WASHINGTON — House Republicans rescued their “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill from an early death in the Senate Wednesday by passing a measure deleting various provisions that would have violated Senate budget rules.

To avoid a stand-alone vote on the fixes, automatic adoption of the resolution correcting the engrossment of the House reconciliation bill was embedded in a rule needed for floor debate of an unrelated bill that would cancel $9.4 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting funds. The House adopted the rule on a nearly party-line vote of 213-207.

Rules Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said during floor debate that no new provisions were added to the reconciliation bill. She said the corrections measure only deleted some provisions for technical reasons “to make sure this big, beautiful bill has its day in the Senate.”

But the need for fixes risked derailing the reconciliation package containing most of President Donald Trump’s agenda, from tax cuts and border security to spending cuts and a major increase in the nation’s borrowing limit. The package passed by a single vote last month and Republicans who have expressed reservations about various pieces of the measure since then could have used Wednesday’s vote as leverage to extract new concessions.

At least two Republicans — Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nebraska Rep. Mike Flood — said they were caught unaware of provisions they oppose in the bill, including a moratorium on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence and barring judges from issuing contempt citations for ignoring court rulings. And the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus issued a set of demands for changes in the bill this week, including deeper spending cuts.

Democratic leaders sought to use the occasion to pressure wavering Republicans into voting down the rule so that more changes could be made.

“Don’t go home and tell your constituents you’re really against this provision if you don’t act on it,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the floor Wednesday before the House vote. “This vote will show whether House Republicans are actually worried about the cuts to SNAP, to Medicaid, and to clean energy jobs — like they claim — or if that was just empty talk.”

But in the end, Republicans stayed united to approve the changes, knowing they will get another chance to vote on the bill whenever the Senate amends it and sends it back.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., a staunch foe of the reconciliation bill, was the sole GOP “no” vote on the rule.

The need for corrections also showed how complicated it can be to push a partisan legislative agenda through Congress using the cumbersome budget reconciliation process, which avoids the risk of a Senate filibuster but imposes strict conditions on the types of matters that can be considered.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said in an earlier interview that the provisions deleted from the bill were measures the Senate parliamentarian had flagged as potential violations of reconciliation rules. If they had been kept in the bill, he said, the bill would have risked losing its “privileged” status in the Senate, which allows for passage with a simple-majority vote instead of a 60-vote threshold that would require support from Democrats.

And with all Democrats united in opposition, a 60-vote threshold would mean certain death for the reconciliation bill. “So you can’t play games,” Scalise said.

While not all the fixes were strictly technical, they appear to have been made to satisfy Senate reconciliation rules.

Gone is a provision designed to crack down on fraud in the use of an employee retention tax credit that was created during the COVID-19 pandemic to help businesses cope with economic shutdowns. Gone, too, is an effort to reinstate mining leases in the Boundary Waters area of northeastern Minnesota, by rescinding Biden-era wilderness protections.

And the military lost out on new funding for intelligence programs and missiles because of concerns that those provisions touched on the jurisdictions of Senate committees that are not part of the reconciliation package under the terms set out in the underlying budget resolution.

Lawmakers deleted $2 billion for military intelligence programs included in the Armed Services Committee’s recommendations because it touched on the jurisdiction of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which isn’t part of the budget resolution. The same jurisdictional problem plagued the effort to secure $500 million for “exportable low-cost cruise missiles,” since foreign military sales are overseen by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, not Armed Services.

And that same concern appeared to explain the removal of $62 million that would fund the conversion of missile tubes on Ohio-class nuclear submarines to allow them to carry additional missiles. That provision risked undermining the New START treaty, a 2011 nuclear arms reduction pact with Russia that is set to expire Feb. 4 of next year.

But that money may not be lost for good. The same provision is in the emerging Senate bill, but with a key stipulation: that the money couldn’t be obligated until March 1, after the treaty is set to expire.

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, continued to work on their version of the package.

While several Senate committees have produced text, the biggest piece will come from the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax cuts and health care funding, including Medicaid. Finance Chairman Michael D. Crapo, R-Idaho, briefed the GOP conference on the progress of his panel’s work Wednesday afternoon.

Senators have said the goal is to produce the entire text by Friday, though that timeline could slip. Senate panels are expected to skip markups in their chamber, unlike the House, and instead vote on a substitute amendment to the House-passed bill. That’s what made the House’s “privilege scrub” so critical, as the House bill couldn’t even get to the Senate floor for amendment with any “fatal” provisions still in it.

In addition to fixing the House reconciliation bill, the House rule adopted Wednesday paved the way for a Thursday floor vote on a White House request to cancel $9.4 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting funds. The fate of that measure remains up in the air as several Republicans have expressed concerns about the proposed rescissions and Democrats appear united in opposition.

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