The Senate passed the GOP megabill. Now what?
Everything you need to know.
Good morning and welcome back to Wake Up To Politics. Quick programming note: I’ll be going live on Substack with , formerly of FiveThirtyEight and now host of the
podcast, at 2 p.m. ET.We’ll talk about the GOP megabill, the NYC election, and Galen’s op-ed on why Democrats need their own Trump. You’ll get an email when we start. Join us, and bring questions!
President Trump’s top legislative priority, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, moved closer to the finish line on Tuesday after the Senate narrowly approved the package.
The chamber split 51-50, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins (ME), Rand Paul (KY), and Thom Tillis (NC) opposing the package and Vice President JD Vance providing the tie-breaking vote.
As a quick reminder, the 870-page megabill would:
Permanently extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
Remove taxes on tips and overtime pay through 2028.
Impose new work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps, while also passing some of the cost of food stamps onto the states.
Roll back the clean energy tax credits from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
Boost border security funding, allowing for further construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents.
Increase defense spending, including for the development of a Golden Dome missile defense system.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the package would increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The non-partisan agency has also forecasted that 11.8 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the next decade due to the bill’s changes to Medicaid and Obamacare, while most Americans will see continued decreases to their tax bills.
In all, per the Yale Budget Lab, the poorest 20% of U.S. households (those with an annual income below $13,350) will see their income reduced by an average of 2.9% under the package, after taking into account both the tax and social safety net changes. The income of the next 20% of households (those with an annual income between $13,350 and $36,475) would remain flat. The top 60% of households will all benefit, especially the richest 20%.
The Senate made a number of last-minute changes to the bill, including dropping a new tax on solar and wind energy that had been mysteriously added to the package, creating carveouts to ease the impact of food stamp changes on Alaska in order to win the support of swing vote Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and creating a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals as a way to partially offset the impact of reductions to Medicaid.
An amendment (approved in a 99-1 vote) removed the moratorium on state regulations of AI. And a number of other key provisions, including changes that would have made it harder for judges to hold the Trump administration in contempt, were removed by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that they didn’t comport with the Byrd Rule, which governs the reconciliation process that Republicans used to advance the package.
The Big Beautiful Bill — well, technically, it’s now called “An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of H. Con. Res. 14” after Democrats struck the original title as non-compliant with the Byrd Rule — now moves back to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is hoping to approve the Senate-passed version as early as today.
But he has his work cut out for him.
According to a whip count maintained by Punchbowl News, more than 30 House Republicans have serious objections to the package. Johnson can only afford to lose three GOP votes and still pass the bill.
Last night, two conservatives — Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Ralph Norman (R-SC) — voted against the bill in the House Rules Committee. Two others — Reps. Warren Davidson (R-NC) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) — voted against a previous version of the package when it was before the House in May. Opposition from just those four would be enough to sink the bill, or at least to force changes to it (which would require yet another Senate vote).
As usual, Johnson has to deal with both sides of his fractious conference: the aforementioned members, and their allies, want more spending cuts to reduce the deficit impact of the package; meanwhile, a corresponding group of moderates believe the package cuts too much.
Luckily for the speaker, at nearly every turn in Trump’s second term, when the president has made a request of House Republicans, they’ve eventually fallen in line. We’ll see if that pattern repeats itself.
Johnson is also dealing with flight delays as members struggle to return to Washington, D.C. (I can relate: after a series of delays, I didn’t get back to my apartment until 2:15 a.m. this morning.)
As a general matter, as Republicans creep closer to achieving the first major legislative package of 2025, the lack of enthusiasm from members across the party’s ideological spectrum is striking.
“Do I like this bill? No,” the moderate Murkowski said minutes after voting for it, as she urged the House to change the package she had signed off on (just as House Republicans hoped the Senate would change the version of package they had voted for).
“The Senate has done some serious damage to President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill,” conservative Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) wrote yesterday, calling the package a “swamp creation.”
Even top Republicans are admitting their discomfort. “I’m not happy with what the Senate did to our product,” Johnson told reporters, even as he plans to push the House to accept the upper chamber’s version. Vance, who provided the tie-breaking vote for the bill (as his potential 2028 rivals are already noting), argued for the package recently by promoting the immigration spending and saying that everything else is “immaterial” in comparison, not exactly a rousing defense of the bill’s less popular provisions.
This is the nature of megabills: they are hard to control, as provisions get tucked in by a variety of factions and interests (sometimes without anyone even noticing), intended to please everyone — but sometimes pleasing no one. These sorts of legislative packages, without any single animating theme, become hard to promote politically (as Democrats discovered in the 2024 election), although that also means they can be difficult to message against.
Recent polls have shown between 49% and 55% of Americans opposed to the package — although surveys also show few have heard much about the bill. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, only 39% of voters said the had heard “a lot” about the bill. Focusing attention on a piece of legislation with so many varied goals is another challenge for both supporters and opponents of the package.
As of this writing, the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post are both taken up with news of Diddy’s trial, while Politico and the Wall Street Journal are highlighting the major legislative package that passed the Senate just yesterday.
Speaking of other news…
CNN: Paramount settles Trump’s ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit with $16 million payout and no apology
AP: Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority strikes down 176-year-old abortion ban
NBC: Pentagon halts weapons shipment to Ukraine amid concerns over U.S. stockpile
WaPo: Judge blocks Trump from ending temporary protected status for Haitians
NYT: Trump’s Finances Were Shaky. Then He Began to Capitalize on His Comeback.
What is the actual mechanism in which a provision was inserted into the bill that “nobody knows where it came from?” I mean, obvious someone inserted it but is unwilling to admit to it because it proved unpopular, but how did it mechanically get added? Doesn’t it need to be an amendment to add things like that? Is there no “track changes” with who suggested what, or what was added by what amendment? How does that even happen?
As a factual matter, it is not accurate to call Chip Roy or Ralph Normal "conservatives". It would be better to call them "far-right extremists".