President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill today to urge passage of his multitrillion dollar tax and spending agenda. The bill is a complex piece of legislation that includes tax cuts, spending increases, spending reductions and some tax hikes. In total, it would increase budget deficits by nearly $3 trillion over a decade. WSJ’s Richard Rubin reports on the testy debate inside the GOP over the bill. Jessica Mendoza hosts. Further Listening: -Trump 2.0: The First 100 Days -Trump’s Tariffs Force a New Era in Global Trade Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Trump's big, beautiful bill?
For months, President Donald Trump has been promoting what he calls his big, beautiful bill.
The great, big, beautiful bill. Great, big, beautiful deal. The big, beautiful bill. Big, beautiful deal. The greatest tax cuts in history. The one big, beautiful bill.
How many pages is this bill?
Chapter 2: How many pages is the legislation?
The version that the House Rules Committee has posted is just over a thousand pages.
Chapter 3: What are the main components of the bill?
That's our colleague, Rich Rubin. He writes about tax policy, and he's been covering the bill as it moves through Congress. In a nutshell, what is this bill? Like, why is it so big and so beautiful?
We're going to need a very large nutshell for this. This is an attempt to roll a bunch of Republican priorities into one piece of legislation. Basically, they've got so many different factions of the party that everyone can get something.
And even if there are parts of it that they don't like, that everyone will be on board for the one big, beautiful bill that represents the core of Trump's agenda.
The bill mainly has to do with taxes, but it touches all kinds of other stuff, from border funding to electric vehicles to education. But so far, the bill has faced some opposition, not just from Democrats, but from within the GOP, putting the party's fault lines on full display.
Chapter 4: Why are there divisions within the GOP over the bill?
It's a test for Trump. Can he get everybody together? But it's also a moment for those members to kind of decide how far they're willing to push up against where the rest of the party and the president are going.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, May 20th. Coming up on the show, why Trump's big, beautiful bill has become a big pain for Republicans. This year's tax bill has a lot to do with another major tax bill, one that Republicans passed back in 2017 during Trump's first term. When that bill became law, it was a huge deal for the GOP.
Chapter 5: What did previous tax legislation achieve?
Here's the House speaker at the time, Paul Ryan.
This is one of the most important pieces of legislation that Congress has passed in decades to help the American worker, to help grow the American economy. This is profound change and this is change that is going to put our country on the right path.
The bill represented the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax system in decades. It cut the corporate tax rate to its lowest point since 1939, and it lowered individual taxes for most households. The tax law did face opposition. Democrats said the cuts favored the wealthy at the expense of poorer Americans.
And the tax cuts added to the national deficit, according to official estimates, which angered fiscal conservatives. But some of the tax cuts in the 2017 bill were temporary.
I covered that bill in 2017. And when it passed, they set all these tax cuts, the rates, the standard reduction, the child credit to expire after 2025. And I was like, OK, well, I know what I'm doing in 2025. And here I am in 2025 covering the extension of those things.
And Republicans are actually in a good position to renew a lot of the policies they put in place about eight years ago. They have majorities in both the House and the Senate, and they have Trump in the White House.
They see this as a moment to really go out and lock those in. That's the core of what this bill is.
This bill is not just extending those 2017 tax cuts, but also expanding them.
The new stuff, they really are focusing on not people at the very bottom of the income scale who don't pay income taxes now, but people in the middle. So there is a higher standard deduction on top of the additional standard deduction. There is a child tax credit goes to $2,500 per child maximum.
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Chapter 6: How does this bill affect entitlement programs?
That's House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
All because Republicans want to provide a massive tax break to their billionaire donors like Elon Musk.
What is the goal for Republicans here? What is the argument behind these proposals? How are they talking about it?
Republicans are talking about the tax cuts as essential. The idea of extending the tax cuts is basically non-negotiable. It's something that they really feel is imperative economically, something they need to do. The spending changes, the spending cuts are something they also feel is an imperative to turn the tide on budget deficits, to try and rein in spending.
Their argument is that Biden and Democrats overspend and they need to start reining that in.
But the bill has gotten off to a rocky start, partly because it doesn't reduce the deficit. In fact, it increases the deficit. And that's annoyed some Republican hardliners, like Texas Congressman Chip Roy.
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Chapter 7: What are the criticisms from Democrats?
This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits.
Before even heading to the House floor, Republicans in committee meetings have gone as far as temporarily blocking the bill. And while the party does have a majority in Congress, that majority is super slim. They can only afford to lose three Republican votes. And keeping the coalition together isn't easy. That's next.
Chapter 8: What is the Republican argument for the bill?
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Let's talk about the challenges that the bill has faced up to this point. What have the key holdouts been arguing?
So there are, I think, a few different groups of holdouts, and we'll take them in turn. One is the conservative hardline holdouts, people like Chip Roy of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Josh Burkine of Oklahoma, and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. They're concerned about spending, largely. They think that the bill doesn't do enough to rein in spending.
Budget analysts have crunched the numbers, and they've found that if the bill were to be passed into law, the country's deficit would grow by about $2.75 trillion over the next decade. The four conservative holdouts say they want to see more aggressive spending cuts.
We are writing checks we cannot cash, and our children are going to pay the price.
They're concerned that the work requirements for Medicaid start too late, right? That it's backloaded and that a future Congress might just come in and change that. And so they want to accelerate that probably to 2027. They're concerned that the clean energy tax breaks don't go away fast enough, right? There's sort of a ramp down.
And, you know, if you set a 2031 date for the final phase out of certain energy tax credits, that lobbies will come and the next Congress will come and Trump will be out of office and there will be opportunities to extend those dates further out.
While hardline conservatives feel that the spending cuts don't go far enough, there are Republicans in Congress tugging in the other direction. Some have come out against the Medicaid cuts, saying it would take health care away from their poorest constituents. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, usually an ally of the president, was one of those critics.
These are working people and their children who need health care. And it's just wrong to go and cut their health care when they're trying to make ends meet, trying to help their kids.
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