House Republicans eked out a win in May with their advancement of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” filled with negotiations and compromises on thorny policy issues that barely passed muster in the lower chamber.
Next week, Senate Republicans will get their turn to parse through the colossal package and are eying changes that could be a hard sell for House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who can only afford to lose three votes.
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Congressional Republicans are in a dead sprint to get the megabill — filled with Trump’s policy desires on taxes, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt — onto the president’s desk by early July.
Trump has thrown his support behind the current product, but said during a press conference in the Oval Office on Friday that he expected the package to be “jiggered around a little bit.”
“It’s going to be negotiated with the Senate, with the House, but the end result is it extends the Trump tax cuts,” he said.
“If it doesn’t get approved, you’ll have a 68% tax increase,” the president continued. “You’re going to go up 68%. That’s a number that nobody has ever heard of before. You’ll have a massive tax increase.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has an identical margin to Johnson, and will need to cultivate support from a Senate GOP that wants to put its own fingerprints on the bill.
Senators have signaled they’d like to make changes to a litany of House proposals, including reforms to Medicaid and the timeline for phasing out green energy tax credits, among others, and have grumbled about the hike to the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap pushed for by moderate House Republicans.
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Thune said many Republicans are largely in favor of the tax portion of the bill, which seeks to make Trump’s first-term tax policy permanent, and particularly the tax policies that are “stimulative, that are pro-growth, that will create greater growth in the economy.”
Much of the debate, and prospective tweaks, from the upper chamber would likely focus on whether the House’s offering has deep enough spending cuts, he said.
“When it comes to the spending side of the equation, this is a unique moment in time and in history where we have the House and the Senate and the White House and an opportunity to do something meaningful about controlled government spending,” Thune said.
The House package set a benchmark of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.
Some in the Senate GOP would like to see that number cranked up marginally to at least $2 trillion, largely because the tax portion of the package is expected to add nearly $4 trillion to the deficit, according to recent findings from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
“There’s just so many great things in this bill,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., told Fox News Digital. “The only thing I would like to do is try to cut the spending, and I would love to take a little bit from a lot of places, rather than a lot from just one place.”
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Others, like Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., want to see the cuts in the package return to pre-pandemic spending levels, which would amount to roughly a $6 trillion slash in spending.
Johnson has remained unflinching in his opposition to the current bill, and warned that “no amount of pressure” from Trump could change his mind.
“President Trump made a bunch of promises,” Johnson said at an event in Wisconsin on Wednesday. “My promise has been, consistently, we have to stop mortgaging our children’s future. OK, so I think there are enough [Republicans] to slow this process down until the president, our leadership, gets serious about returning to a pre-pandemic level.”
Others are concerned over the proposed slashes to Medicaid spending, which congressional Republicans have largely pitched as reform efforts designed to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the program used by millions of Americans.
The House package would see a roughly $700 billion cut from the program, according to a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and some Senate Republicans have signaled that they wouldn’t support the changes if benefits were cut for their constituents.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., warned in an op-ed for The New York Times last month that cutting benefits was “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” Meanwhile, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, raised concerns about what proposed cuts to the program would do to rural hospitals in her state.
“I cannot support proposals that would create more duress for our hospitals and providers that are already teetering on the edge of insolvency,” she said.
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