The fight over President Donald Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill is turning ugly.
After passing the GOP-controlled House, the bill has moved to the Senate, where Republicans are facing a bitter divide over how to balance their competing priorities.
They want to extend and expand Trump’s tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the rich and come at a steep price tag, as well as bolster immigration enforcement and defense spending. However, some are reluctant to do so while increasing the national debt by almost $2.6 trillion and slashing Medicaid benefits.
Republicans want to pass the bill by July 4 through a complex process known as budget reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes to pass. There are 53 Republicans in the Senate, but it’s unclear whether they will be able to resolve their disagreements in time.
Some Republican senators, including Ron Johnson (R-WI.) and Rand Paul (R-KY), have criticized the current version of the bill as unreasonable. Trump megadonor (and newly sworn enemy) Elon Musk has called on lawmakers to rework the legislation, which he dubbed a “disgusting abomination.”
”Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL,” Musk said in a post on X Wednesday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that Musk is “flat wrong” about the bill and that there is not enough time to go back to the drawing board.
So, what exactly is in the bill, and what does it mean — for the deficit and for Americans? We break it down, in charts.
The bill would cause the US deficit to skyrocket
This spending bill is expensive, and short of truly drastic cuts to nearly all social programs (and perhaps not even with such cuts), it’s not clear that the government could feasibly pass it without increasing the national debt.
The version that passed the House would raise the deficit by trillions of dollars over the next decade, not accounting for the potential effects the bill would have on the US economy. That spending is concentrated between 2025 and 2028, coinciding with the next presidential election.
Republicans once campaigned against raising the national debt during the Obama administration, framing it as a national security threat and a burden to future generations. But it’s no longer the rallying cry it once was.
There are reasons to be concerned about a growing national debt. As my colleague Dylan Matthews writes, the bond market is already bristling at the prospect of such a significant increase in the deficit, a warning of potential economic downturn or even further increasing debt due to higher servicing costs if the bill becomes law.
Tax cuts are what make the bill so expensive
Trump wants to build on the tax cuts he passed during his first term. They are set to expire this year if Congress does not act, and the spending bill would keep them in place. It would also add some new ones, including the elimination of taxes on tips.
That is going to cost the US government. A breakdown of the bill’s budgetary effects published by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that the House Ways and Means Committee, which presides over tax policy, would be permitted to contribute an additional $3.8 trillion to the deficit — far more than any other House committee. That’s at least in part because tax revenue would be lower under the bill.
Meanwhile, the Armed Services and Homeland Security committees are the only others where Trump is seeking significant increases in spending as he seeks to deliver on his campaign promise of “mass deportations” with assistance from the military.
Any spending cuts in other areas aren’t nearly enough to counterbalance the resulting increase in the US deficit. That would likely require Republicans to slash public benefits even further than they already have in this bill. While they haven’t gone so far as to touch Social Security benefits, they have gone after Medicaid and insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.
Millions could become uninsured under the spending bill
Republicans have also included measures in the bill that would greatly increase the number of people without health insurance, according to a CBO estimate.
One provision allows enhanced premium tax credits for ACA insurance plans to lapse, which would increase premiums for millions of Americans who rely on them.
After the Covid-19 stimulus bill was signed in 2021, these tax credits became available to anyone whose premiums were over 8.5 percent of their household income — not just people earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line. Enrollment in ACA plans subsequently doubled to 24.3 million people between 2020 and 2025.
The House bill would allow those expanded tax credits to expire this year, effectively driving people out of the ACA marketplaces with higher costs.
Another provision would significantly decrease Medicaid enrollment by creating a work requirement for people under the age of 64 who do not have a dependent under 7 years old.
While not directly slashing Medicaid benefits, the work requirement would create additional barriers to Medicaid access, including administrative hurdles that could result in lower enrollment even among people who do work. (It’s worth noting that most nondisabled Medicaid recipients already work.)
Some states have already implemented similar work requirements with disappointing results. Arkansas and Georgia saw Medicaid enrollments plummet thereafter, with a court eventually overturning the Arkansas requirements on the basis that they violated federal Medicaid law.
The spending bill disproportionately benefits the rich
Under the tax cuts passed by Trump during his first term, the top 1 percent of earners saw the most significant gains, both in dollar amounts and as a percentage of their incomes.
This time is no different. Top earners will again profit significantly from the House spending bill, according to the CBO. The lowest earners, meanwhile, will see their household resources shrink, primarily due to reduced access to public benefits programs such as Medicaid and SNAP and higher ACA insurance premiums.
The bill could have a big impact on immigrant populations and their families abroad
The House bill advances numerous provisions targeting immigrants and undermining their US-citizen relatives, from restricting access to public benefits for families in which at least one person is undocumented to imposing new fees on asylum-seekers. However, there is one that would have a sizable impact well beyond America’s borders: a new tax on remittances, the payments that immigrants typically send to their families in their home countries.
The US is the largest source of remittances worldwide. Some of the top receiving countries include America’s neighbors in Central and South America — countries that have produced high numbers of migrants in recent years.
That’s significant because remittances have historically accounted for much larger sums than any foreign aid provided by the US and represent efficient, direct payments to individuals who can spend that money on what they need, mitigating economic incentives for them to migrate.
Now that the Trump administration has reduced foreign aid, remittances are more crucial than ever; however, their sums may be decreasing with new taxes.
