Conservatives on the House Budget Committee on Friday blocked their party’s megabill from reaching the floor, citing concerns that the legislation to fulfill President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda would add too much to the deficit.

It was a remarkable revolt that threatened to upend the party’s goal of pushing the legislation through the House before its Memorial Day recess and sent Republican leaders scrambling to try to put down the uprising.

The setback underscored the treacherous balancing act that Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to pull off. Without the support of Republican hard-liners on the Budget Committee, the bill cannot advance. But any changes to win their backing could alienate the more moderate Republicans whose votes will also be needed to pass the measure on the House floor.Five Republican representatives — Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania — joined Democrats in voting to block the legislation. The vote was 16-21 on a motion to advance the bill.

“This bill falls profoundly short; it does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits,” Roy said before the vote, explaining his opposition. “Deficits will go up in the first half of the 10-year budget window, and we all know it’s true, and we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t say that we’re doing something we’re not doing.”

A few hours after the vote failed, committee leaders announced that the panel would reconvene Sunday at 10 p.m. to reconsider the legislation. It was not clear what, if any, changes Republican leaders agreed to before calling lawmakers back.

But immediately after the vote, they had not seemed optimistic: The committee’s chair, Rep. Jodey C. Arrington of Texas, told its members they could return home to their districts.

“Well, the noes have it,” Arrington said. “I want to thank everybody for their time and patience, and Godspeed and safe travels.”

Smucker, who changed his “yes” vote to a “no” vote at the last minute, said he did so for procedural reasons. Because he voted against the bill, he will be able to ask to call the legislation back up for consideration once Republicans broker a deal.

The legislation the party is trying to push through would make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent and eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay through 2028, fulfilling a campaign pledge. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and subsidies for clean energy would partly offset the roughly $3.8 trillion cost of those tax measures over 10 years, as well as increased spending on the military and immigration enforcement.

But the conservatives are demanding changes to the bill, arguing that their leaders did not go far enough to cut federal spending. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that calls for lower deficits, estimated that the bill would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. A number of House conservatives have said they do not want to vote for legislation unless it is deficit-neutral.

The changes the conservatives seek cut to the heart of concerns from their most centrist colleagues. Chief among the hard-liners’ frustrations is that a measure imposing work requirements on childless Medicaid recipients without disabilities would not kick in until 2029.

“We’re telling a healthy body, a healthy American, that you’ve got four years to get a job,” Norman said.

They are also unhappy that the legislation does not immediately eliminate a slew of clean energy tax credits that were created by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Brecheen said that he worried the gradual rollback of some of those tax credits would simply never materialize, citing his efforts in the Oklahoma Legislature to repeal wind tax credits.

“It was always the promise to end them many years from now, which never materialized,” he said, adding, “I know no other way to foretell the future than by the past.”

The legislation’s provisions on Medicaid and the clean energy tax credits were written in an effort to split the difference between the conservatives who have been clamoring for deep cuts to both and more centrist Republicans who say their constituents depend on the programs.

Politically vulnerable Republicans in particular have warned that voting for a measure that would ax widely used federal programs would be politically toxic.

House Republican leaders had attempted to soothe the conservatives on the panel, meeting with them Thursday and again Friday morning, hoping to win their support by offering to move up the timeline for Medicaid work requirements to kick in.

And as the panel was convening Friday, Trump weighed in on social media, writing that “Republicans MUST UNITE behind, ‘THE ONE, BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL!

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

But those efforts were not enough. Many of the conservatives view reducing the nation’s debt as their raison d’être for running for Congress.

“I’m not going to sit here and say that everything is hunky-dory when this is the Budget Committee,” Roy said. “This is the Budget Committee. We are supposed to do something to actually result in balanced budgets, but we’re not doing it.”