President Donald Trump has spent the first four months since his return to the White House pushing as fast, and as far, as he can to achieve his policy goals through an expansive use of executive power.
Now, he’s going to need Congress’ help.
The president’s “big, beautiful bill,” – a catchall behemoth that aims to incorporate nearly every legislative priority for the Trump administration, including tax cuts and immigration enforcement – is nearing a vote in the House.
Why We Wrote This
Republicans in Congress have an incredibly slim majority to pass a funding bill for a Trump-led agenda that includes cutting taxes, boosting immigration enforcement, and shrinking other programs.
But significant disagreements remain over key aspects of the legislation among House Republicans, who can lose no more than three votes because of an exceedingly narrow majority. And the House might be the easy part: A number of Senate Republicans are already lobbing criticism at the bill. A president who’s shown much more interest in signing broad executive orders than in following the nuanced debate over his congressional agenda risks seeing his main legislative priorities stymied over sharp disagreements between his GOP allies.
House GOP leaders are hoping to pass the bill next week, with the goal of getting it through the Senate and signed into law by July.
What’s in the bill?
The bill is so broad that 11 different House committees have had jurisdiction over various portions. It includes roughly $69 billion in new spending for border security and deportation enforcement, along with an extension of the tax breaks for individuals that were passed during Mr. Trump’s first term in office. Those tax breaks will cost an estimated $5 trillion over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’ nonpartisan tax scorekeeper.
Republicans need to find spending cuts to offset these costs in order to get the legislation through the Senate, whose arcane rules allow one fiscal bill to be passed each year with a simple majority rather than with the standard 60-vote threshold.
The current version of the bill rolls back clean energy tax credits passed during President Joe Biden’s term, including the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles. It also makes significant changes to Medicaid that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could leave 7.6 million more people without health insurance. And it trims food stamp benefits by forcing states to shoulder more of the burden of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
All of these proposals have been condemned by Democrats and face resistance from some moderate Republicans as well. But while House GOP moderates mostly seem willing to hold their noses and vote for the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, a bigger stumbling block is adjusting the cap on the allowed deduction of state and local taxes (SALT).
When Republicans passed their expansive tax cuts during President Trump’s first term, one way they sought to save money was by putting a $10,000 cap on SALT deductions. That forced constituents in states with higher taxes – like California, New York, and New Jersey – to pay more. Now, House Republicans from those states are fighting back.
Pushback from some Republicans
The House Ways & Means Committee has passed a compromise that would raise that cap to $30,000. But five House Republicans – more members than the GOP can afford to lose – are threatening to tank the bill if they don’t get an even better deal on the SALT provisions.
Some of these lawmakers say there’s also an underlying trust issue. New York Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican from Long Island, says that he and some of his colleagues want assurances from President Trump and Senate Republicans that if they take a tough vote, they won’t have the rug pulled out from under them. He points back to when moderate House Republicans reluctantly agreed to vote for a 2017 bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, only to have President Trump later describe that bill as “mean.”
The green energy cuts, the biggest cost-saving measure in the House bill, are also a potential stumbling block on the Senate side. Four Republican senators wrote a letter to their leadership last month warning against a full-scale repeal of the green energy tax credits, warning it “could lead to significant disruptions for the American people.”
Similarly, the Medicaid adjustments are a looming problem on the Senate side. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has repeatedly warned against trimming the program. He has said that he’s worried about measures in the House bill that would add proof-of-work requirements for Medicaid recipients, force some poor people to pay more for health care copays, and risk funding that helps keep rural hospitals operating.
“I’m not going to support this bill from the House in this form,” he said on CNN Wednesday. “I think it’s clear it’s got to change before it can pass the Senate.”
Hunting for hawks and moderates
Even as moderate and swing-district Republicans are expressing concerns about various spending cuts in the bill, GOP budget hawks are complaining that it doesn’t do anything to reduce the deficit. House Republican hard-liners point out that some of the changes to Medicaid – including work requirements – wouldn’t kick in for years.
Texas Rep. Chip Roy and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman said Thursday that they wouldn’t vote for the bill as it stands when it comes up for a planned vote in the House Budget Committee on Friday, enough to cause it to fail.
House Speaker Mike Johnson floated a compromise to placate both sides: Move up the timeline on Medicaid cuts, and use the money generated to raise the SALT cap.
“I am convinced that we’ll be able to adjust the dial, so to speak, so that we can come to an agreement that will meet the criteria that everybody has and that we can move this thing forward,” Speaker Johnson told reporters Thursday afternoon. It’s unclear if it will work – or if the tighter Medicaid requirements could lose more moderates.
Some Senate Republicans complain that the bill does almost nothing to get the United States on a more sustainable fiscal path. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told the Monitor that if the bill includes a significant debt ceiling increase, as is currently the plan, it’s a “deal-killer” for him.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson says the U.S. government has a “spending problem” that this bill comes nowhere near solving. He calls the bill’s cuts a “sad joke” and says he won’t vote for it as it currently stands. The senator suggests Republicans should go back to the drawing board and split the border security and defense pieces out as a separate bill – an idea that has been echoed by other Republicans from both chambers.
The portion of the bill that the president seems to care about the most has so far drawn the least attention and criticism from GOP members.
The bill includes $69 billion in new spending on border enforcement and crackdowns on unauthorized immigrants. That includes: $46.5 billion to construct more of the U.S.-Mexico border wall that President Trump began building during his first term in office; $4.1 billion to hire an estimated 3,000 new Customs and Border Protection agents; funding to deport an estimated 1 million more unauthorized immigrants; money to hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, a nearly 50% increase from the 21,000 current ICE employees. It also adds in money to construct new detention centers with beds for up to 100,000 unauthorized immigrants at a time, more than double the current capacity of 41,500 nationally.
Extra fees for immigrants and asylum seekers
The bill would also put a new financial onus on immigrants, including asylum-seekers. It includes a $1,000 fee for people to apply for asylum, which Judiciary Committee Republicans describe as the first fee of its kind in U.S. history; a $1,000 fee for individuals given permission to enter and temporarily remain in the U.S.; and a $3,500 fee for sponsors of unaccompanied children.
Ironically, the “big, beautiful bill” seems to be running into some of the same problems that Mr. Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation hit. Both presidents tried to pass their signature legislative goals in one sprawling package to get it through the Senate with just 50 votes.
In the end, Mr. Biden had to settle for a significantly scaled-back version, after a handful of Democrats in the Senate, where his party had a very narrow majority, refused to go along with the original plan.
Mr. Trump appears to have more control and a greater ability to exert pressure on his members. But the razor-thin GOP House majority, and a fairly narrow three-seat Senate majority, mean there is little margin for error, and individual members have outsize power to make demands in return for their votes.
