Why Doesn’t the Big Beautiful Bill Cut the Budget More? A Defense

The Big Beautiful Bill has taken a lot of PR hits of late, including from me and Elon Musk. 

I love writing that line. It makes it sound like Elon Musk and I have similar influence, when everybody knows that I am the larger political force of the two. 

The criticisms all boil down to one essential fact: the bill doesn’t fundamentally change the trajectory of budget deficits continuing forever, and the national debt keeps increasing at an alarming rate. 

If the United States faces an existential threat from an exploding debt and deficits as far as the eye can see, how does raising the debt limit and increasing so many parts of the budget do anything but make things worse? Worst of all, given all the work done by DOGE to slash government spending, why aren’t those DOGE cuts put into law?

For all my criticisms of the Big Beautiful Bill, I also have said I would vote for it if I were in Congress. Ultimately, my criticisms are based on what I think ought to be done, not on what can be accomplished by a single bill that will ultimately be passed through the reconciliation process. If you don’t pass this bill, nothing will get passed because Democrats can use the filibuster to stop anything else. 

Are we to let the perfect be the enemy of the good? If so, then we will never make progress.

And as much as there is to criticize, there is equally much to be admired, and without passing this bill, the United States will be much worse off than if it makes it onto President Trump’s desk for a signature. And that is the standard by which we should be judging this bill. Will things be better, or worse, if it passes?

Stephen Miller explains why the Big Beautiful Bill looks as it does:

I’ve seen a few claims making the rounds on the Big Beautiful Bill that require correction.

The first is that it doesn’t “codify the DOGE cuts.” A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to “mandatory” spending only — eg…

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 25, 2025

I’ve seen a few claims making the rounds on the Big Beautiful Bill that require correction.

The first is that it doesn’t “codify the DOGE cuts.” A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to “mandatory” spending only — eg Medicaid and Food Stamps. The senate rules prevent it from cutting “discretionary” spending — eg the Department of Education or federal grants. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory. The bill saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform. A remarkable achievement.

I’ve also seen claims the bill increases the deficit. This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick. Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.

Another fantastically false claim is that the bill spends trillions of dollars. This is just completely invented out of whole cloth. This is not a ten year budget bill—it doesn’t “fund” almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not). In other words, if this bill passed, but the annual budget bill did not, there would be no government funding. Under the math that critics are using, if we passed a one paragraph reconciliation bill that cut simply 50 billion in food stamp spending, they would say the bill “added” trillions in spending and debt because they are counting ALL the projected federal spending that exists entirely outside the scope of this legislation, which is of course preposterous. The only funding in the bill is for the President’s border and defense priorities, while enacting a net spending cut of over 1.6 TRILLION dollars.

The bill has two fiscal components: a massive tax cut and a massive spending cut.

If you take Miller’s analysis seriously–and I certainly do–the bill suddenly looks radically different. All the claims that it adds to the deficit are based on the assumption that the 2017 tax cuts should expire this year. 

In other words, built into the CBO assumptions is a massive tax increase, which is what would happen if this bill doesn’t pass. Passage of the BBB simply extends the Trump tax cuts, which everybody expects, no matter what kind of budget gets passed. Calling that “adding to the deficit” is fundamentally dishonest because there is no possible world where those tax cuts would have expired. Even if Joe Biden had been reelected, the majority of those tax cuts would have been extended. 

Given the scope of the bill–and no budget reconciliation bill can have a bigger scope–there is actually a massive spending CUT about which you have heard much: the cuts to Medicaid. By cutting off Medicaid for illegal aliens and deadbeat men who refuse to work even 20 hours, spending is cut dramatically. You can only accomplish what amounts to welfare reform of this magnitude through the budget reconciliation process because it would be filibustered and die in the Senate otherwise. 

As for DOGE cuts? As Miller says, they can’t be included in this bill because Senate rules won’t permit it. They will have to be passed the old-fashioned way. Trump may be magic, but his magic doesn’t extend that far. 

In other words, this bill does an awful lot that absolutely must be done, and by Senate rules, cannot do any of the other things we all so desperately wish it could. 

Trump is doing much to drain the swamp, but his power does not extend to changing the rules of the legislature. This bill does everything the Executive can do, given the constraints that it faces. When we criticize Trump and even Congressional Republicans, much of our ire directed at them should be aimed elsewhere. 

It’s not that RINOs aren’t complicating the process needlessly–they are–but even if we had 58 solid Republican Senators who worked in lockstep, the bill would be no better. If Democrats have more than 40 Senators, we’re stymied.