Senate Republicans revise Trump's policy bill, scrounging for votes to pass it

Boston Globe

15 hours ago

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Republican leaders in the Senate are rushing to shore up support for the legislation so they can quickly pass it and send it to the House for final approval in time to meet the July 4 deadline Trump has set. An initial vote in the Senate could come later Saturday.
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Party leaders are trying to appease two flanks of their conference. Some, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said they could not support it without greater reassurances that the Medicaid cuts it contains would not hurt rural hospitals in their states. And fiscal hawks, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, have said they do not want to back legislation that would only increase the deficit.
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The core of the bill remains the same. It would extend tax cuts passed by Republicans in 2017 and add some new ones Trump campaigned on, while slashing spending on safety-net programs, including Medicaid and food assistance. The biggest tax cuts and the biggest changes to those anti-poverty programs remained intact. Taken together, the bill would likely increase federal debt by more than $3 trillion over the next decade, though lawmakers are still shaping the bill and waiting on an official estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.
With Trump demanding quick action, Republicans in Congress have intensified their efforts to push it through to enactment even as many of them — including several who voted for it in the House — have been open about their reservations about a measure they are concerned could be a political loser.
The revisions released early Saturday were designed to allay some of those concerns.
Senators, including Tillis and Susan Collins, R-Maine, had pressed for the inclusion of a rural hospital fund to help health care providers absorb the impact of a provision that would crack down on strategies that many states have developed to finance their Medicaid programs. Despite their pushback, that provider tax change remains in the bill, though lawmakers have delayed its implementation by one year.
It is unclear whether a $25 billion compensation fund will be enough to win their votes. Collins had suggested that she wanted to provide as much as $100 billion to ensure that rural hospitals, which operate on thin margins, were not adversely affected.
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But it appeared to be enough to win over at least one Republican holdout who had expressed concern about the Medicaid cuts — Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said he would vote for the bill and was confident that changes benefit his state at least in the short term.
A new provision allowing 'individuals in a noncontiguous state' to be exempt from enforcing new work requirements imposed on SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, appeared aimed at mollifying Murkowski of Alaska. Her state would be hit with billions of dollars in nutrition assistance costs as a result of the legislation, and she had cited the provision as one of her chief concerns. The bill also includes new health provisions designed to benefit Alaska, as well as new tax benefits for fishers in the state's waters.
Some of the changes were aimed at appealing to members of the House, where Republicans from high-tax states like New York have threatened to sink the bill if it does not include a substantial increase in the state and local tax deduction, currently capped at $10,000. Senate Republicans, skeptical of the deduction, still ultimately decided to match the House plan to lift the cap to $40,000. But while the House made the increase permanent, the Senate keeps it for only five years, allowing it to snap back to $10,000 in 2030.
The newest draft makes even sharper cuts to subsidies for wind and solar power, something that Trump and other conservatives had explicitly called for this past week. It remains to be seen whether those changes could cause friction with Republicans who have publicly supported green energy credits, including Tillis, Murkowski and Sen. John Curtis of Utah.
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Previously, the Senate proposed allowing companies that were building wind and solar farms to claim a tax credit worth at least 30% of their costs if they started construction this year, with a phaseout over two years. But the revised bill would require companies place their projects 'in service' by the end of 2027 to claim the tax break.
The bill would also impose additional taxes on renewable energy projects that receive 'material assistance' from China, even if they don't qualify for the credit. Because China dominates global supply chains, those new fees could affect a large number of projects.
The new Senate measure would more quickly end tax credits for electric vehicles, doing away with them by Sept. 30. It would also slow the phaseout of a lucrative tax credit to make hydrogen fuels, allowing such projects to qualify if construction were started by the end of 2027, instead of by the end of this year.
The bill also includes a provision written by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to sell as much as 1.225 million acres of federal land across the American West in order to build housing. Earlier versions of that proposal that would have auctioned off even more acreage had drawn fierce opposition from conservative hunters and outdoorsmen, and Republican senators from Montana and Idaho had said they would not vote for it.
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