As the Senate prepares to put its imprint on President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act this week, Republicans are grappling over the potential impact the megabill might have on the national debt, which has ballooned to nearly $37 trillion.
With a 10-year budget bill, deficit hawks in the Senate like Rand Paul and Ron Johnson are drawing a red line — pushing for deeper cuts than those in the bill the House sent to them.
As lawmakers aim to send a bill to Trump by the Fourth of July, those demands could complicate the Senate’s calculus for passage — where Republicans can only afford three defections.
On one hand, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduces outlays by more than $1.5 trillion against current baseline spending — according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary analysis, meeting reconciliation’s target for between $1.5 to $2 trillion in spending reductions.
On the other hand, the bill still adds about $3.1 trillion to the debt, according to the CBO — though some Republicans like Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky predict it could add up to $20 trillion to the debt over the next decade.
At odds with the White House
Paul and Johnson are directly at odds with the White House, which points to an analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisors that finds the legislation will save $1.6 trillion over 10 years.
“There’s $1.6 trillion worth of savings in this bill,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a May 19 press briefing. “That’s the largest savings for any legislation that has ever passed Capitol Hill in our nation’s history.”
In a press briefing on Thursday, Leavitt attacked the CBO and other scorekeepers, saying they used “shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.”
The Senate is expected to alter the House-passed proposal and some of the Senate’s fiscal hawks have conditioned their support on the implementation of even steeper cuts. But any cuts these members want implemented will have to be balanced by Senate leadership against the desires of moderates who wish to preserve key social safety net programs, creating major challenges for hopes of offsetting the cost of the package.
Will the House and Senate see eye-to-eye?
Another complication: any changes to the bill made by the Senate must be approved by the House, which narrowly sent the bill to the upper chamber by just one vote.
Speaker Mike Johnson, who guided the bill through the House over the objections from both fiscal hard-liners and moderates in his conference, declared “It’s not going to add to the debt,” when asked if Trump would take ownership of an increase of the deficit.
And he said he and Trump has the same concerns as Johnson and Paul.
“He’s also concerned as I am, as Ron Johnson is, as Rand Paul is, as all of us are about the nation’s debt, and he and I talk about this frequently, and he is excited about changing that trajectory,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The bill sent to the Senate would also hike the federal debt limit by $4 trillion dollars, another sticking point with fiscal hawks.
“There’s nothing fiscally conservative about expanding the debt ceiling more than we’ve ever done it before,” Paul said after the bill passed through the House two weeks ago. “This will be the greatest increase in the debt ceiling ever, and the GOP owns this now.”
‘Wimpy and anemic’
At an event last week in Iowa, Paul repeated his disdain for the bill, calling the current cuts “wimpy and anemic” and suggesting that additional cutbacks could happen to entitlement programs like Medicaid and Social Security — areas where a line has been drawn by Trump and fellow GOP senators like Josh Hawley of Missouri, who called building the bill on cutting health insurance for the working poor “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
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Paul told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he thought there were enough votes among his Senate Republican colleagues to block the bill.
“I think there are four of us at this point, and I would be very surprised if the bill at least is not modified in a good direction,” he said.
Trump called Paul out over the weekend, writing on his Truth Social platform that if the senator votes against the bill, “Rand will be playing right into the hands of the Democrats, and the GREAT people of Kentucky will never forgive him!”
Talking to reporters on Monday, Leavitt suggested there will be a price to pay for those who vote against it.
“Their voters will know about it. That is unacceptable to Republican voters and all voters across the country who elected this president in a Republican majority to get things done on Capitol Hill,” she said.
Budget reconciliation, the tactic congressional Republicans are using to get the bill passed, is not subject to the filibuster, enabling the Republican majority to enact sweeping changes with only a simple majority.
But changes to Social Security and Medicare are exempt from the fast-track budgeting process. Any changes to those entitlements would require 60 votes and bipartisan cooperation from Democrats — a prospect Republicans are not entertaining as they go it alone on the bill.
Paul called for steeper spending cuts so that raising the debt limit would not be part of this bill. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called on Congress to increase the statutory debt limit by the end of July to prevent the country from defaulting on its debt obligations.
“I want [Trump’s 2017] tax cuts to be permanent. But at the same time, I don’t wanna raise the debt ceiling five trillion,” he told CBS on Sunday. “The GOP will own the debt once they vote for this.”
Sen. Johnson, a notable fiscal hawk, has also signaled strongly that he would not support the bill in its current form, given that it adds to the debt.
“It’s so far off the mark. It’s so bad,” he told reporters at the Capitol while the House was still advancing the bill through the Rules Committee. “I’ve been trying to interject reality. I’ve been trying to interject facts and figures. They’re on my side.”
Big or beautiful?
At a Newsmaker luncheon Wednesday in Milwaukee hosted by WisPolitics and the Milwaukee Press Club, Johnson claimed there was “no amount of pressure” that Trump could place on him in order to support it in its current form.
Asked Sunday on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” if he was willing to push so far as to blow up Trump’s agenda, Johnson stressed his loyalty was with the American people.
“I want to see [Trump] succeed. But again, my loyalty is to the American people, to my kids and grandkids. We cannot continue to mortgage their future,” Johnson said.
Trump adviser Elon Musk, who left the White House on Friday after his role as a special government employee reached its 130-day limit, broke publicly with the president during an interview with CBS a couple days earlier in which he said he was “disappointed” by the massive spending bill.
“I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful,” Musk told CBS News, “but I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”
-ABC News’ Isabella Murray and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
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