Votes this week picked up where we left off last week.  Following several weeks of working on the House Republicans’ Fiscal Year 2026 budget reconciliation bill, which House Republicans called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1), the House Budget Committee met late Sunday evening and passed the bill out of committee, allowing the bill to move forward for consideration in the full House.  The bill was more than 1,000 pages.  The last stop before heading to the House floor for consideration by the full chamber, is the Rules Committee. 

The House Rules Committee met at 1 a.m. on Wednesday to begin consideration of more than 500 proposed amendments to the bill from House Democrats.  Debate and consideration of the amendments continued all through the day Wednesday while various factions within the House Republican Conference argued behind closed doors (not in the Rules Committee) for changes to the bill.  Late Wednesday evening, around 9:00 p.m., House Republicans substituted the bill with a “manager's amendment” with 42 pages of changes.  The Rules Committee then ended the markup passing the amended bill (without any of the Democratic amendments).  The full House convened around 11 p.m. on Wednesday for a series of procedural votes and further debate on the bill. 

The House debated the bill all night, and I was there for debate and procedural votes throughout the night.  We cast our final votes on the bill around 7:00 a.m.  The bill passed by a vote of 215 (yes) - 214 (no) -1 (present).

I voted no.  As I discuss in more detail below, the bottom line is this: This bill takes from the poor to give tax cuts to the rich.  And in the process it increases our national debt and deficit spending, decreases essential services, and betrays our values.

You may have seen a lot of arguments about what the bill does and doesn’t do.  And throughout the debate, I heard them over and over.  The descriptions are so different, and the bill is so complicated, that it is confusing.  So, I am sharing here the information that the independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) prepared when asked to estimate the costs for different provisions.  These analyses, however, were conducted before Republicans added the manager’s amendment to the bill (and experts expect the numbers to increase after that amendment).  I should emphasize that the CBO takes many steps to ensure that its work is objective and impartial. 

CBO found that, if enacted, H.R. 1 would:

• Increase deficit spending by $3.8 trillion for the period from 2026-2034.
• Take health care away from nearly 14 million Americans, including children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities by cutting more than $700 billion from Medicaid and as much as $300 billion from the Health Insurance Marketplace (Affordable Care Act [aca] exchange) for a total of nearly $1 trillion.  In TX-07 it is estimated that 5,113 people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage and 38,400 people are at risk of losing their ACA health care coverage; and
• Make the largest cut to food assistance in history, cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps, by more than 25 percent and placing 11 million people, including more than 4 million children and 2 million seniors and adults with disabilities, at risk of going hungry.

In addition to the devastating cuts to health care programs in this bill, CBO has warned that this bill could lead to nearly $500 billion in cuts to the Medicare program.  And that is because the bill will raise deficits so significantly it would trigger mandatory spending cuts, also known as “sequestration,” under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 (PAYGO).  The idea behind PAYGO is somewhat simple–if Congress adds to the deficit without offsetting it with cuts to other programs, across-the-board cuts to certain mandatory federal spending are implemented.  Triggering PAYGO in this case would mean an automatic 4% reduction to most Medicare spending, which will impact payments to doctors, hospitals, and prescription drug plans.

To view a longer analysis of the bill from CBO, click here.

With more than 1,000 pages, there are so many provisions in this bill that I can’t cover them all here.  The New York Times has a helpful, easy to read chart of the CBO’s assessment of almost all of the provisions.  But, I will highlight here a few other things.  If enacted, the bill will:

• Extend the tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  These provisions cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans.  Estimates show that, in 2027, the average benefit for the top 0.1% will be $255,000 per year (or $700 a day), while the average benefit for people making less than $50,000 is $265 (or less than $1 a day).
• Authorize a $4 trillion increase to the debt limit to pay for these tax cuts.
• Implement monthly reporting requirements for people on Medicaid, creating unnecessary red tape that studies have shown will result in eligible people losing health coverage.  These requirements were to go into effect in 2029, but with the manager’s amendment, they will now begin in December 2026.
• Increase deficit spending by $300 million by enacting a provision prohibiting federal funding for any Planned Parenthood clinic from receiving federal funding for any services at all (like birth control, cancer screenings, and annual well-woman exams).
• Block federal payments for Health Insurance Marketplace (ACA exchange) insurance plans that cover abortion care—essentially, a marketplace-wide ban on abortion coverage impacting every state.
• Reduce or eliminate Pell Grants for about two thirds of current Pell Grant recipients, increasing higher education costs for more than 4 million students from low-income and middle-class families.
• Tax certain university endowments up to 21 percent on their endowment returns; in our district increased taxes will affect Rice University and neighboring Baylor College of Medicine.
• Eliminate or substantially limit several tax credits designed to encourage investment and production of clean energy.

There are also several provisions that are not clearly tied to spending—which should be an issue in the Senate.  Among other things, the bill prohibits the enforcement of any laws that states have enacted regulating artificial intelligence for a period of 10 years.  It also undermines the rule of law and the federal courts with a provision that strips funding from courts and says courts cannot enforce contempt orders for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order.  This should alarm everyone.  There is no legitimate basis for such a provision.

