Pa. Rep. Lloyd Smucker looks to give Trump’s ‘one big, beautiful bill’ another chance after voting no Friday

• By Jaxon White/LNP | LancasterOnline

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 4:50 p.m. to include comments from Rep. Smucker. 

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U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker initially voted to pass President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” out of the Budget Committee on Friday morning.

But once the result was announced, revealing the bill would fail, Smucker quickly asked to change his vote to a “no.”

The bill failed to clear the House Budget Committee after Smucker and four Republican hardliners joined every Democrat on the panel to shoot it down. The vote was 21-16.

But constituents would be mistaken to think Smucker altered his vote to oppose the bill.

Smucker said he flipped his vote for procedural reasons. Doing so ensures he can call for another vote on the more than 1,100-page legislation at a later date. House rules require that a motion to reconsider must be introduced by a member from the prevailing side of the vote — in this case, someone who voted against the bill.

Smucker praised the bill during his opening statements, saying it delivered “conservative wins all across the board.”

“This bill is a clear fulfillment of our promise to change the way Washington operates,” Smucker said in his three-minute opening statement. “For the first time in years, we’re delivering real, measurable reductions in federal spending: 1.5 trillion in direct savings.”

Those savings he referenced are intended to offset the lost revenue from the bill making permanent Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and temporarily eliminating taxes on tips and overtime.

Texas Republican Chip Roy has been a louder critic of the bill. At Friday’s committee hearing. Roy said it “falls profoundly short” on delivering cuts to the federal deficit. (The 2024 deficit was $1.38 trillion.)

“This bill has backloaded savings and has frontloaded spending,” Roy said before voting against it. Joining in opposition were Republicans Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Andrew Clyde of Georgia, along with every Democrat.

Deficit spending

Smucker has walked a fine line in this year’s budget negotiations.

The West Lampeter native rarely defies GOP leadership, and his close ally, House Speaker Mike Johnson, has championed the budget bill as delivering on Trump’s tax agenda.

However, few congressional Republicans have been as loudly opposed to increasing the U.S. spending deficit as Smucker, who authored a provision in the bill’s blueprint tying the size of the GOP’s planned tax cuts directly to the value of reductions in federal spending achieved.

In April, Smucker garnered national attention for pressuring Republican leaders to prioritize drastic cuts in federal spending — a rare act of defiance against GOP leaders from

And Smucker later gathered 31 other House Republicans to sign a letter threatening to withhold their support if the budget bill expanded the U.S. spending deficit. Nonpartisan estimates predicted the bill voted down on Friday would have expanded the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion over the next decade, according to The Washington Post.

Smucker said that projection was wrong and he believed the bill would not add to the national debt over the next ten years.

He estimated that the tax cuts’ estimated cost of about $4 trillion over ten years would be offset by combining the $1.5 trillion in spending reductions with the projected $2.5 trillion the GOP expects in economic growth.

“It doesn’t add more to the debt,” Smucker said, noting his opinion is assuming the economic growth projections are correct.

More opposition

Philadelphia Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the committee, seized on the GOP disagreements over the bill. NPR reported that many Senate Republicans, like Josh Hawley of Missouri, have said they oppose it.

Boyle called it a “big bill for billionaires,” arguing the tax cuts would be paid for using cutting healthcare for millions of people, citing data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

As many Democrats have done in recent weeks, Boyle incorrectly said the estimates show 13.7 million people would lose health care coverage. The CBO said it would be around 8.6 million people.

Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington, of Texas, announced Friday afternoon that his panel would reconvene Sunday at 10 p.m. to reconsider the budget bill, saying he’s “confident we will get to a good place this weekend and have the votes to pass it out of Committee Sunday evening.”

According to Politico, Johnson and the White House will negotiate this weekend with conservative holdouts who are looking for a work requirement on Medicaid to begin earlier than 2029. Also up for consideration is a higher limit on state-and-local-tax deductions, Politico reports.

Johnson needs to keep the conservative lawmakers on side, as Republicans can lose only three votes in the full House because they hold a narrow 220-213 majority.

Trump weighs in

While the House Budget Committee debated the budget bill, Trump posted to social media that Republicans “MUST UNITE” behind the legislation.

“We don’t need ‘GRANDSTANDERS’ in the Republican Party,” Trump wrote. “STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE!”