WASHINGTON — Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., muscled a revised budget blueprint needed to advance President Donald Trump's agenda through the House on Thursday, beating back a conservative rebellion that had threatened to sink the measure just one day earlier.
The vote was 216-214, with just two Republicans — Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Victoria Spartz, R-Ind. — joining all Democrats in opposition. Trump had endorsed the budget plan, which the Senate adopted it last weekend on a narrow 51-48 vote.
Johnson had to abruptly scrap a vote on the budget plan Wednesday night after he and the conservative holdouts privately huddled for more than an hour off the House floor but failed to come to an agreement. The discussions continued that evening and into Thursday morning, when there appeared to be a breakthrough in the standoff.
Shortly before the vote, Johnson appeared alongside Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., at a rare joint news conference and projected confidence. Fiscal conservatives in the House, including several House Freedom Caucus leaders, had vowed to vote down the budget unless they got guarantees for deeper spending cuts.
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Johnson said leaders were "committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people" — a figure that seemed to win over many of the holdouts. The Senate-passed budget blueprint had called for a minimum of just $4 billion in spending cuts, which the conservatives scoffed at and led to the impasse.
"Our first big, beautiful reconciliation package here involves a number of commitments, and one of those is that we are committed to finding at least $1.5 trillion in savings for the American people while also preserving our essential programs," Johnson told reporters.
Thune, who hosted several of the House Republican holdouts in his office on Wednesday night, said the Senate is "aligned with the House in terms of what their budget resolution outlined in terms of savings."
"We have got to do something to get the country on a more sustainable fiscal path, and that entails us taking a hard scrub of our government figuring out where we can find those savings," Thune said. "The speaker's talked about one and a half trillion dollars. We have a lot of United States senators who believe that is a minimum, and we're certainly going to do everything we can to be as aggressive as possible to see that we are serious about the matter."
Thursday's successful vote in the House is just the first step in a lengthy "reconciliation" process to fulfill Trump's agenda to prevent a tax hike at the end of the year, and boost immigration enforcement and defense spending. The budget directs relevant House and Senate committees to begin working on the details of those efforts, while also identifying specific savings to pay for them.
It represents a major victory for Johnson, Thune and Trump just as lawmakers depart for a planned two-week Easter recess, where they will face many constituents furious about Trump and Elon Musk's sweeping DOGE cuts to federal agencies and rattled by the stock market gyrations and rising prices of goods amid the U.S. tariff battle.
