WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans hauled President Donald Trump’s big tax breaks and spending cuts bill to passage Tuesday by the narrowest of margins, pushing past opposition from Democrats and their own GOP ranks after a turbulent overnight session.
The outcome capped an unusually tense weekend of work at the Capitol, the president’s signature legislative priority teetering on the edge of approval or collapse. In the end that tally was 50-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
Three Republican senators — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky — joined all Democrats in voting against it.
“In the end we got the job done,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said afterward.
The difficulty for Republicans, who have the majority in Congress, to wrestle the bill to this point is not expected to let up. The package now goes back to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana had warned senators not to overhaul what his chamber had already approved. But the Senate did make changes, particularly to Medicaid, risking more problems ahead. House GOP leaders vowed to put it on Trump’s desk by his July Fourth deadline.
It’s a pivotal moment for the president and his party, as they have been consumed by the 940-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which was its formal title before Democrats filed an amendment to strip out the name. Republicans invested their political capital in delivering on their sweep of power in Washington.
Trump acknowledged it’s “very complicated stuff” as he departed the White House for Florida.
“I don’t want to go too crazy with cuts,” he said. “I don’t like cuts.”
Alabama’s Angle
After the Senate vote, U.S. Sens. Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., touted what they believed were wins for the state in the bill, including tax breaks, funding for the border, farmers, and for NASA in Huntsville.
“This pro-family bill delivers on the mandate the American people gave us on November 5, with huge wins that fulfill much of President Trump’s and Senate Republicans’ America First policy agenda,” Britt said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote.
Tuberville was equally optimistic about the bill’s passage. He said in a statement, “The road to Making America Great Again runs through the One Big Beautiful Bill. President Trump campaigned on popular policies like No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, and No Tax on Social Security — and this bill turns those policies into law.”
Britt specifically highlighted her advocacy for increasing funding for the 1890 Scholars Program to $60 million, a $20 million increase from the 2018 Farm Bill, according to a press release from her office. The scholarship covers tuition and fees for students studying agriculture, food or natural resource sciences at historically Black colleges and universities, including two in Alabama. The U.S. The Department of Agriculture abruptly canceled and then reinstated the program earlier this year after public outcry.
The Marshall Space Flight Center is also set to benefit from the legislation, with the Senate adding funding for the Space Launch System rockets and towards improvements at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Redstone Arsenal is also expected to play a part in the Golden Dome missile defense system. The initiative would get $25 billion from the bill.
In a last-minute change, Senate Republicans boosted a rural hospital fund to $50 billion, originally slated to be $25 billion, over the next five years to offset the impacts of Medicaid cuts in the bill. In a post on X Tuesday, Britt highlighted how she and Tuberville supported the provision, which would give the state’s rural hospitals $500 million of that money.
However, both of Alabama’s senators voted against an amendment from Collins during the vote-a-rama that would have also boosted that fund to $50 billion but would have done so by giving a higher tax rate to people making over $25 million a year. The amendment failed, but 18 Republicans voted for it.
Tuberville said he was “especially proud” of getting his legislation to cap graduate student loans included in the bill.
“We are more than $37 trillion in debt, and we have to start standing up for American taxpayers,” he said in a statement.
Alabama’s House delegation is expected to split on party lines when it votes on the big bill this week.
Senators work around the clock
What started as a routine but laborious day of amendment voting, in a process called vote-a-rama, spiraled into an all-night slog as Republican leaders bought time to shore up support.
The droning roll calls in the chamber belied the frenzied action to steady the bill. Grim-faced scenes played out on and off the Senate floor, amid exhaustion.
Thune worked around the clock, desperately reaching for last-minute agreements between those in his party worried the bill’s reductions to Medicaid will leave millions more people without care and his most conservative flank, which wanted even steeper cuts to hold down deficits ballooning with the tax cuts.
The GOP leaders had no room to spare. Thune could lose no more than three Republican senators, and two — Tillis, who warned that millions of people will lose access to Medicaid health care, and Paul, who opposes raising the debt limit by $5 trillion — had already indicated opposition.
Attention quickly turned to two other key senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Collins, who also raised concerns about health care cuts, as well as a loose coalition of four conservative GOP senators pushing for even steeper reductions.
Murkowski in particular became the subject of GOP leaders’ attention, as they sat beside her for talks. Then all eyes were on Paul after he returned from a visit to Thune’s office.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Republicans “are in shambles because they know the bill is so unpopular.”
An analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law. The CBO said the package would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the decade.
Pressure built from all sides. Billionaire Elon Musk said anyone who voted for the package should “hang their head in shame” and warned he would campaign against them. But Trump had also lashed out against the GOP holdouts, including Tillis, who abruptly announced his own decision over the weekend not to seek reelection.
Senators insist on changes
Few Republicans appeared fully satisfied as the final package emerged, in either the House or the Senate.
Collins fought to include $50 billion for a new rural hospital fund, among the GOP senators worried that the bill’s Medicaid provider cuts would be devastating and force them to close.
While her amendment for the fund was rejected, the provision was inserted into the final bill. Still she voted no.
The Maine senator said she’s happy the bolstered funding was added, but “my difficulties with the bill go far beyond that.”
And Murkowski called the decision-making process “agonizing.”
She secured provisions to spare Alaska and other states from some food stamp cuts, but her efforts to bolster Medicaid reimbursements fell short. She voted yes.
What’s in the big bill
All told, the Senate bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, according to the latest CBO analysis, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.
The Senate package would roll back billions of dollars in green energy tax credits, which Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide. It would impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements on able-bodied people, including some parents and older Americans, making sign-up eligibility more stringent and changing federal reimbursements to states.
Additionally, the bill would provide a $350 billion infusion for border and national security, including for deportations, some of it paid for with new fees charged to immigrants.
“The big not so beautiful bill has passed,” Paul said.
Democrats fight all day and night
Unable to stop the march toward passage, the Democrats tried to drag out the process, including with a weekend reading of the full bill.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, raised particular concern about the accounting method being used by the Republicans, which says the tax breaks from Trump’s first term are now “current policy” and the cost of extending them should not be counted toward deficits.
She said that kind of “magic math” won’t fly with Americans trying to balance their own household books.
Alabama Daily News’ Alex Angle contributed to this report. Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti, Darlene Superville, Seung Min Kim and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.