Washington: The Republican-led US Senate on Tuesday approved President Donald Trump’s mammoth domestic policy bill dubbed the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ by the narrowest of margins, despite misgivings over delivering deep welfare cuts and another $3 trillion in national debt.
Republican leaders had struggled to corral support during a record 24-hour “vote-a-rama” amendment session on the Senate floor, as Democrats offered dozens of challenges to the most divisive aspects of the package.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune was able to turn around two moderates considering siding with Democrats, to deliver a 50-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.
The sprawling text now heads to the House of Representatives, where it faces unified Democratic opposition and multiple Republicans balking at slashed health care and food aid programs for poor Americans.
Trump’s bill proposes a $4.5 trillion extension of his first-term tax cuts, contentiously offset with $1.2 trillion in savings mainly targeting the Medicaid health insurance program that will strip coverage from an estimated 12 million low-income and disabled Americans.
It also rolls back billions of dollars in green energy tax credits while providing a $350 billion infusion for border security and Trump’s mass migrant deportation program.
The president made clear that the goal remains to get the bill through the House in the coming days and sign it into law by Friday’s July 4th Independence Day holiday, although he acknowledged that the self-imposed deadline could slip.
“It’s going to get in, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be very happy,” he told reporters as he arrived in Florida to view new migrant detention facilities.
Murkowski says Senate bill not ‘perfect,’ says there’s more work to do
Considerable attention had been given to moderate Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, ahead of the Senate vote on tax break and spending cut legislation. Murkowski voted in favor of the bill.
On Tuesday, she told reporters it is “not a perfect bill by any stretch of the imagination,” but said she supported continuing the tax breaks first passed in 2017, as well as the idea of no tax on tips or overtime. She also felt she secured provisions for Alaska around programs such as Medicaid and SNAP that she said were aimed at ensuring vulnerable people aren’t made more vulnerable.
But she said there was much more work to do and said trying to rush a bill through Congress for final passage by Friday would be a “mistake.”
House Democrats ask, ‘Why not slow down?’
House Democrats are chiding Republicans for rushing to get President Trump’s tax and spending cut bill to his desk by Friday for a 4th of July signing ceremony.
Members of the House Rules Committee immediately went to work setting terms for debate on the bill, barely an hour after the Senate approved it.
Rep. Jim McGovern, the committee’s top Democratic lawmaker, said there’s no real deadline for getting the bill passed, and the July 4th deadline was an arbitrary marker made up by the president.
“We’re rushing not because the country demands it, but because he wants to throw himself another party,” McGovern said. “This isn’t policy. It’s ego management.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx, the committee’s Republican chair, said Democrats are engaging in fearmongering about the bill and said Americans understand that. She called the bill “the embodiment of the America First agenda.”
What’s in the big bill
All told, the Senate bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, according to the latest CBO analysis, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.
The Senate package would roll back billions of dollars in green energy tax credits, which Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide. It would impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements on able-bodied people, including some parents and older Americans, making sign-up eligibility more stringent and changing federal reimbursements to states.
Additionally, the bill would provide a $350 billion infusion for border and national security, including for deportations, some of it paid for with new fees charged to immigrants.
Bad legislation
Polls show the bill is among the most unpopular ever considered across multiple demographic, age and income groups, and Democrats hope to leverage public anger ahead of the 2026 midterm elections when they aim to retake the House.
Backed by extensive independent analysis, they say the bill’s tax cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthy at the expense of social safety net programs for the poorest Americans.
“It’s bad legislation,” Arizona Senator Mark Kelly told MSNBC. “If this passes, this is a political gift for Democrats.”
A handful of senators in the Republican majority had also threatened to upset the apple cart, echoing Democratic concerns that the bill would add more than $3.3 trillion to the nation’s already yawning budget deficits over a decade.
The most high-profile opposition has come from outside Congress, however, in the shape of tech billionaire and estranged former Trump aide Elon Musk, who balked at the bill’s debt implications and stripping of clean energy subsidies.
In a dramatic reignition of his feud with Trump, Musk vowed to launch a new political party to challenge lawmakers who campaigned on reduced federal spending only to vote for the bill.
Musk — whose businesses include rocket company and government contractor SpaceX, which has about $22 billion in federal contracts — has been campaigning against the bill since quitting as a Trump advisor in May.
A furious Trump on Tuesday said he would consider deporting Musk and ending federal funds for his companies.
“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far,” Trump posted in a retort on social media, “and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa.”
Focus on House
Although the House of Representatives has already passed their own version of the bill, it will have to come back to the lower chamber for a final rubber stamp before it reaches Trump’s desk.
House Republicans were watching anxiously from the sidelines to see if their Senate colleagues would adopt changes that would be hard for Speaker Mike Johnson to sell to his lawmakers.
Fiscal hawks in the lower chamber are furious at what they say is $651 billion of extra deficit spending in the Senate’s tweaks.
A House vote could come as early as Wednesday but even with full attendance, House Republicans can only afford to lose three votes.
“We’re going to pass this bill one way or the other,” Johnson told reporters at the Capitol on Monday.
