Could Trump fail on tax bill? Why going 'big' doesn't always work out as planned

USA Today

11 hours ago

Disputes inside the GOP about parts of Trump's major tax bill threaten approval in the Senate and past compromises reached by the Republican-led House.
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Republicans begin debate in the narrowly divided Senate with factions seeking to increase spending cuts or curbing tax breaks, which threaten the compromise needed for approval back in the House.
Trump's billionaire adviser Elon Musk complicated the debate by urging lawmakers to kill the bill.
Congressional leaders insist approval is still possible despite the fissures in the narrow Republican majorities in each chamber and the unified opposition of Democrats.
WASHINGTON – Will President Donald Trump 's 'big beautiful bill' go bust?
The second-term president's highest-priority legislation is under attack from some Senate Republicans – and from his former billionaire adviser Elon Musk – for costing too much. Complaints are also mounting from Republicans who are opposed to cutting Medicaid health insurance and other popular programs used by many Americans, especially as a way to help pay for tax breaks that would benefit some of the country's highest-income earners.
With Republicans holding the slimmest of majorities in both chambers of Congress and with Democrats showing no sign of wanting to help Trump notch a major win to begin his new administration, lawmakers from Trump's own party are sounding apprehensive about threading the needle before their self-imposed July 4 deadline to get something to the president's desk for signature into law.
'We're anxious to get to work on it," Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, told reporters earlier in the week as Republicans and Musk started publicly airing their complaints about the effort.
Adding to the challenge: Some of the very House GOP members who last month voted in favor of their 1,100-page version of Trump's tax and policy plan started finding faults of their own that they say meant they'd probably have been a 'no' if they had the chance to do it again.
Presidents often aim high to start terms
Presidents often try in their first year to build on the momentum of their elections to get major legislation approved.
For Joe Biden, it was an infrastructure bill. For Barack Obama, it was overhauling healthcare insurance. For George W. Bush, it was overhauling public education.
Trump leapt into action in 2025 with an unprecedented pace of executive orders: 157 through May 23. When he turned to legislation, he persuaded Republican congressional leaders to package all his priorities into one bill, rather than splitting taxes and border security into two different bills, to complete the debate in one fell swoop.
Lawmakers often shy away from piling too much into one bill because each contentious provision spurs its own opposition. But faced with the prospect of unanimous Democratic opposition, Trump opted for a strategy that focuses on GOP priorities such as tax relief and border security while personally lobbying reluctant Republicans to stay in line.
'Americans have given us a mandate for bold and profound change,' Trump told Congress in a speech March 4. 'I call on all of my Republican friends in the Senate and House to work as fast as they can to get this Bill to MY DESK before the Fourth of JULY,' he added in a social media post about three months later, on June 2.
Musk opposition makes waves
Trump's efforts worked in the Republican-led House, which after several days of negotiations and an all-night floor debate voted 215-214 in favor of a plan that had the full backing of the White House. Getting the measure through the Senate - even with the GOP in charge needing just a simple majority of 51 votes - is proving to be its own elusive challenge.
Musk, the former head of Trump's bureaucracy-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, spent this past week unloading on the House-passed bill for spending too much money. He called the legislation "pork-filled" and a "disgusting abomination," and urged lawmakers to "KILL the BILL."
While Musk's barrage ignited a war with Trump and left many Republicans cringing, deficit hawks in the GOP said they appreciated the world's richest man also pushing for deeper spending cuts from the U.S. government.
"I welcome people like Elon Musk that try to hold our feet to the fire," said Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Missouri. "We often disappoint our voters when we don't do the cuts that we campaign on, when we're not fiscally responsible."
But Rep. Don Bacon, R-Nebraska, who served in the Air Force for 30 years, said the division between Trump and Musk wasn't a good look for his party, especially when it's trying to advance the primary piece of legislation on the president's agenda.
"It's just not helpful," Bacon said. "When you have division, divided teams don't perform as well."
'The opposite of conservative': Sen. Paul on bill
Several pockets of Republican senators have voiced concerns about the House-passed legislation. Each group has their issue that they want addressed, and each one presents a hurdle for Trump and GOP leaders like Thune as they try to cobble together a winning 51-vote coalition that can also make it back through the House for another final vote.
The Senate factions include one group seeking to cut more spending because the Congressional Budget Office said the House-passed plan would add $2.4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. Others are worried about cutting Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income families. And another handful of senators say they are worried about the House-passed bill rolling back renewable energy tax credits for solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear energy.
"There are many of us who recognize that what came out of the House was pretty aggressive in how it seeks to wind down or phase out many of the energy tax credit provisions," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. "I happen to think that we've got tax policies that are working to help advance our energy initiatives around the country, as diverse and as varied as they are. Wouldn't we want to continue those investments?
