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Donald Trump has cancelled a weekend trip to New Jersey in a last-gasp effort to persuade Congress to pass his landmark tax and spending bill by his looming July 4 deadline.
The president had been due to end the week at his Bedminster golf club but will instead remain in Washington to lobby Senate lawmakers to pass the so-called “big, beautiful bill”, according to a White House official.
“You could have a couple of grandstanders,” Trump told reporters on Friday, referring to Republican senators who have threatened to oppose the bill. “And it’s very dangerous because our country would go from being the most successful country in the world to who knows what happens.”
But the president appeared to acknowledge that his self-imposed deadline of next Friday, US Independence Day, could slip. “It’s not the end-all,” he said. “We can go longer, but we’d like to get it done by that time if possible.”
Trump’s fresh push to get the legislation through Congress comes as the bill faced an uphill slog in the Senate, especially from fiscal hawks concerned about its impact on US debt levels.
Senate majority leader John Thune plans to hold a vote as soon as Saturday, according to a person familiar with the plans.
The House of Representatives passed its own version of the legislation last month, but it must approve any changes made by the Senate for it to become law. Some House members have objected to alterations made by the upper chamber, further complicating its passage.
The bill, which is the president’s top legislative priority, would extend many of the tax cuts he introduced during his first term in 2017. But lawmakers have expressed unease that it would increase debt levels and slash funding for healthcare and welfare services.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has said the bill would swell budget deficit levels by $2.4bn over the next decade, pushing federal debt levels beyond their previous second world war high.
Trump made a conciliatory gesture to the holdouts on Friday, saying that the Republicans had “a lot of very committed people and they feel very strongly about a subject”. He praised one of them, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, as “a good guy”.
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Over the past week, the administration has made various efforts to get the bill over the line by the president’s deadline. Trump sought to tout its advantages to working Americans — including clauses aimed at scrapping taxes on tips and overtime pay — at a White House event on Thursday.
The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers released a report on Wednesday arguing that the legislation would not increase debt levels, in an attempt to win over those Senate fiscal hawks who have threatened to withhold support.
Republicans hold a majority of 53-47 in the US Senate and are hoping to pass the bill with a simple majority using a special process for tax and spending legislation. Most legislation requires 60 votes to pass the chamber.
Yet the bill ran into difficulty this week when the Senate parliamentarian, the official adviser to the upper chamber, ruled that elements of the proposed text — including many of the planned cuts to Medicaid, the government health insurance programme for people on low incomes — were prohibited under this mechanism.
