President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” faces an uphill climb in the Senate, as key Republican lawmakers demand deeper spending cuts before lending their support.
Despite narrowly passing the House last Thursday after months of internal debate, the legislation is already running into resistance from GOP fiscal hawks in the upper chamber.
The bill extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, boosts defense spending, enacts strict border security measures, and targets Biden-era green energy subsidies. But according to some Republicans, the bill’s projected $3.1 trillion addition to the deficit over the next decade is a nonstarter.
“We have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), warning that Republicans do not yet have the votes to push the bill through the Senate in its current form.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), another outspoken critic, slammed the bill’s proposed $4 trillion hike to the debt ceiling. “The idea that we’re going to explode deficits and the projections are now looking at over $3 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, I think is just, you know, not a serious proposal,” Paul said on Fox News.
Both senators have signaled they may support the bill only if key changes are made, chief among them, stripping the debt ceiling hike and making real progress on reducing spending.
Across the Capitol, House conservatives are echoing those concerns. Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said he remains hopeful the Senate will take the opportunity to strengthen the bill.
“Typically, the bill gets weaker in the Senate,” Perry said. “We feel that there’s an opportunity for the bill to get stronger.”
While the House version includes $1.5 trillion in cuts over a decade, Perry and others argue that’s not enough. “Some of these cuts are not real,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), noting that the figure amounts to just 1.5% of total spending.
Perry credited the Freedom Caucus for pushing the House GOP leadership to quintuple the cuts from an initial $300 billion proposal and praised provisions that phase out green energy tax breaks and tighten Medicaid work requirements. But he insists that the Senate must go further, particularly by revisiting a proposed increase in the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap.
“The people that I work for, my bosses, don’t feel like paying for the high taxes in California, New York and Illinois,” Perry said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has acknowledged the concerns, suggesting the Senate will make adjustments to address both fiscal and procedural challenges, like ensuring the bill complies with reconciliation rules under the Byrd Rule.
“We’re coordinating with them,” Thune said of the committees reviewing the bill. “The Senate will have its imprint on it.”
Trump has made it clear he wants the bill on his desk by the Fourth of July. But with a slim 53-seat Republican majority and several senators withholding support, further negotiations appear inevitable.
As Perry put it, “This is the first swing. We want the tax cuts to happen. We need to deal with the debt ceiling. But we also need to deal with the spending in Washington.”