GOP Sen. Susan Collins said in a lengthy statement Tuesday that she voted against President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill “primarily” because of her concerns about Medicaid cuts.
“While I continue to support the tax relief I voted for in 2017, I could not support these Medicaid changes and other issues,” she wrote in a thread on X.
Collins was one of three Republicans to vote against the bill. She said a provision creating a fund to help rural hospitals was not “sufficient” to offset other Medicaid changes.
“I strongly support extending the tax relief for families and small businesses. My vote against this bill stems primarily from the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid, affecting low-income families and rural health care providers like our hospitals and nursing homes,” she wrote.
“This bill has additional problems,” she continued. “The tax credits that energy entrepreneurs have relied on should have been gradually phased out so as not to waste the work that has already been put into these innovative new projects and prevent them from being completed. The bill should have also retained incentives for Maine families who choose to install heat pumps and residential solar panels.”
“I am pleased that the bill contains a special fund that I proposed to provide some assistance to our rural hospitals, but it is not sufficient to offset the other changes in the Medicaid system.”
In his first reaction to the Senate’s passage of his domestic policy bill, President Donald Trump called it “music to my ears” while holding a roundtable discussion at a new migrant detention facility in Florida.
“Wow, music to my ears,” Trump said when a reporter broke the news to him.
“I was also wondering how we’re doing, because I know this is primetime, it shows that I care about you,” he added.
The president also commended Vice President JD Vance, who cast the tie-breaking vote.
“He’s doing a good job,” Trump said.
More on the Senate vote: The bill passed in a 51-50 vote, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky voting with Democrats against the measure.
The legislation now moves to the House, where it faces a high-stakes vote and House Speaker Mike Johnson has a razor-thin majority.
CNN’s David Wright and Aileen Graef contributed reporting to this post.
Just before Republicans narrowly passed President Donald Trump’s agenda bill, the typically mild-mannered Sen. Angus King of Maine shouted at his GOP colleagues on his way out of the Senate chamber.
“Shame on you guys. That was the most disgusting vote I’ve ever seen in my life,” King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said loudly enough that it could be overheard by reporters in the gallery above.
GOP senators nearby did not appear to react to him.
GOP leaders in the House reiterated their commitment to pass Trump’s agenda bill by July 4, saying in a statement after it passed the Senate that they planned to “consider the bill immediately for final passage and put it on President Trump’s desk by the Fourth of July.”
“The House will work quickly to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill that enacts President Trump’s full America First agenda by the Fourth of July. The American people gave us a clear mandate, and after four years of Democrat failure, we intend to deliver without delay,” said the statement from Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Whip Tom Emmer, and Chairwoman Lisa McClain.
“Republicans were elected to do exactly what this bill achieves: secure the border, make tax cuts permanent, unleash American energy dominance, restore peace through strength, cut wasteful spending, and return to a government that puts Americans first,” the statement said. “This bill is President Trump’s agenda, and we are making it law. House Republicans are ready to finish the job and put the One Big Beautiful Bill on President Trump’s desk in time for Independence Day.”
Senate Republicans narrowly approved President Donald Trump’s giant tax and spending cuts package today after a days-long grind to secure the support of key holdouts, leaving one major step to send it to his desk.
The vote was 50-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
Republican Sens. Rand Paul, Susan Collins and Thom Tillis voted “no” with Democrats on the legislation.
The multi-trillion-dollar bill would unlock tax cuts and funding boosts for national security, partly paid for by the biggest cut to the federal safety net in decades.
What’s next: The sweeping bill must now pass the House before heading to the president’s desk. Republican leaders are scrambling to meet Trump’s Fourth of July deadline.
This post has been updated with additional reporting on the vote.
As the Senate nears a vote on President Donald Trump’s megabilll, the president projected confidence while touring a new migrant detention facility in Florida.
“Did they take the vote yet?” Trump asked reporters.
“I would normally be home waiting for the vote,” Trump said, “but I wanted to come down.”
“I hear the vote’s going to be good. You’ll let me know,” he said.
In addition to striking an excise tax on wind and solar projects, the latest version of the Senate megabill proposes making other changes to the energy tax credits that are more favorable to wind and solar developers.
