New 'Big Beautiful Bill' Could Add $3.3T to Federal Debt

Six weeks after the House of Representatives passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and domestic policy bill by the narrowest of margins, Senate Republicans spent all of Monday and Tuesday night scrambling to make amendments to the bill that would lock down the votes necessary to pass the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in Senate.

Aside from universal Democratic opposition, Trump’s blockbuster bill also faces strong reservations within the Republican camp for a variety of reasons. The biggest and most pressing concern is the proposed bill’s budgetary effect. According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, the latest version of the bill, introduced by Republican leaders on Friday, would add $3.3 trillion to the already ballooning federal debt – a proposition that causes headaches for many Republican lawmakers. Compared to the version of the bill that was passed by the House on May 22, the Senate bill includes even steeper tax cuts, resulting in more than $800 billion in additional debt by 2034.

The latest version of the landmark bill includes an extension of existing tax cuts plus new ones amounting to nearly $4.5 trillion over the next decade. The foregone tax revenue would partly be offset by deep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare and rollbacks of clean energy programs, but the funding gap remains too big for the taste of House Republicans, who had been adamant to limit the funding gap to $2.5 trillion over ten years. Exceeding that benchmark by such a wide margin, puts serious question marks over the bill’s prospects in the narrowly divided House, where Republicans cannot afford many defectors for the bill to pass before the July 4 deadline set by President Trump.