'This bill is the opposite of conservative, and we should not pass it,' added Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, in a June 4 social media post that raised concerns about the nation's debt limit.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is one of the outspoken Republicans taking issue with the House-passed bill's provisions that would cut nearly $800 billion during the next decade from Medicaid and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, cost 7.8 million people their health insurance.
"I don't want to see rural hospitals close and I don't want to see any benefits cut in my state," Hawley said.
Trump and his allies contend spending cuts of $1.6 trillion are the most ever approved in a House bill and that the tax cuts will spur economic growth to offset the costs. Trump got personal this week in calling Paul's ideas 'crazy' in a social media post and said the people of Kentucky 'can't stand him.'
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a staunch Trump ally, told reporters June 4 that few people are going to like everything in an 1,100-page bill. But the Louisiana Republican said the measure he helped craft in the House was carefully calibrated to gain wide support.
"I hope everybody will evaluate that – in both parties, and everybody – and recognize, 'Wow, the benefits of this far outweigh anything that I don't like out it,'" Johnson said.
Senate dropping local tax deductions would be 'radioactive': Rep. Lalota
Any changes made by the Senate will force another vote in the House before the bill can become law - and that's where the math can get tricky.
Republican senators are talking about tinkering with a key compromise that Trump and Johnson signed off on in the House that raised the federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) from $10,000 to $40,000 for people earning less than $500,000 per year. That provision is important to GOP lawmakers from high-tax states such as California, New York and New Jersey who supported the House bill that passed through the 435-seat chamber by only a one-vote margin.
The Senate aims to cut back that provision. But Rep. Nick Lalota, R-New York, told reporters on June 4 that revisiting the tax issue "would be like digging up safely-buried radioactive waste."
House members scouring through the bill they voted on weeks ago are also finding unfamiliar provisions in the version that they say they would have opposed. For example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, said in a social media post June 3 that the Senate needs to strip out language she hadn't noticed earlier that would prevent states from regulating artificial intelligence.
Rep. Mike Flood, R-Nebraska, said he opposed a section that aims to hinder federal judges from enforcing their court orders. Trump sought the provision to prevent judges from blocking policies largely spelled out via his executive orders.
Senate could drop contentious provisions House members risked supporting
Even though Republicans control both chambers of Congress, the Senate could drop or fail to approve contentious parts that GOP House colleagues in competitive districts already went out on a limb to support. It's happened many times before - with sizable political consequences. The concept even has a name: Getting BTU'd.
That refers to a 1993 House vote on a controversial energy tax during the first year of Bill Clinton's presidency based on British thermal units. House Democrats lost 54 seats in the 1994 election – and control of the chamber for the first time in 40 years – in part because of supporting the BTU tax that the Senate never debated.
John Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, has said a book about such votes could be called 'Profiles in Futility.'
Another example was the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act, a bill which Obama supported as president that aimed to limit the emissions of heat-trapping gases from power plants, vehicles and other industrial sources. The Democrat-controlled House narrowly approved the measure 219-212 but the Senate never took it up. Critics said it would raise the cost of energy. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-profit libertarian think tank that opposed the measure, counted 28 House Democrats from coal states who lost their seats in the 2010 mid-term election after voting for the bill.
Fast forward to 2025 and Republicans are the ones facing a similar dynamic. Musk, who contributed about $290 million of his personal fortune to help Republicans including Trump win last November, slammed House lawmakers who voted for the president's legislative package.'Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong,' Musk wrote June 3 on social media.
But House Republicans who voted for the legislation, including some who also demanded deeper spending cuts when it was in their hands, said they're not worried about the package falling apart and coming back to haunt them. They say that's because they did fight for more budget cuts.
"This wasn't a hard vote. It was hard going through the process to get more, and you can always do better," said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina. "But look at what Donald Trump 's done, the great things that are contributing to cutting the deficit."
Rep. David Schweikert, R-Arizona, who represents a competitive toss-up district, noted that he's introduced multiple bills to trim federal spending. "If Mr. Musk wants to be helpful, what he should do is start to understand that those of us in a 50-50 district who have shown up with actual policy solutions that offset every penny of this bill," he said.
Leaving Washington for the weekend, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force Once on June 6 that he wasn't worried about Musk and that he remained confident he'd get "tremendous support" in the Senate to pass the bill. 'I don't know of anybody who's going to vote against it," the president said, before adding: "Maybe Rand Paul."
For his part, Johnson told reporters June 4 that he wasn't concerned about House Republicans losing seats in 2026. Predicting that the Senate would find the necessary votes on the president's tax bill, the speaker said he expects Americans will see the benefits of Trump's efforts before the next election.
'Am I concerned about the effect of this on the midterms? I'm not," Johnson said. "I have no concern whatsoever. I am absolutely convinced that we are going to win the midterms and grow the House majority because we are delivering for the American majority and fulfilling our campaign promises."