So the House finally passed President Trump’s “big beautiful bill“:
House Republicans passed their sweeping “big, beautiful” bill early Thursday morning, overcoming opposition from several factions within the caucus and taking a major step toward delivering President Trump’s domestic agenda.
The bill passed 215 to 214, largely along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio joined a united Democratic caucus in voting against the legislation. Republican Representative Andy Harris, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, voted “present.”
The bill would extend the 2017 tax cuts, introduce new tax cuts such as Trump’s signature “no tax on tips” policy, and add work requirements to Medicaid, among other provisions.
Speaker Mike Johnson overcame significant opposition from members of his caucus who argued the bill should include further spending cuts to offset tax cuts that will add to the country’s ballooning deficit.
No fucking shit. America’s massive government debt and it’s ongoing unwillingness to do anything about it is an existential threat to the republic. With a Republican House and Senate, and Trump in the White House, there should have been an absolute push for a real balanced budget this year, one that absolutely defunds the left, and one that puts all the cuts in this year, not garbage out-year cuts that will never actually happen. Zeros don’t grow back, but everything else does.
The model should have been Argentina’s Javier Milei, who ended his country’s budget deficit in nine weeks. Instead, the House has wielded a scalpel when they should have used a chainsaw.
I fear that all the good work DOGE has done will be squandered because congress and the White House refuse to control the deficit.
In a whirlwind 21-hour debate session, Johnson was able to strike a deal with fiscal hawks to introduce Medicaid work requirements in 2026, two years earlier than originally proposed. He also agreed to a four-fold increase in the SALT deduction cap, raising the limit from $10,000 to $40,000, in a concession to Republicans from high-tax blue states.
“After a long week and a long night and countless hours of work over the past year, a lot of prayer and a lot of teamwork, my friends, it quite literally is morning in America,” Johnson said early Thursday after presiding over a full night of debate on the House floor. “After four long years of President Biden’s failures, President Trump’s America First agenda is finally here, and we are advancing that today.”
The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where it will be taken up under budget reconciliation, allowing the GOP to meet a lower simple-majority threshold, rather than the full 60-vote majority required to pass standard legislation.
Reconciliation is the only chance Republicans have to balance the budget without Democrats filibustering it, and this bill squanders it.
Johnson reiterated his promise to have the bill on President Trump’s desk by Memorial Day.
“To our friends in the Senate, I would just say, the president is waiting with his pen,” Johnson said from the House floor ahead of the vote.
While Johnson’s late-stage maneuvering was enough to bring around the vast majority of holdouts, Representative Massie, who was personally called out by President Trump earlier this week as a “grandstander,” laid into his colleagues for adding to the country’s debt crisis.
“This bill is a debt bomb ticking,” Massie said on the House floor ahead of the vote. “We’re not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic tonight. We’re putting coal in the boiler and setting a course for the iceberg.”
Johnson spent recent days huddling privately with holdouts trying to corral them into supporting the mammoth bill to boost defense spending, increase border security funding, and extend and expand many expiring provisions in the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA).
It’s a tactical mistake to do tax cuts before deficit reduction, since the squishy business Republicans will now go “Got what I wanted! See you later, suckers!” Republicans have shown the ability to pass tax cuts time and time again, but haven’t been able to balance a budget except when Newt Gingrich’s was Speaker and dotcom boom money was rolling in hand-over-fist. And they never will unless Republican voters hold their feet to the fire.
Those negotiations bled into Wednesday afternoon, when GOP leaders and budget hardliners met inside the White House to hash out last-minute disagreements over the legislative language surrounding Medicaid, clean-energy tax credits, and the bill’s tax provisions.
The legislation includes some reforms to Medicaid, such as scaling back federal funding to states that provide entitlements to illegal immigrants. The bill would also institute new work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients, requiring them to demonstrate 80 hours of work a month to receive coverage. But the GOP decided against big cuts to Medicaid largely because Trump sees entitlement reform as a political loser.
After huddling with budget hawks who threatened to vote against the bill over concerns with ballooning deficits, House GOP leaders agreed to amend the bill so that new work requirements will kick in beginning in December 2026 instead of the initially proposed 2029 timeline. The amendment also changes legislative language surrounding clean-energy tax breaks, such as prohibiting any tax credits for nuclear energy facilities that begin construction after December 31, 2028. The new legislative language renames child savings accounts from “MAGA accounts” to “Trump accounts,” and expands a ban on Medicaid coverage of puberty blockers and gender-transition care for minors to include adults seeking those treatments as well.
It’s not that there aren’t good things in the bill, like reimbursing Texas for the border wall. The problem is that it doesn’t address the enormous deficit elephant in the room. I have not read all 1,116 pages of the bill, but it seems perilously short of text like “eliminated,” “closed” or “shut down.” What happened to all those promises of defunding PBS and NPR? This bill doesn’t seem to do that.
Maybe my budget-fu is weak, and the bill eliminates a lot more wasteful programs than I see at first glance.
But I rather doubt it.
Now…
Tags: Andy Harris, Budget, deficits, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Javier Milei, Mike Johnson, Newt Gingrich, Republicans, Texas, Thomas Massie, Warren Davidson
The only good thing I saw was the inclusion of the Hearing Protection Act. I wish we could have gotten the SHORT Act as well.
And despite promises to the contrary, I come tax on Social Security wasn’t eliminated. The one thing that’d helped me.
Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza coalition won a much larger victory in 2023 than Trump’s Republicans in 2024. Milei is not subject to blackmail by fringe party members, nor is he being frustrated by an overtly political judiciary.
Most of the “tax cuts” in the bill are just extensions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, not new tax cuts. The vast majority of the projected deficit is due to exploding interest on the national debt and Medicaid costs. The taxes on tips and overtime are not significant.
Interest on the national debt is now 20% of the budget, more than defense expenditures. Federal Medicaid expenditures have increased from $ 118 billion in FY2000 to $ 557 billion in FY2024, a 472% increase. Now well over half of the defense budget due to cheating by the states. It will take a much larger Republican mandate in the House and Senate to spike deficit spending.
We need a majority in the House and Senate (preferably a super majority) when the midterm election comes.
Hopefully, the economy would have righted itself by the end of this year or beginning of next year and that would make the MAGA Repubs palatable to the voters for them to vote them to the legislative branch.
Newt did not balance the budget. He balanced the Budget. The Off-Budget was used to hide the full deficit and so the debt went up both years that he and Clinton bragged about balancing the budget. Secondly, every member of Congress will tell you that the budget is balanced: Taxes+Borrowing = Spending. Since they are all Keynesians, debt is meaningless. Anyone not prepping is not serious about the future.
The bill would have died but for the fact that the Dems were down three seats, Grijalva, Turner, and Connolly having been sent permanently to the penalty box. Were we lucky? Only time will tell.
It’s the first budget of his term. Keep expectations low for this one.
Also, “Republican Majority” does not mean “MAGA Majority.” Expect Trump to stump hard for MAGA candidates in the midterms.
[…] thoughts mirror my own. They should not have used reconciliation on a bill that doesn’t balance the […]
[…] The House and Senate have both passed the “Big Beautiful Bill” and Trump just signed it into law. There’s some good stuff in it, but I think it should have done a lot more to balance the budget. […]