The bill would extend another year for wind and solar projects to start construction and makes reforms to language that would require clean energy developers to divorce their supply chains entirely from China. Solar and wind trade groups were concerned the China-related provisions kicked in too quickly in previous versions of the bill.
However, the bill would still significantly ramp down energy tax credits compared to the Biden-era clean energy law passed in 2022.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he hopes Republicans have the votes needed to pass President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill as they prepare for a final vote.
“Let’s hope so,” he answered when asked if he had the votes as he walked to the Senate floor.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a key holdout, emerged from Thune’s office moments before and headed to the floor without answering how she plans to vote on the bill.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, who has been involved in negotiations with Murkowski, had also been in Thune’s office.
Senators are expected to cast four votes in the vote series happening now, with the final vote on the President Donald Trump’s agenda in full, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The first will be on an amendment brought by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Two amendments that update the bill text — known as a “perfecting” and “substitute” amendments — will follow, and then lawmakers will vote on final passage of the bill.
Republicans have removed a last-minute excise tax on wind and solar projects from the latest version of President Donald Trump’s agenda bill that energy experts and business groups said would have been a potential “killer” to the renewable energy industry.
The tax would have increased the price of new wind and solar projects and significantly decreased the amount of clean energy put on the US electrical grid.
CNN obtained a draft of the latest proposed bill text.
Senate GOP leaders have doubled the size of the rural hospital fund sought by centrists like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine in the latest version of President Donald Trump’s agenda, according to a draft obtained by CNN.
The fund now includes $50 billion, which would be doled out between 2026 and 2030 — going into effect two years earlier than initially expected.
The Senate’s original language would have created a $25 billion fund, which senators like Collins and Josh Hawley of Missouri said was inadequate.
If the Senate passes its version of President Donald Trump’s agenda today, the House is expected to vote tomorrow, according to a GOP leadership source familiar with the plans.
It’s a rapid turnaround for House lawmakers, who are currently scattered across the country for the holiday recess, but multiple GOP sources said they believed they could get it done in the House this week as well.
Both Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson have been working furiously to deliver Trump his first major legislative win this week, so the president can sign it in a special ceremony on the Fourth of July.
After hours of stalemate, Senate GOP leaders are now pushing toward their final set of votes in hopes of passing President Donald Trump’s agenda out of the chamber in the next few hours.
Asked if GOP leaders had a deal to move ahead, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters, “I believe we do.” He added: “I’m of Scandinavian heritage. Always a bit of a realist. So we’ll see what happens.”
Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota told reporters that the first vote could start in the next 15 minutes, and they expect four votes, including final passage.
“There will be one amendment vote, and then there will be three votes that actually go to adopting the substitute and passage,” Hoeven said.
Hoeven said Vice President JD Vance is expected to cast a tie-break vote in his capacity as president of the Senate on several of those provisions, including the massive package of negotiated changes from Senate GOP leadership known as the “substitute” amendment.
“We’ll need him on the actual substitute bill,” Hoeven said of Vance.
The burst of movement from the Senate GOP comes after 24 hours of intense negotiating between Thune, Vance and the GOP holdouts, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
GOP Sen. Susan Collins said she continues to have “serious reservations” about President Donald Trump’s policy bill and is waiting to see the “direction” that the legislation takes after a record-long vote-a-rama before announcing whether she’ll vote to pass it.
“I think the push is still to get it done today, but as I’ve said from the beginning, I have a lot of serious reservations about the bill,” she told reporters Tuesday morning.
“I’m going to wait till we’re done, know what direction we’re going in before announcing my decision,” she continued.
Collins, who has expressed concern with potential Medicaid cuts in the bill, offered an amendment overnight aimed at raising more money for rural health care providers, but it failed to advance. She told reporters at the time that her amendment’s failure to advance “has absolutely no impact” on her final vote on the package.
The Maine Republican told reporters she had canceled her third scheduled flight home and was “trying to rework” her schedule as the vote-a-rama drags on.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso told reporters he believed the Senate would vote this morning on President Donald Trump’s agenda bill, after emerging from a closed-door meeting with key holdout Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
When asked if the Senate planned to vote to pass the bill this morning after a marathon vote session that just passed the 24-hour mark, Barrasso said “yes,” offering the first glimpse of clarity from GOP leadership in more than a day.
