US President Donald Trump derailed a housing overhaul that he was set to sign into law Wednesday, canceling a signing ceremony for the broadly popular bipartisan bill until Congress passes an election security measure.
Trump had been scheduled to sign the bill, which passed the Senate Monday and the House Tuesday with wide margins, during a Capitol ceremony.
But in a pair of social media posts prior to the event, he derided the overhaul aimed at lowering housing costs as “minor” before refusing to sign it entirely.
“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.
The controversial SAVE America Act, a top priority for Trump, addresses the extremely rare phenomenon of noncitizen voting. Republican senators have told Trump there are not enough votes in the chamber for it to pass.
The housing bill’s Senate sponsors, Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, a Republican, and ranking Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sought to lower the costs of housing construction by removing regulatory barriers, expanding the uses of federal housing grants and banning institutional investors from buying single-family homes.
Scott, a South Carolina Republican, lauded the bill Tuesday as not only bipartisan, but nonpartisan, addressing universal needs.
Republican leaders framed the measure as addressing affordability, which is expected to be a key issue in November’s midterm elections amid stubborn inflation.
The measure, which combined elements of proposals in each chamber, appeared on a fast track to becoming law after the Senate approved it 85-5 Monday and the House voted 358-32 Tuesday. The White House had said Trump supported the bill.
The House opponents were virtually all from a group of conservatives, led by Florida’s Anna Paulina Luna, who said she would oppose all legislation from the Senate, and even some House rules resolutions, until the Senate passed Trump’s elections security measure.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said during a Wednesday morning press conference that he had spoken with the president earlier in the day and that Trump is going to delay signing the housing bill until Congress approves a grant program for elections through the complex budget reconciliation process. That’s the same procedure the GOP used to enact its “big, beautiful” law and $70 billion for immigration enforcement.
“You have to put it on a reconciliation bill,” he said. “We believe that if you create a grant program that ties it to reconciling the budget and you allow blue states, if they come to their senses and they want to avail themselves of election integrity proposals and ideas and policies, they can draw down from a federal fund and use those funds. We’re willing to invest heavily in that.”
Johnson said he told Trump that Republicans in Congress can enact that policy if they “stand together.”
“As you know he has a window of time before he has to sign a bill and he’s going to use a bit more of that window of time,” Johnson said. “And we’re going to go through this together.”
Johnson said he expects Trump to sign the housing bill within the 10-day window.