Belated Republican Objections to the One Big Beautiful Bill Glide Over Its Blatant Fiscal Irresponsibility

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The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the House of Representatives narrowly approved early in the morning on Thursday, May 22, lives up to its name in at least one respect: It is big, weighing in at 1,037 pages and nearly 200,000 words. Since the bill's final text was not available until 10:40 p.m. on Wednesday, about eight hours before it passed by a single-vote margin shortly before 7 a.m. the next day, it would not be surprising if bleary-eyed legislators overlooked some of its nuances in their hurry to deliver the package that President Donald Trump demanded. As Reason's Liz Wolfe notes, at least two Republicans—Reps. Mike Flood (R–Neb.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.)—have publicly admitted as much, saying they missed objectionable parts of the bill when they voted for it.
If Flood and Greene had voted no, it would have been enough to change the outcome. Furthermore, it seems safe to assume that at least some of their colleagues had similar regrets but are too embarrassed to admit that they failed to exercise the minimum diligence that should be expected from members of Congress. But the complaints from Flood and Greene are notable for another reason: They have nothing to do with the bill's blatant fiscal irresponsibility, the main flaw highlighted by critics such as Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), and Elon Musk, who on Tuesday condemned "this massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill" as "a disgusting abomination."
That much was clear prior to the House vote. As Reason's Eric Boehm noted the day before Flood and Greene gave their crucial assent to the bill, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that it would add $2.3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years—an estimate that the CBO upped to $2.4 trillion this week. Boehm added that "other assessments of the bill" by the Yale Budget Lab (originally published on May 16) and the Penn Wharton Budget Project (published three days later) estimated that it would add "more than $3 trillion" to the debt.
Those are low-ball estimates, based on the unrealistic assumption that Congress will allow Trump-favored tax cuts to lapse toward the end of that period. If "temporary provisions in the bill are made permanent," Boehm reported, the Yale Budget Lab estimated that it would trigger $5 trillion in new borrowing.
The national debt currently exceeds $35 trillion, including about $29 trillion in debt held by the public, which is about the size of the entire U.S. economy. Last March, Trump promised to do something about that. "In the near future," he told Congress, "I want to do what has not been done in 24 years—balance the federal budget. We're gonna balance it." But the glaring gap between that promise and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act did not faze Flood or Greene, whose concerns are much narrower.
Flood belatedly objected to a provision on page 541 of the bill that would limit the authority of federal judges to "enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order." While that would be convenient for an administration that seems bent on defying court orders, it raises clear rule-of-law concerns, and it is not obviously related to taxes or spending, the bill's ostensible subjects. But as The New York Times notes, this provision "was advanced out of committee three weeks before" the House approved the bill.
At a town hall in Nebraska last week, Flood nevertheless admitted that the provision was "unknown to me when I voted for the bill." Although that confession provoked "boos from the crowd," Flood thought he should get points for candor, saying, "I am not going to hide the truth."
Greene, for her part, was upset about a provision on page 278 of the bill that would impose a 10-year moratorium on local and state regulation of artificial intelligence. "Full transparency, I did not know about this section," Greene admitted in an X post on Tuesday. "I am adamantly OPPOSED to this [because] it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there."
Why did Greene miss that vote-changing detail? "You know," she told the Times, "it's hard to read over 1,000 pages when things keep changing up to the last minute before we voted on it." But the deal-breaking provision that Greene overlooked was not one of the things that changed at the last minute: There it is on page 491 of a report that the House Budget Committee distributed on May 20, two days before the vote on the bill.
"PRO TIP," Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.) wrote in response to Greene's confession. "It's helpful to read stuff before voting on it." Many other commenters joined Lieu in mocking Greene's dereliction of duty.
To be fair, however, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a lot to digest even with two days' notice. It combines the extension of income tax cuts enacted in 2017 with sundry new tax provisions, increases in spending on the military and border control, cuts to welfare programs such as Medicare, and various changes that have little or nothing to do with fiscal policy, including the provisions that bother Flood and Greene. The White House counts "50 Wins in the One Big Beautiful Bill," and its list is not exhaustive.
The challenge of understanding what the bill would do was magnified by Trump's unremitting pressure and House Speaker Mike Johnson's insistence on a vote prior to Memorial Day, which left legislators and their staffs scrambling to read and comprehend the final version in the middle of the night. Although "major provisions of the big beautiful bill are still being negotiated and written," Massie noted on May 21, "we are being told we will vote on it today. Shouldn't we take more than a few hours to read a bill this big and this consequential?"
That wait-and-hurry-up approach has long been par for the course with Congress, where must-pass legislation succeeds by sheer volume and artificial haste, cramming together unrelated provisions that would not have passed on their own. Even if you have trouble mustering sympathy for legislators like Flood and Greene, who by their own account fell down on their jobs, this is no way to make law. Still, it is telling that the post-passage dissents do not even touch upon the looming fiscal crisis that Trump and Congress seem determined to ignore.
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