House approves Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ bill by single vote, sending it to Senate

House Republicans narrowly approved US President Trump’s “big, beautiful” agenda bill, sending it to the Senate after a 48-hour scramble to get enough votes.

The Republican-led US House of Representatives voted Thursday to approve President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax relief and spending cuts mega-bill that critics warn would decimate health care while ballooning the debt.

The “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” — which now moves to the Senate — would usher into law Trump’s vision for a new “Golden Age,” led by efforts to shrink social safety net programs to pay for a 10-year extension of his 2017 tax cuts.

“Legislation of this magnitude is truly nation shaping and life changing,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson ahead of the largely party-line vote, which capped a marathon debate that went through the night.

“It’s the kind of transformational change that future generations will study one day. They’ll look back at this day as a turning point in American history.” The mammoth package passed along party lines — 215 votes to 214 — after Republican leadership quelled a rebellion on the party’s right flank that threatened its passage.

It is the centrepiece of Trump’s domestic policy agenda that could define his second term in the White House, and he took to social media to celebrate its success.

“’THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL’ has PASSED the House of Representatives!” Trump posted. “This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!” But the package had faced scepticism from Republican fiscal hawks who say the country is careening toward bankruptcy, with independent analysts warning it would increase the deficit by as much as $4 trillion over a decade.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted it would boost the incomes of the richest 10 per cent while making the bottom 10 per cent poorer, through hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to health care and food aid.

The White House Council of Economic Advisors has made hugely ambitious projections, well outside the mainstream consensus, that the package will spur growth of up to 5.2 per cent.

And Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the bill “does not add to the deficit,” and would actually save $1.6 trillion through spending cuts.

But investors were unconvinced as the yield on the 10-year US Treasury note surged to its highest level since February on Wednesday, amid worries over the budget-busting bill’s bottom line adding to the $36 trillion US debt burden.

Democrats called the bill “devastating” for the middle class, pointing to CBO estimates that its cuts to public health insurance for low-income Americans would deprive 8.6 million people of coverage.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the bill “the largest cut to health care in American history … in order to enact the largest tax breaks for billionaires in American history.”

Mr Trump has seen his polling numbers plummet in his early months back in office, but success in the House for his signature legislation underlined his continued sway over the party’s quarrelsome and deeply polarised politicians.

The president had pressured the party to back the controversial package in a rare Capitol Hill visit Tuesday after it hit a series of roadblocks pitting conservative fiscal hawks against moderate coastal Republicans.

Originally published as House approves Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ bill by single vote, sending it to Senate