Republican lawmakers are on the cusp of handing President Donald Trump a major legislative victory by passing his entire congressional agenda in one fell swoop. But many Americans will face more costs than tangible new benefits from the sprawling tax and immigration enforcement bill that adds trillions to the national debt.
The Senate on Tuesday passed its version of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” by the barest of majorities – 51 to 50 – after more than 26 hours of debate and amendments. House Republicans are rushing to try to pass the bill into law this week before a July 4th deadline set by the president, though a handful of House GOP critics make that prospect less than certain.
The bill’s most expensive component is an extension of the individual tax cuts that Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans passed into law during his first term and which are set to soon expire.
Why We Wrote This
As the Senate passed its version of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the main priority was to preserve a low-tax status quo. The other major outcome: tighter eligibility for Medicaid and nutrition assistance.
When Republicans passed their tax cut package in 2017, they made the corporate tax cuts permanent while sunsetting individual tax cuts to comply with Senate rules that bar reconciliation bills from increasing the federal deficit after 10 years. Their assumption at the time – which is proving correct – was that future members of Congress, facing the imminent prospect of a tax hike on their voters, would vote to extend the cuts.
But as Republicans now move to make those lower rates permanent, it won’t actually feel any different to taxpayers. And many of the bill’s spending cuts – such as to Medicaid and food stamps – will impact their voters directly. Even with the cuts to government programs, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the just-passed Senate bill will add a net $3.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
What the bill does add in new, tangible benefits for Americans is limited. It temporarily suspends taxes on tips and overtime pay and lowers taxes on Social Security benefits, but those changes only last through 2028. People facing higher state taxes will be able to deduct more from their federal returns, but only for five years. The bill increases the child tax credit. But it strips that credit from noncitizens who pay taxes, meaning families with American citizen children and two noncitizen immigrant parents would see a tax increase.
According to the Tax Policy Center, the bill is extending a tax cut of less than 2 percentage points for an average middle-income taxpayer – roughly $1,750.
The bill also includes roughly $150 billion for border security and expanding interior enforcement, a top priority for President Trump (and a reason he won in 2024, though poll numbers on immigration have since slid).
Pressure to extend tax cuts
Republicans acknowledge the bill isn’t offering big new benefits, but point to the downside of not extending the tax cuts.
“The most important part of this is the extension of the tax cuts,” says South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, adding that the bill was primarily aimed at “fixing things so that we don’t have major shock.”
“If Congress fails to act, a typical family will face a $1,700 tax hike,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on the Senate floor last week. “Republicans are determined to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that extending the tax cuts alone will cost the government $2.2 trillion over the next decade. The GOP bill also extends a reduction in the estate tax, which was part of the 2017 bill. The CBO estimates that will cost another $200 billion in revenue over the next decade.
When asked to compare the tangible new outcomes of this bill to other recent expensive megabills like the original 2017 GOP tax cut, President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, or President Joe Biden’s green energy credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson scoffed.
“Everybody loves to go to Disney World. It’s exciting to spend money. It’s not very exciting to go, ‘We can’t afford it,’” he says. “Nobody in my party wants to increase taxes. This isn’t a tax cut. This is just preventing a massive tax increase.”
The Senate bill cuts more than $1 trillion in combined federal spending from Medicaid and SNAP programs, better known as food stamps. It also rolls back a half-trillion dollars of clean energy tax credits passed under President Biden, cuts off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood, and establishes a new tax on investment income on endowments for colleges and universities with more than 3,000 students that goes as high as 8%.
Central to the Medicaid and SNAP cuts are new work requirements for recipients who are able-bodied adults without young children – changes that analysts say will not only eliminate coverage for many of those people but also impact people who would qualify but will fail to apply. The Senate went further than the House in cutting Medicaid, by limiting how much the federal government will reimburse states for Medicaid coverage – likely forcing states to limit benefits and threatening rural hospitals. (The bill includes $50 billion to offset some of this disruption.)
