Much Costlier ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Primed to Pass the House Without Changes

After an all-night lobbying campaign, it appears that Speaker Mike Johnson has all the votes he needs to send the One Big Beautiful Bill Act without amendments to the president’s desk a day before July 4, Trump’s self-imposed deadline. As of my writing this post, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is still speaking on the floor, as he has been for the past few hours, in a quixotic attempt to delay passage of Republicans’ massive reconciliation bill. Once Jeffries stops talking, the speaker will move to vote on final passage, and the legislation, absent any surprises, will squeak through.

Now that the Senate has rewritten it, however, this legislation is very different from what the House originally passed in May. The initial House version of the bill was projected to add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over ten years by the Congressional Budget Office (not counting its economic effects, which raised the cost to nearly $2.8 trillion). The Senate-revised bill they are now waiting to approve, on the other hand, would balloon deficits by $3.4 trillion.

Amazingly, those CBO estimates do not even include projected interest costs that will flow from a higher national debt. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates that, including interest costs, the Senate-passed reconciliation bill will add $4.1 trillion to the national debt over a decade. If the bill’s expiring provisions, such as major tax breaks and spending increases, are made permanent later on, the bill’s total cost could reach $5.5 trillion. For reference, the national debt currently stands at $36.2 trillion and already is expected to grow — before this bill’s passage — by another $21.75 trillion by 2036.

It should go without saying, but obviously bears repeating: Deficits are nothing more than deferred taxes and/or spending cuts. The interest costs that derive from the national debt will, in due time, require massive new taxes on the American middle class to prevent the federal government from catastrophically defaulting on its obligations. Paying interest to bondholders is already, in 2025, the third-largest category of federal expenditures behind Social Security and Medicare — surpassing the entire defense budget, all means-tested welfare, the federal portion of Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits.

The costliest provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are listed below, with their deficit impacts projected over ten years:

• Extending the individual and business tax cuts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (including a far larger state and local tax deduction of $40,000 versus the original $10,000 and an added $6,000 deduction for seniors): $4.68 trillion
• New tax cuts lasting only through Trump’s term, including no tax on overtime, no tax on tips, no tax on car loan interest, and new tax-advantaged “Trump accounts” for children: $168 billion
• Other tax provisions, including full expensing for certain factories, tax credits for private school scholarships, and the expansion of other targeted tax credits: $264 billion
• An increase in defense spending, including on shipbuilding, munitions and the defense industrial base, missile defense, and other weapon systems: $149 billion
• Increased spending on immigration enforcement and homeland security, partially offset by higher immigration-related fees: $128 billion
• Expansion of agricultural subsidies, including direct farm payments based on commodity prices, trade promotion, and disaster assistance: $60 billion

Meanwhile, the bill’s major spending offsets — reforms to Medicaid and food stamps, cuts to green energy subsidies, and limits on student loans — combine to produce well over a trillion dollars in savings, yet they cover only a fraction of the bill’s overall cost.