were dismayed by its cost and demanding changes that could derail it altogether.

“I can’t tell you I’m a yes; I can’t tell you I’m a no,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who huddled with about a dozen other holdouts in an office just off the House floor.

Facing tight margins in the House, Johnson can afford only a small handful of defections on the legislation, which would slash taxes by a total of $4.5 trillion, increase funding for defense and border security and cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, with more reductions to food assistance for the poor and other safety net programs.

It was the latest make-or-break moment for the speaker, who has seen other major legislative priorities imperiled by resistance in his own ranks and repeatedly teetering on the brink of defeat, only to pull out narrow victories with the help of considerable pressure from Trump.

With a procedural vote held open for much of the afternoon, Trump spent part of the day meeting with holdouts at the White House. Russell Vought, his budget director, who is close with the fiscal conservatives who were standing in the way of the bill, arrived on Capitol Hill late in the day to meet with them.

“I’m hopeful we can proceed tonight and get this done,” Johnson said Wednesday afternoon.

Unlike in his prior down-to-the-wire efforts, when a flurry of negotiations and changes helped Johnson sway holdouts, the House has little room for maneuvering: Any changes to the bill would send it back to the Senate for negotiations that could drag on for weeks, potentially killing the enterprise altogether.

The bill squeaked through the Senate by the narrowest of margins on Tuesday. But the changes that senators made to cobble together support for it exacerbated deep internal divides among House Republicans that have plagued their efforts to advance Trump’s agenda since the beginning. Fiscal conservatives were demanding even deeper cuts to rein in the deficit, while politically vulnerable lawmakers whose seats are at risk during next year’s midterm elections were wary of the biggest cuts to popular government programs.

“The Senate doesn’t get to be the final say on everything. We’ve got to work this out,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a member of the Freedom Caucus. On Wednesday morning, he said there were enough Republicans “right now” who wanted to reopen the bill and were willing to blow through the July 4 recess to do so, suggesting that the votes would not be there to move it forward.

And more moderate Republicans, many of them anticipating difficult reelection campaigns in swing districts, object to Medicaid cuts approved by the Senate that went deeper than those approved by the House in May.

Members of both groups attended separate meetings at the White House on Wednesday where Trump and Republican leaders tried to persuade them to advance the bill.

Before one meeting, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told reporters that he was pushing for a bill that addressed the deficit and adhered to the House’s framework on cuts to taxes and social safety net programs like Medicaid and nutrition assistance.

After the meeting, Burchett sounded more optimistic, saying in a social media video that Trump answered lawmakers’ questions.

“We’ll hopefully get this worked out and do some great things for this country,” he said.

It was not clear whether lawmakers’ resistance would hold. Conservatives have repeatedly refused to back major legislation because of its potential impact on federal deficits, only to back down under pressure from Trump. Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, a notoriously fickle lawmaker, suggested that she would try to block the bill from coming to the floor, even as she planned to vote for it to pass.

With the timing of any House action uncertain, Democrats raised a number of procedural roadblocks to register their opposition to the measure and slow its progress.

“When we say the Republican Party has turned into a cult, this is what we mean,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I. “Our Republican colleagues are pushing a bill that would throw their constituents under the bus, a bill that flies in the face of everything they claim to stand for, all because Donald Trump wants a bill signing photo-op by the Fourth of July.”

Emboldened by the GOP rift, Democrats have made a point of projecting a united front while they railed against the bill and ramped up pressure on vulnerable Republicans.

At a news conference on the House steps attended by a sizable portion of the Democratic caucus, Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 House Democrat, called out Rep. David Valadao of California, one of the most endangered Republicans. She questioned how he could back a bill that would slash Medicaid, a program that he has repeatedly voiced concern about.

Valadao has said he cannot support the level of Medicaid cuts included in the Senate measure.