The bill will likely be the largest cut in Medicaid coverage since the program was created in the 1960s. The CBO estimates that 11.8 million more Americans will lack health insurance by 2034 if the Senate bill becomes law – more than the 10.9 million under the House version of the bill. The bill also lets health insurance subsidies granted during the COVID-19 pandemic expire, which the CBO estimates will cause another 4.2 million people to lose coverage.
President Trump himself has pledged not to cut Medicaid beyond eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse – a pledge that North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis noted when he slammed the bill over the weekend.
“It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the promise that Donald J. Trump made,” Senator Tillis said on the Senate floor. “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding is not there anymore?”
Mr. Tillis, who voted against the bill, announced that he would not run for reelection next year, shortly after President Trump threatened to back a primary challenger against him.
The bill’s critics also include the senator who put it over the top.
“Do I like this bill? No,” Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who backed the legislation after getting a number of state-specific carveouts for her own constituents, told NBC News shortly after the vote. “I tried to take care of Alaska’s interests. But I know, I know, that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don’t like that.”
Senator Murkowski later issued a statement saying that she hoped the House would further amend the bill.
The Medicaid and SNAP cuts were put in place to satisfy conservatives who say they’re worried about the deficit. But the CBO estimates the bill has only $1 trillion in cuts to more than $4 trillion in tax cuts and new spending. Senate Republicans relied on a never-before-used budget gimmick to ignore that number and work around normal rules that apply to reconciliation bills, using the current law as a baseline for analyzing the tax cuts’ impact to claim that since they were just extending it that it wouldn’t add anything to the deficit.
Vice President JD Vance, who cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Senate bill on Tuesday, sought to refocus the conversation away from the Medicaid cuts and onto the billions in new funding for border security and deportation efforts.
“[T]he CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy – is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” he posted on X. “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration.”
But for many Republicans, the Medicaid changes are a feature, not a bug. Senator Johnson, who wanted even deeper Medicaid and other spending cuts in the bill, says Republicans had to “clean up the mess” of previous administrations’ deficit spending.
Democrats already writing their campaign ads
Democrats have made clear they’ll put the Medicaid cuts at the center of their 2026 midterm strategy.
The bill isn’t popular, according to multiple recent public polls. A Fox News survey found it underwater with registered voters by 59%-38%; the Pew Research Center found Americans opposed it 49%-29%; and a Washington Post-Ipsos survey found Americans opposing it 42%-23%.
Still, Democrats will have some work to do to make the bill a campaign issue.
Nearly half of Americans hadn’t heard anything about the bill, according to polling released Monday from the Democratic group Priorities USA, and just 8% of Americans said they’d heard that the bill would cut Medicaid, a sign that the details of the massive piece of legislation aren’t yet breaking through with voters. “Awareness of the GOP bill is limited, diffuse and general in nature, at best,” the group wrote in a memo accompanying the poll.
House GOP leaders are pushing to begin votes on the Senate bill as soon as Wednesday, with the goal of sending it to President Trump before the weekend.
The legislation still faces some hurdles in the House, with both centrists and hard-line conservatives griping about some of its provisions.
Republican Rep. David Valadao, a moderate whose rural California district has a high proportion of Medicaid recipients, has said that he would vote against the bill because of the Senate’s additional cuts to Medicaid spending, specifically citing its changes to federal funds for rural hospitals. Rep. Don Bacon, a moderate Republican from Nebraska who is retiring, said on Monday that the Senate had made “concerning” changes to the House bill regarding Medicaid, though he declined to say how he’ll vote on the final product. A number of other swing-district Republicans have signaled their unhappiness with the bill’s Medicaid changes as well.
On the other side, hard-line conservatives including Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Chip Roy of Texas, and Andy Harris of Maryland have complained about the Senate bill’s costs, with Congressman Norman calling the Senate changes to the bill “unconscionable” and pledging to vote against it.
House Republicans can only afford to lose three votes if they hope to pass this legislation. They passed their own version of the bill with no votes to spare in May. But many members have griped and threatened to oppose major votes in the past, only to buckle under pressure from President Trump in the end.