Murkowski declined to comment to reporters about whether they’d made progress in negotiating her support, but she signaled that a deal could be close.
Asked if the vote was in the hands of the Senate parliamentarian, Murkowski replied:
“It’s in the hands of the people that operate the copy machine.”
President Donald Trump is expected to visit “Alligator Alcatraz,” an immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, but he plans to return to Washington, DC, this afternoon as senators continue their marathon voting session on the president’s megabill.
Ahead of his departure from the White House, Trump said he was excited to visit the immigration detention center and noted that he worked “very hard” with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, his former rival, to make it happen.
The president later underscored how placing undocumented immigrants in a swamp surrounded by predators was a security tactic.
“This is not a nice business,” he said. “You know, the snakes are fast, but alligators,” the president added.
Trump and DeSantis are expected to tour the compound, built on a remote airstrip surrounded by swamp and predators. In the latest display of his support for a signature Trump priority, DeSantis used emergency powers to seize the land and fast-track construction with encouragement from the Trump administration.
Immigration section in Trump bill: The domestic policy megabill being considered by the Senate today includes a massive amount of funding for Trump’s immigration agenda, allocating tens of billions of dollars toward border barriers and detention facilities and increasing the costs associated with legal immigration.
The Senate version of the bill allocates $46.5 billion toward the construction, installation and maintenance of border barriers and $45 billion toward facilities that detain immigrants over the next four years. That would make Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency and far surpass its previous budgets.
CNN’s Michael Williams, Priscilla Alvarez and Steve Contorno and Kit Maher contributed to this report.
The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that a food stamps-related carveout meant to win over GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski can remain in President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill, while another Medicaid provision is not compliant with Senate budget rules, according to a Democratic source familiar with the ruling.
CNN reported over the weekend that the parliamentarian had ruled against carve outs on Medicaid spending, which were tailored specifically to Alaska and Hawaii.
Republican leaders continued to work through the provisions as they looked to lockdown Murkowski’s support, which could be critical to passing the bill.
But the parliamentarian ruled a provision meant to change federal cost sharing for Medicaid to benefit states like Alaska and Hawaii was not compliant with Senate rules.
However, she also ruled another provision that would shield Alaska and Hawaii from having to shoulder food stamp benefit costs complies with chamber budget rules.
Remember: Senators can continue to change provisions and work through the bill, though it would add even more time to what has already been an almost 24-hour amendment process, before voting to advance Trump’s bill out of the Senate and over to the House.
Senators will not vote on a highly anticipated amendment that would have cut how much the federal government provided to states for Medicaid expansion during their record vote-a-rama on President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The amendment, led by Florida Sen. Rick Scott, was an important reason that Scott and other conservatives voted to advance the bill across a key procedural hurdle.
Scott had told reporters in the past few days that he was confident the amendment, which had the backing of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, would pass when asked if he would vote for the bill without it included.
President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that he’s open to pushing back the deadline on his domestic policy bill and assured he won’t go “too crazy” with spending cuts, as lawmakers continue negotiating changes ahead of a final vote.
Trump said his preference was to stick with his Friday deadline for final passage of the bill but acknowledged the timeframe would be difficult.
“I’d love to do July 4, but I think it’s very hard to do July 4,” Trump said. “I would say maybe July 4, or somewhere around there,” the president added.
Pressed by CNN’s Kevin Liptak on whether some proposed amendments go too far, Trump responded, “I don’t want to go too crazy with cuts,” despite the bill’s combination of deep tax cuts and reductions in safety-net programs.
“I don’t like cuts, there are certain things that have been cut, which is good. I think we’re doing well. We’re gonna have to see some very complicated stuff. Great enthusiasm, as you know. And I think at the end we’re gonna have it,” Trump said.
“And it’s a big bill, and smaller bills would have been easy, but they wouldn’t have been as good I think.”
What else Trump said: The president also told reporters he is looking to cement a Gaza ceasefire deal “sometime next week,” but he did not set it as a condition for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday.
Republican Senate leaders have been huddling with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski — who could be a key vote in passing President Donald Trump’s policy agenda bill — for more than half an hour.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, as well as fellow Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, have been seen joining Murkowski in the back of the Senate chamber.
