Trump signs Big Beautiful Bill
The major tax cuts and spending package is expected to raise the federal debt by $3.3 trillion
US President Donald Trump is set to sign a sweeping multitrillion-dollar tax and spending package he dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill” into law. It comes just a day after the legislation was approved in a narrow vote in the US House of Representatives.
The signing ceremony is taking place place at the White House on Friday, July 4, during an Independence Day picnic hosted by the US president for military families. The event featured a flyover of US fighter jets and a B-2 bomber — the aircraft used in recent bunker-busting raids on Iranian nuclear sites.
The nearly 900-page-long piece of legislation extends the 2017 tax cuts from Trump’s first term and temporarily lowers taxes on tips and overtime pay. It also includes hundreds of billions in new spending allocated for the president’s border and national security agenda. In particular, it includes funding for the US-Mexico border wall and large-scale deportations of migrants.
To partially offset the costs, the bill imposes deep cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, and clean-energy subsidies. Nearly 12 million Americans relying on Medicaid will lose their medical insurance by 2034 and 3 million will lose their eligibility for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits, as a result of the cuts, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
The legislation is expected to raise the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next decade by incurring revenue losses amounting to $4.5 trillion and bringing only $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, the budget office estimated. It also contains a provision increasing the national debt ceiling by $5 trillion to allow further borrowing.
The House vote on Thursday, just a day before the July 4 deadline set by Trump, followed a tense 24 hours of internal GOP negotiations. GOP holdouts in the Republican-led House initially blocked a procedural vote on Wednesday. Trump had to personally call lawmakers into the early hours of Thursday to win them over.
Only two Republicans – Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania – ended up breaking rank to vote against the legislation.