House Republican leadership Wednesday night unveiled last-minute tweaks to President Trump’s tax cut and spending priorities bill, including increasing the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap and speeding up the implementation of new Medicaid work requirements.
The changes, made in legislation called a manager’s amendment, were revealed after late-stage negotiations with blue-state Republicans and hard-line conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus who had been withholding support for the legislation.
GOP leaders plan to bring the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to a floor vote as soon as it clears the House Rules Committee, either late Wednesday night or in the wee hours of Thursday morning.
Just before the text was unveiled, conservative holdouts emerged for a series of meetings signaling they were ready to support the bill, assuming the laundry list of demands they had negotiated with leadership was reflected in the amendment.
Included in the manager’s amendment is an increase to the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, which moderate Republicans from high-tax blue states had demanded. The text lays out a $40,000 deduction cap for individuals making $500,000 or less the same agreement moderate GOP lawmakers struck with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Tuesday night.
The initial version of the bill included a $30,000 deduction cap for individuals making $400,000 or less a proposal that SALT Republicans vocally rejected.
It also speeds up implementation of new Medicaid work requirements to “no later than December 31, 2026,” rather than Jan. 1, 2029 a change that hard-line conservatives were seeking.
The manager’s amendment does not, however, include some of the more aggressive Medicaid reforms that some Freedom Caucus members were calling for.
In lieu of those alterations, Trump is likely to sign a flurry of executive orders to address some of the matters requested by hard-liners that were left on the cutting-room floor. Johnson hinted at the gambit after a meeting at the White House on Wednesday.
“You will see how all of this is resolved, but I think we can resolve their concerns, and it’ll be probably some combination of work by the president in these areas as well as here in Congress,” the Speaker said. “There may be executive orders relating to some of these issues in the near future. And this is a commitment the president has made.”
Some of the changes are more about style than substance. It renames “MAGA accounts,” a pilot savings account program for children that would get an automatic $1,000 boost for every baby born between 2025 and 2028, as “Trump accounts.”
And other changes address lower-profile sticking points, such as eliminating plans to make cuts to federal employee retirements. The manager’s amendment strikes a provision to have employee pensions be calculated by an average of top five years of pay rather than the top three years, while changes revealed earlier in the week ditched a plan to require federal employees pay more into their federal retirement plans.
There are a number of changes to the energy and environment portions of the bill, as well.
It speeds up rollback of tax credits for climate-friendly energy sources handing a win to hard-liners who lamented that they were allowed to remain on the books for too long. The prior iteration phased out the credit for projects that began producing electricity after 2028, with partial credit available up until 2032.
Under the new version, there is no partial credit, and any projects that begin producing electricity after 2028 will not be eligible at all. To get the credit, projects will also need to begin n construction within 60 days of the bill’s enactment.
Republicans have also stripped a controversial provision added during the amendment process that would have allowed the sale of certain public lands in Utah and Nevada a rare victory for environmentalists, who have otherwise hammered the legislation.
Updated at 10:20 p.m. EDT
