
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Photo
House Steps 5/22/25
A worker picks up trash on the House steps of the U.S. Capitol after the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Thursday, May 22, 2025.
Welcome to “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster,” a pop-up newsletter about the Republican tax and spending bill, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in a generation. Sign up for the newsletter to get it in your in-box.
All Senate Republicans voted early Monday to pretend that the $3.76 trillion extension of the Trump tax cuts doesn’t cost anything. The vote was perfectly along party lines, with all Democrats voting no.

Trump's Beautiful Disaster banner
The “current policy baseline” gimmick was not just a rhetorical maneuver so Republicans could claim that a bill that will cost $3.3 trillion over the next decade (not including new interest on the debt) actually saves money. It was fundamental to allowing Republicans to pass the bill under the budget reconciliation rules.
As Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) confirmed over the weekend, if the Senate used the baseline of current law that it has used most commonly—meaning that an extension of a tax cut or spending item actually costs money relative to what the law previously said—then the Senate bill would increase the deficit by more than what the budget resolution accounted for, and that deficits would also increase outside of the ten-year budget window. This would violate the rules of budget reconciliation and would mean that the bill would have to be reworked.
Therefore, Senate Republicans voted not just to make fake claims about budget deficits, they voted to save their bill.
Read more “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster”
The problem is that reality will intrude on this hermetically sealed Senate chamber, where the cost of extending tax cuts can be waved away with a magic wand. The House Freedom Caucus demanded in its “fiscal framework” that there could only be $2.5 trillion more in tax cuts in the bill than there are in spending cuts. That has been violated in the bill, with nearly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and only $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. This fiscal framework was a red line for the entire Freedom Caucus, totaling around 30 members, and according to them the language in the budget resolution is binding and does not rely on a current policy baseline. The Freedom Caucus is out with a post that claims the Senate bill, accounting for interest costs, adds 1,705 percent more to the deficit than the House version.
So whether the House will have the votes to accept the Senate’s work product is very much in question. But first the Senate has to get the bill over there.
All day today, the Senate will be engaged in the “vote-a-rama,” a process that is typical for the budget reconciliation process. It’s a strange tradition, because it’s seemingly meaningless and its rules are infinitely malleable.
Any senator can file any amendment and get a vote on it during the vote-a-rama. There have been at least 225 amendments filed on this bill. Yet nobody believes that all 225 will get voted upon today (and probably into tonight, maybe even tomorrow). At some point, senators just give up. There’s no real reason why it happens; at some point everyone tires of submitting their amendments for a vote. Often the vote-a-rama happens through the night to tire everyone out. But instead of starting it at 2 a.m. Monday when Democrats used the last of their debate time, Senate Republican leaders decided to reconvene at 9 a.m. That could mean more amendments, but it’s totally unclear how many will get a vote and how long it will last.
In addition, the vote-a-rama amendments are kind of nonbinding. Any amendment that passes can get nullified through a “wraparound” amendment that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) will substitute in at the end of the process. Most of the amendments are more message votes, the kinds of things that show up in campaign ads. (“Your senator voted to maintain tax cuts for the rich,” things like that.)
But Thune has to be careful not to bulldoze amendments that might lose him votes on the final bill. There are a few of the amendments, then, that take on importance:
The Collins Amendment: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has said that she is “leaning no” on the bill on final passage, and that she wanted to add amendments. Her amendment would double the rural hospital fund, the Band-Aid for nearly a trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts, from $25 billion to $50 billion. It would also add a new tax bracket for mega-millionaires—$25 million for single filers and $50 million for married couples filing jointly—at the pre-Trump 39.6 percent rate.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) has said he’s going to vote for it, and maybe other Republicans will as well. It would certainly help them rhetorically with the impression that this is a bill for millionaires. But big-money Republicans would hate it, and Thune would have to consider dropping it from the final bill. The problem, of course, is that Collins may bolt from the bill without it, and with Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Rand Paul (R-KY) clear nos, and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) unclear after much of her Alaska Gold Rush giveaway was overturned, Collins’s vote may be needed for passage.
The Obamacare Partial Repeal: Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) has filed an amendment to eliminate the 90 percent federal share for Medicaid expansion (the Obamacare insert for people between 100 and 138 percent of the federal poverty line) for new enrollees after January 1, 2031. The six-year lag time minimizes the perceived impact, but it would be massive; just four years of this in place would cut Medicaid by $220 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and if states dropped the expansion as a result of the federal match dramatically declining, it would lead to an additional 10.6 million losing coverage.
Related: Murkowski’s Alaska Gold Rush Loses Some Gold Plating
There are signs that this would be a bridge too far even for Senate Republicans. But if it passed, it would greatly expand the slashes to Medicaid in fundamental ways. And since this amendment was Scott’s condition for voting for the bill to proceed, it’s unclear whether he and others like Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) would continue to support the bill if it didn’t pass.
The AI Ban: Overnight, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) reached agreement on a deal that softened the ban on state regulation of artificial intelligence, a key ask from Big Tech. The deal would reduce the ban from ten years to five, while adding carve-outs for certain types of legislation that states could still implement. Keep in mind that the way this is structured is that states would need to adhere to the ban to be able to accept some of a $500 million broadband fund. But there’s a much bigger pot of broadband money from the 2021 infrastructure law that states could accept without having to adhere to the AI rules. So the “ban” as written is a bit toothless.
Nevertheless, the expectation here is that the deal was between Cruz and Blackburn alone, and not the other Republicans and Democrats who want to see the state AI ban taken out of the bill entirely. There will likely be an amendment to that effect in the vote-a-rama, though the Blackburn-Cruz deal may get placed in the wraparound amendment and supersede any vote-a-rama action, Politico reported.
Depending on how this all goes, final passage will happen either late today or early tomorrow. If Tillis and Paul are definite no votes—and all signs point to that—the real questions are Collins and Murkowski on the moderate side, and Johnson and Lee and Scott on the deficit hard-liner side. The Senate threaded this needle on the motion to proceed, but Thune would have nothing left to give out on final passage. So there’s still some uncertainty around final passage.
And there’s even more uncertainty in the House, depending on what’s delivered there.