Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday was forced to delay a vote on the Republican budget blueprint to unlock President Trump’s domestic agenda, after conservatives balked at a plan that they said would add too much to the nation’s debt.
In a dramatic scene on Capitol Hill that laid bare Republican divisions, Mr. Johnson huddled with the holdouts in a room off the House floor for over an hour before the vote was scheduled to begin, grinding activity in the chamber to a halt as the measure’s fate hung in the balance.
It has been a tried-and-true tactic for Mr. Johnson, who has previously succeeded at wearing down conservative opposition on the House floor by essentially daring would-be defectors to derail planned votes on Mr. Trump’s priorities.
But Wednesday night was a rare instance in which the hard-right Republicans refused to blink — at least for now — and it dealt the speaker, who had confidently predicted he would have the votes to push the measure through, a bruising setback.
Mr. Johnson emerged from the closed-door meeting on Wednesday night and told reporters the House would vote on the measure “probably tomorrow, one way or the other.”
There were still “a small subset of members who weren’t totally satisfied” with the bill, he said. Those lawmakers, who continued to huddle privately after Mr. Johnson delayed the vote, said they were seeking more assurances that the Senate would ultimately come up with deeper spending cuts than the resolution required.
Mr. Johnson said he had stepped off the House floor to update Mr. Trump on the situation, but that the president had not spoken to individual members.
“He wants us to do this right and do it well, and sometimes it takes a little bit more time to do that,” he said.
Still, Mr. Trump had lobbied hard for the measure, hosting some of the holdouts at the White House on Tuesday and assuring them that the final budget legislation would contain far deeper spending cuts at levels they could support. He repeatedly pressed them to back it.
On Wednesday, he declared on social media that “it is more important now, than ever, that we pass THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL.”
But as of Wednesday night, his entreaties had failed to sway a small but persistent band of ultraconservative Republicans who view the issue of reining in the nation’s debt and federal spending as their most important priority, and who insisted that the legislation Mr. Trump endorsed did not require steep enough cuts.
“You cannot have a one-way ratchet on tax cuts and ignore the spending side of the ledger,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas said. “And my colleagues in the Senate, for sure, and some in the House on this side of the aisle, want precisely that. The Senate budget is all tax cuts and no spending cuts. Now we’re told, ‘Trust us, there’s a promise.’”
The holdouts had also met with Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, about an hour before the vote was scheduled to begin. Some had sounded briefly optimistic as they emerged from his office.
“I’ve been in this business long enough to know that your word is your bond in this business,” Representative Andy Harris of Maryland, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said. “So if someone looks me in the eye and they have a pretty good reputation, I usually trust him.”
But the hour of negotiations did not yield a breakthrough, leaving the measure still short of the votes Republicans needed to push it through.
In order to move along the reconciliation process, which Republicans plan to use to push their spending and tax legislation through Congress strictly along party lines, the House and the Senate must adopt the same budget resolution.
The plan the Senate passed over the weekend directed committees in that chamber to find about $4 billion in spending cuts over a decade. That is a tiny fraction of the $2 trillion in spending cuts that the House has approved, and conservatives there fear that if they agree to the Senate’s measure, they will ultimately be forced to accept far smaller spending cuts than they want.
They have also been skeptical of the Senate’s insistence that extending the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 would cost nothing, because such a move simply maintains the status quo. Senate Republicans adopted that approach so that they could extend the tax cuts indefinitely without appearing to balloon the deficit.
Representative Keith Self of Texas suggested in a lengthy statement that he did not believe that the Senate would approve larger spending cuts, and referred to opposition in that chamber to the Department of Government Efficiency.
“Should we trust the Senate?” Mr. Self wrote. “Who recently passed a bill to block Trump’s tariffs on Canada? With Republican senators who voted for an amendment that would reverse significant DOGE cuts?”
Others, like Representative Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania, suggested that lawmakers add language to the resolution that would guarantee that the Senate enact the kind of deep spending reductions that conservatives in the House were demanding.
“I think we could take a little bit of time and make sure we have the guardrails in place to achieve this responsibility that many of us want to see,” Mr. Smucker said.
But any alteration to the budget plan would require the Senate to approve it again, which is no certainty given the depth of the divisions among Republicans on the package. And with both chambers scheduled to begin a two-week break this weekend, G.O.P. leaders are in no mood to delay the progress of their biggest legislative priority.