Members of the House Freedom Caucus staked out strong opposition to the Senate-passed version of the “one big beautiful bill” of President Trump’s tax and spending priorities on Wednesday, threatening to derail the megabill unless the House made further changes.
All of them flipped their positions by the wee hours of Thursday, after hours of conversations with Trump and administration officials about how the bill would be implemented and other executive actions Trump could take. That flipping of votes ushered the bill to Trump’s desk without making any changes to the text.
But they are insisting that they did not fold.
“Six months ago, we were being told we’d be lucky to get $300 billion in savings,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), policy chair of the Freedom Caucus and perhaps the most vocal of the group’s members. “We kind of threw down, and we’re fiscal hawks, and we got $1.6 trillion in mandatory spending, which historic — has never happened.”
“I’ll put our effectiveness up against anyone if they want to match up scorecards,” Roy said.
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), the chairman of the caucus, had warned on Wednesday morning that members of his group and beyond would derail a procedural rule vote on the bill unless Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed to make more changes to the Senate version of the bill — particularly to bring it closer to the House budget framework that dictated dollar-for-dollar spending cuts to offset tax cuts above certain levels.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), another member of the group, had also said he would vote against the rule due to those concerns.
Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) in a post on X called the legislation a “broken bill,” accused leaders of “disregarding their promises,” and called his opposition “an issue of morality.”
They forced the House floor to stall for hours — and then they all allowed the vote to move forward, and supported the final bill.
Asked at what point Republican leadership would realize that the Freedom Caucus is always just bluffing, Norman said: “We’re not bluffing at all. We back up our votes. We get the best we can get, and we go as far as we can go. The reason we have credibility is because they know we will vote no.”
Members said that administration officials gave them assurances about how last-minute Senate changes would be implemented, such as provisions that softened the rollback of green energy incentives, and got projections of revenue growth that assuaged concerns about the bill’s deficit impact. Roy mentioned Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought planning pocket rescissions — withholding federal funds from being spent in certain ways. Members said Trump would issue more executive actions soon to address some of their concerns, but declined to tell reporters what those would be.
“We had made significant improvement overnight, came to some significant agreements with the administration over a variety of issues,” Harris said after the House vote on Thursday afternoon.
“The final package at the end of the night was very different from what we started with in the morning,” he added.
Even though none of the text changed?
“There were many aspects of executive actions and other things, how things were going to be implemented, that we came to significant agreements with, with the administration that changed the entire package — both inside and outside the bill — significantly,” Harris said.
Members of the Freedom Caucus and their allies are often called “hardline” conservatives, in reference to the strong stances they take and stated intention to wield every legislative tool they have to force leaders to accept more conservative outcomes. Its members in the past several years forced former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to go 15 ballots to earn the gavel as they negotiated concessions, and repeatedly sunk GOP procedural votes to protests policies or strategy.
But Thursday’s vote was far from the first time in the months-long process of passing and crafting the “one big beautiful bill” that members of the group agreed to drop their opposition and vote to push the legislation forward without securing changes in the actual text they were voting on. A similar scenario played out when they opposed the Senate-passed budget resolution in April.
Roy said that in addition to getting some comfort about how the bill would be implemented and putting trust in the Trump administration, part of the decision to accept the bill as-is was the risk of having to make concessions on parts of the bill that they liked if they forced the matter of changing the bill text.
And Roy argued that even if reports like this one highlight instances that the group came around to yes without getting tangible changes, GOP leaders and the Trump administration take the group seriously.
“Does anybody doubt our willingness to vote ‘no’ when we need to vote ‘no’?” Roy said.
Harris at the beginning of the year had forecasted that the Freedom Caucus would be closer to Trump than any other faction: “Pound for pound, or per capita, we are the strongest supporters of President Trump anywhere in Washington. This group is it.”
Asked if the Freedom Caucus members are still the president’s biggest champions, even after giving him so many headaches, Harris said: “No doubt about it, and I’m pretty sure he agrees.”
