(The Center Square) – After more than 26 hours of debate and a record number of vote-a-rama amendments, the U.S. Senate narrowly passed President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ Tuesday.
The massive budget reconciliation bill hikes the debt ceiling by $5 trillion and implements President Donald Trump’s tax, energy, border security and defense agenda. But the cost and complexity of the bill required Vice President J.D. Vance to break the chamber tie with Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, voting no.
By permanently extending the bulk of the 2017 tax cuts – rather than extending them for only 10 years, as the House originally did — the Senate-amended OBBBA would add roughly $4 trillion to the national debt when accounting for interest by fiscal year 2034.
Republican leaders have spent weeks trying to rally their constituents around the massive bill, formerly titled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act but stripped of its name via a last-minute procedural complaint by Senate Democrats. While fiscal hawks objected to the bill’s projected impact on the debt and deficit, other Republicans raised concerns about the $1.7 trillion in savings found by House and Senate committees.
The majority of the bill’s offsets came from Medicaid reforms, with the House imposing work requirements on able-bodied adults and the Senate lowering the Medicaid provider tax cap from 6% to 3.5%. Some GOP senators worried this could cause rural hospitals to close, so a provision creating a $25 billion hospital stabilization fund was included.
Another 11th-hour amendment, introduced by U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., passed in a 99-1 vote and stripped a provision that would have banned states from regulating AI for the next ten years or risk losing federal funds.
The Senate also changed the House’s plan to quickly phase out most Inflation Reduction Act subsidies and gave states with high SNAP payment error rates more time to fix their rates before incurring the penalties outlined in the bill.
Most notably, the Senate changed budget reconciliation precedent by operating under current policy baseline, an accounting method that treats tax cut extensions as if it costs nothing. As a result, the Senate waived the usual requirement to find additional budgetary offsets in order to codify the tax provisions of the bill.
Dozens of House Republicans had already warned they will reject the bill if it returns with drastic Senate revisions, especially the never-before use of current policy baseline to calculate revenue loss from tax cuts. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had personally promised holdouts that tax cuts would be paired dollar-for-dollar with spending reductions or economic growth.
Since the Senate’s final product upended that compromise, Johnson and House committees will likely have to revise the Senate’s revisions to get enough lower chamber votes, which in turn will require another Senate vote before the bill can reach Trump’s desk.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a deficit-concerned holdout who eventually voted in favor, called the bill “a step forward” after its Senate passage but reiterated that “there is still a long way to go.”
