5 Big Changes Senators Made To Donald Trump’s Massive Tax Bill
Senate Republicans are hoping to vote on the massive $4 trillion tax cut legislation as early as Saturday despite opposition from several of their members.
On Saturday night, Senate Republicans advanced their version of President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” after several key Republican holdouts flipped to “yes” and high drama on the Senate floor.
The massive 940-page bill, which isn’t final, contains big cuts to social safety net programs meant to offset part of the cost of over $4 trillion in tax cuts and spending on defense and border security. It doesn’t cut as much in spending as the House-passed legislation, but it borrows far more over 10 years and still contains some huge policy changes.
“This bill is the largest reduction in government spending in recent memory, and is a down payment on fiscal reform,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement. “The Big Beautiful Bill contains all of President Trump’s domestic economic priorities. By passing this bill now, we will make our nation more prosperous and secure.”
Several Republican senators have expressed reservations about the bill so GOP leadership may need to make more changes to get the 50 votes necessary to pass it by Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.
Big Safety Net Cuts
After the Senate parliamentarian ruled earlier this week that major Medicaid cuts in the bill violate the chamber’s rules governing reconciliation, Republicans reworked the provisions dealing with the so-called provider tax states use to help pay for Medicaid costs. They included a one-year delay to the cuts to satisfy concerns from a group of senators, including Tillis and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). The Senate draft also includes $25 billion to support rural hospitals harmed by the cuts — up from an initial $15 billion — in a bid to ameliorate Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)
The bill includes the same new “work requirements” for nondisabled adults passed by the House ― the biggest Medicaid cut in the bill that is estimated to kick millions of Americans off their health insurance plans.
Public Land Sales
After a huge backlash from hunters, fishers and conservatives, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) dropped his plan for the sale of up to 1 million acres of public lands in 11 states across the American West. The bill would have required putting up for auction 0.25% to 0.5% of land managed by the Federal Bureau of Land Management within five miles of a population center numbering 1,000 people or more, excluding all National Monuments and Forest Service lands.
Lee argued that the sale of public lands would increase the availability of affordable housing, but critics of the bill have called it a giveaway to special interests that would replace public lands with vacation homes, ski villas and other luxury real estate.
Several GOP senators threatened to vote against the bill in opposition to Lee’s plan, forcing him to ultimately announce that he was pulling the scheme on Saturday evening.
Clean Energy Repeal
Included in the bill is a major repeal of renewable energy tax credits for wind and solar that was passed by Congress in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Some Republicans pushed for a less drastic rollback of the funds that are to finance big energy projects in their states, but the provisions hew more closely to the House bill, in a nod to demands from the conservatives in the lower chamber. The bill also imposes new taxes on wind and solar industries.
Democrats said the new changes would make the cost of energy more expensive for millions of Americans.
“At the behest of Big Oil, in the dead of night, Senate Republicans released a new version of their “Big, Beautiful Betrayal” that retroactively raises taxes on energy,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “Republicans want to jack up your electric bills and jeopardize hundreds of thousands of jobs, all so they can give billionaires tax breaks.”
Immigrant Crackdown
The bill imposes more than a dozen new or increased fees on people seeking asylum or Temporary Protected Status in the U.S., an attempt to essentially price people out of being able to seek refuge in the U.S. from violence in their home countries.
These fees include a minimum $100 fee for anyone seeking asylum, a minimum $550 so-called “employment authorization application fee,” a $500 fee for anyone filing for Temporary Protected Status, and a $1,000 fee for anyone paroled into the U.S., except in limited situations like medical emergencies or funerals.
The bill also provides nearly $30 billion in new funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, for things like “promoting family unity by detaining alien parents with their children,” a euphemism in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s overview of the bill for detaining children born in the U.S. with their parents who were not born in the U.S.
$5 Trillion Debt Limit Hike
The legislation includes a $5 trillion hike to the statutory borrowing limit, an eye-popping sum and the largest-ever specified increase in history, to accommodate the cost of its tax cuts for mostly wealthy Americans. The House bill included a $4 trillion hike. The previous largest dollar increase was $2.5 trillion in 2021 to accommodate the aid Congress approved on a bipartisan basis as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republicans for years opposed such debt limit increases, taking the nation’s fiscal health hostage by demanding equal spending cuts from Democrats. Under both of Trump’s presidencies, however, they’ve looked the other way.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is expected to oppose the bill because of its impact on the national debt. He’s called for GOP leadership to strip out the debt ceiling hike from the reconciliation bill and vote on it separately, something that’s not likely to happen.
