President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a bill signing for major bipartisan legislation on housing affordability on Wednesday, saying he wouldn’t back the law until Congress passes his elections bill.
“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 said in a post to Truth Social.
Trump was scheduled to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing bill on Wednesday afternoon, which passed both chambers with wide bipartisan support.
Trump announced the cancellation as Speaker Mike Johnson and top House leaders held a news conference touting the bill.
The bill is the product of almost a year of back-and-forth between all four congressional corners and aims to increase affordability by boosting housing supply and home ownership.
The legislation also includes language seeking to limit large institutional investors from dominating the single-family housing market, which was a top priority for Trump and a requirement for his signature on the bill.
The cancellation seemingly caught Republican leaders on the Hill by surprise.
“He decided, and I didn’t announce it, I wanted him to announce it,” Johnson said shortly after Trump posted, “but we’re delaying this. As you know, he has a window of time before he has to sign a bill, and he’s going to use a little bit more of this window of time and we’re going to go through this together.”
Both the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed a final version this week after an agreement quickly came to fruition with key lawmakers last week, with the expectation that the bill would be signed into law Wednesday.
If Trump does not sign the bill into law within 10 days — excluding Sundays — while Congress is in session, it will still become law. Congress also has the power to override a presidential veto.
Johnson, told by reporters at the news conference that Trump had canceled the housing bill signing, said he understands Trump’s push for the elections bill and that he expects him to sign the housing bill within “10 days.”
House GOP leadership hasn’t sent the housing bill to the White House yet, which is required to start the 10-day clock regardless of whether Trump continues to hold it hostage over his demands for the SAVE America Act, according to four people with direct knowledge of the matter, granted anonymity to discuss internal planning.
Johnson and GOP leaders are now privately trying to work through when they could send it to the White House. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), whose signature is also required on all legislation sent to the White House as president pro tempore of the Senate, hasn’t signed it yet either, according to another person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Johnson said he spoke with Trump on Wednesday morning about a plan to include a watered-down version of key SAVE America Act provisions in a party-line budget reconciliation bill.
Trump has fixated on the SAVE America Act, often tying negotiations on the Hill to trying to get it passed.
His proposed legislation would impose strict new guidelines for registering to vote and casting ballots — including requiring voters to present a photo ID at the ballot box and effectively ending widespread mail-in voting. Trump has also said repeatedly he would like the SAVE America Act to include prohibitions on transgender athletes competing.
Democrats are staunchly against the bill, arguing it could disenfranchise millions of voters, while Republican leaders in Congress have repeatedly indicated it does not have the votes to pass.
Trump was scheduled to meet with GOP leadership to discuss the legislation Wednesday.
Republicans still appear confident Trump will sign the housing legislation, though.
“The president, when we go through the details of the bill, he’s going to understand that it’s a good product and certainly something that fulfills his promises to bring down the costs,” Johnson said.
“He’s going to sign the bill in my view,” said House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.), one of the architects of the bill. But it will just be “another day.”
Hill added that he didn’t find Trump’s decision to cancel the signing “personally offensive” and said “that’s fully in his prerogative to do that.”
Other Republican lawmakers similarly defended Trump’s decision.
“We’ve got a bipartisan bill, but look, the president doesn’t have to sign it, the president can veto it,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee, told reporters Wednesday. “He has the right to do what he’s doing.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, a retiring North Carolina Republican who hasn’t been shy about leveling criticism toward Trump, said he didn’t understand why the president was “holding a bill that’s ready for signature hostage, [for] a bill that will never pass in this Congress. Makes no sense to me.”
Democratic supporters of the bill were quick to attack Trump for throwing the legislation’s enactment into question.
“This is just more evidence that Donald Trump really doesn’t care about how hard Americans are struggling,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who helped shepherd the bill through the Senate, told reporters. “The House and the Senate worked together to develop a bill on a bipartisan basis that would help bring down housing costs and Donald Trump is turning his back on it.”
Warren added that “this is a Republican problem, and it’s going to require a Republican solution.”
Meredith Lee Hill and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.
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