At a time when families across our community and our country are struggling with rising costs, this budget bill makes devastating cuts to programs that they rely on every day while increasing deficit spending and the national debt.  It is going to make life harder, not better.  It is going to make things more expensive, not less.  The American people deserve better than what is in this bill—and we can do better. 

The fight over this budget bill, H.R. 1, is far from over.  The bill now moves to the Senate and we expect Senators to make lots of changes.  Then, the House will need to pass this amended version, and then the President has to sign it into law.  Speaker Johnson said he intends to have the President sign this bill into law by the Fourth of July.  And we will continue to fight this bill, as House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on behalf of our caucus during the debate.

While the budget bill was consumed so much time and energy this week, several other events and developments were on the minds of people in our Captiol, and at home in our community.

Last Friday, Moody’s, one of the three major bond credit rating companies, downgraded the U.S. credit rating in response to the increasing burden of the federal government’s budget deficit.  Moody’s attributes their ratings downgrade to the sharp increase in the federal debt because of continuous deficits in the federal budget.  The U.S. national debt is more than $36 trillion and annual budget deficits have grown, even outside of recession or pandemic conditions.  Interest costs on debt are rising because of higher interest rates.  And with Congress failing to pass long-term funding bills and fiscal reforms, Moody’s cited “political polarization” as a barrier to addressing fiscal challenges.

The Supreme Court watch continues.  This week, the Court allowed the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venzuelans.  TPS allows migrants whose home countries are considered unsafe the right to live and work in the United States for a temporary, but extendable, period of time.  Individuals with felony convictions or two or more misdemeanor convictions in the U.S. are ineligible for TPS.  In February of this year, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued an order to end TPS for 348,000 Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States, which was enjoined.  This week, the Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal from the Trump administration to lift a lower court’s injunction, placing the legal status and work authorizations for TPS recipients in our community and across the county in limbo. 

On Wednesday night, two young staff members from the Embassy of Israel were shot and killed as they left an American Jewish Committee event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. not far from the Capitol.  My thoughts are with their friends and families and with people across our community at home in Houston and around the world who feel the pain of this senseless hate and violence.  As we learn more about the attack, we already know that antisemitism has no place in our society.  We must do all we can to stop it and to alleviate human suffering around the world.

This week, we continued working on the annual government spending bill for fiscal year 2026.  As I mentioned last week, this is a separate process from the budget reconciliation process and the big bill we just voted on this week.  It is, instead, part of the annual appropriations process.  I have been spearheading several letters to the appropriations subcommittees about funding priorities for our community and working on others.  I plan to send a summary of that work in the next update.  But I do want to thank all the people who have written, called, and met with our team about your priorities.

I also cosponsored the Aaron Salter, Jr., Responsible Body Armor Possession Act, H.R. 3398, this week.  Named in honor of the late Buffalo, New York Police Lieutenant Aaron Salter, Jr., who died protecting citizens at Tops Supermarket, the bill prohibits civilian ownership or sale of enhanced military-grade body armor, which the Buffalo shooter used and which has been used in multiple mass shootings across the country, including in Sutherland Springs, Texas; Aurora, Colorado; Boulder, Colorado; San Bernardino, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and many other communities.

I jumped at the opportunity to join my colleagues on the Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Environment for a hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) fiscal year 2026 budget with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.  While I am not a member of this subcommittee, I asked to participate in this hearing (what we call “waiving on,” as you’ll hear if you listen to the clip) so that I could raise an important issue with the new EPA Administrator.  In 2019, at the direction of the last Trump administration, EPA began a process to relocate the Region 6 lab from Houston to a facility in Ada, Oklahoma.  Since then, I have fought to keep EPA’s Region 6 lab in Houston to ensure that we have access to the rapid air and water quality testing and monitoring that is vitally important for us year-round and especially during hurricane season.  Over the years, I have raised this issue with every administration and multiple EPA officials, and the move has been delayed (for now) to 2027.  During EPA’s budget hearing on Tuesday, I outlined my concerns to EPA’s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, and asked him to work with me to ensure that we keep an EPA Region 6 lab in Houston.  You can watch my comments here, or below.

I am grateful to our panelists for their insight as well as to everyone who joined us for our conversation and asked great questions!  I am still waiting for answers to the questions I sent to the new acting NOAA administrator a few weeks ago, and I am working to try to restore funding to the agency through this year’s appropriations process.

In Washington, our team held nearly two dozen meetings with constituents and groups advocating on their behalf, including with Leukemia Society, Coalition of Arab American Communities, National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, Houston METRO, and National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD), pictured below.  Back home in the district, Team TX07 team was out and about across the district, hosting a constituent services pop-up at the Chinese Community Center, meeting with groups at home, including Catholic Charities, and attending community events, including the Gulfton Super Neighborhood Meeting, and the opening of a new business, pictured below.