On July 3, the United States House of Representatives narrowly passed, 218-214 and mostly along party lines, President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a sweeping budget reconciliation originally introduced in May.
The bill, which is 887 pages long, makes significant cuts to Medicaid and prohibits health clinics that provide abortion care from accepting Medicaid funds for any of their services, allocates more than $46 billion to build a border wall on the country’s southern border— a key promise of Trump’s first administration— and train immigration officers, eliminates tax incentives for electric vehicles and green energy appliances, as well as ending the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, introduces a school voucher plan that provides a tax credit for those who donate to nonprofit organizations, as well as a scholarship from the nonprofit to pay for private school tuition, reduces federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion and more.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates it could also add over $3 trillion to the current national debt— a claim the White House’s official “Myth vs Fact” page for the bill disputes, while insulting the office.
After the House passed the original version of the bill on June 1, the Senate made alterations— including the removal of a clause restricting state regulation of artificial intelligence for 10 years, which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said would have caused her to vote no on the bill if she had read— before sending it back to the House, where it received another affirmative vote.
At the beginning of the Congressional session, Hakeem Jeffries, using his power as Minority House Leader, stretched his allotted 60 seconds of speech into a record-breaking eight hours and 45 minutes, in an attempt to delay the vote.
“Leadership requires courage, conviction, compassion— and, yet, what we have seen from this administration and co-conspirators on the Republican side of the aisle is cruelty, chaos and corruption,” said Jeffries.
The bill was then passed.
“America was in deep trouble,” said Representative Mike Johnson after the vote. “We knew that if we got in government, we’d have to quite literally fix every area of the absolute disaster of the Biden era.”
Response to the bill’s passing has been mixed.
“This is the decisive, once and for all answer to what this president and his party are about,” said Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg in a video shared to social media. “It is up to us, the American people, to respond politically and say that it is unacceptable to harm the majority of Americans to make the very wealthiest a little better off.”
Buttigieg had said in May that the bill “has something for every part of the American political spectrum to hate.”
In a statement, Michian Governor Gretchen Whitmer said that “Republicans in the United States House passed a reckless bill that threatens the health, security, and economic stability of millions—including hundreds of thousands of Michiganders who stand to lose their Medicaid coverage, and countless working families who rely on SNAP benefits to put food on the table.”
Members of the Republican party, meanwhile, expressed their satisfaction with the passage.
“The One Big Beautiful Bill wasn’t written for the Democratic party, the elites, or the media. It’s for hardworking Americans,” wrote Johnson on X.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt simply shared the word “VICTORY!,” with an American flag emoji.
In a poll conducted by a Democratic super PAC, 60% of respondents were familiar with the bill and 55% opposed it once they knew what it entailed— the number was 43% before they were aware.
Trump is expected to officially sign the bill into law during a ceremony on July 4.
