.”