The US Adopts One Big Beautiful Bill
The Republicans came together to pass Trump’s mammoth spending bill that cuts taxes, slashes social services, expands ICE, divests from clean energy, and greatly increases the deficit
American politics is usually little more than a TV show. Unfortunately, what the lead characters do sometimes impacts Canada. Each week, Tripwire takes a look at the headlines coming out of Washington to find the stories that matter most to Canadians.
The U.S. has just adopted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), a sweeping omnibus spending bill which contains the core of President Donald Trump’s agenda in his second term. The bill is highly controversial for the changes it makes to taxes and social services, among other areas.
Trump had demanded that the OBBB be passed by 4 July, U.S. Independence Day. It took a lengthy and chaotic congressional process to pass the bill on time, mainly due to several Republican holdouts who had concerns about various provisions, especially related to the deficit. However, Trump and Congressional Republican leaders were able to force or cajole enough of the doubters to deliver the OBBB to Trump’s desk just before 4 July. Trump signed the bill into law that day.
“The Republicans in the House of Representatives have just passed the “ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL ACT.” Our Party is UNITED like never before and, our Country is “HOT.”,” Trump posted on Truth Social after the bill was passed.
The 877-page OBBB contains hundreds of provisions pertaining to dozens of issues. Among the most impactful is that it extends the tax cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which was passed in 2017 during Trump’s first term. The USD $4.5 trillion tax cuts in the TCJA were set to expire this year, most of which benefit the wealthy—specifically, those making over $1 million annually. The OBBB also contains more tax breaks and provisions, and it allows workers to deduct tips and overtime from their taxes.
To help pay for the tax cuts, OBBB also makes major cuts to social programs like SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps) and Medicaid, a government health insurance program which provides coverage to 68.6 million low-income Americans. OBBB adds work requirements so that able-bodied Medicaid recipients would have to work or volunteer for at least 80 hours per month to qualify for benefits, which adds a complex work verification process to health insurance on top of other challenges.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which forecasts the impact of legislation like OBBB, estimates 10.9 million people will lose Medicaid coverage over the next decade. Overall, the CBO projects OBBB will cut over $1 trillion from U.S. health care and, when combined with other policy changes, will cause 16-17 million people to lose health care.
Another major concern about OBBB is the impact it will have on rural hospitals. In June, a group of Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the Republicans saying that the proposed cuts to Medicaid would put 338 rural hospitals at risk of being closed. Numerous hospital operators themselves are expressing concern that a loss in funding would shut down already-strained rural hospitals and could cause millions of people to lose access to health care even if they have coverage.
“What it’s going to do to rural health care in Arizona is destroying it,” Neal Jenson, the CEO of Cobre Valley Regional Medical Center in Arizona told the Gila Herald. Numerous other health advocates and hospitals are saying the same thing.
The OBBB also gives a massive increase to immigration enforcement, including ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the law enforcement agency tasked with arresting illegal immigrants for deportation. The Trump administration has been pushing for mass deportations, which has strained ICE’s resources. The OBB allocates $170 billion to immigration enforcement, including ICE, the border wall, and Customs and Border Protection. ICE had a budget of $9.13 billion in 2025 and the OBBB raises it to over $30 billion by 2029. This means ICE will have a budget larger than most militaries.
The new funding comes as ICE opens a new detention facility in Florida known as Alligator Alcatraz. The small facility, which has a capacity of 5,000 inmates, is located deep in the Everglades in a swamp filled with alligators with only one road in or out. The U.S. government has been looking for new facilities to keep migrants. The Trump administration tried keeping illegal immigrants in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility, but moved away from the idea as it costs over $13 million to keep each inmate at that facility, far more than anywhere else in the U.S. Trump said that part of the appeal of the facility is that escapees would be eaten by alligators.
The OBBB also eliminates tax credits for clean energy and generally moves the U.S. away from clean energy sources like wind and solar power. 93 per cent of electricity capacity being added to the U.S. in 2025 will be from clean energy sources. Energy consumption is rising faster than ever in the U.S. as the country adds energy-intensive AI development projects to its top priorities. However, coal and oil are the big winners under the OBBB.
The law opens up federal land across the U.S. for oil and gas drilling and reduces the royalties companies extracting these resources are required to pay. It creates new carbon capture tax credits which encourage higher production. The OBBB also mandates that at least four million acres (1,618,743 ha) more land will be opened for coal mining.
“This bill will be the most transformational legislation that we’ve seen in decades in terms of access to both federal lands and federal waters,” lobbying group American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers told CNBC. “It includes almost all of our priorities.”
One Big Beautiful Deficit
Despite the long-time insistence from Republicans that they want to reduce the national debt and deficit, the CBO projects that the OBBB will add up to $3.4 trillion to the U.S. deficit over the next decade. It also raises the debt ceiling—the maximum amount the federal government is allowed to borrow—by $5 trillion. According to the U.S. Debt Clock, the U.S. federal debt is just over $37 trillion. In 2025, the U.S. hit a deficit of $1.365 trillion prior to passage of the OBBB.
The White House is pushing back on this claim, saying the OBBB will in fact cut the deficit by $1.4 trillion. The White House says analysis by the Council of Economic Advisors, which advises the president directly, found that the economic policies and spending reductions in the OBBB will overall reduce the debt and deficit.
The increase to the deficit was a major hurdle for some Republicans, especially members of the Freedom Caucus, a group of Republicans in the House of Representatives who are generally the most conservative members and ostensibly oppose increases to the deficit above all else. The Freedom Caucus was formed in 2015 by members of the Tea Party movement, a group of Republicans who formed in 2007 to oppose President Barack Obama, especially his expansion of the health care system under Obamacare. The Tea Party and Freedom Caucus have caused numerous problems for both the Democrats and for Donald Trump during both his terms.
Thomas Massie, a representative from West Virginia and member of the Freedom Caucus, became one of the faces of Republican opposition to the OBBB. Massie expressed concern over the increase to the deficit in the bill and ultimately voted against it.
“Although there were some conservative wins in the budget reconciliation bill (OBBBA), I voted No on final passage because it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates,” Massie posted on X.
_(cropped)_4x5.jpg){kind=link}
Massie was one of just two Republicans in the House who voted against the OBBB on Thursday. The other was Brian Fitzpatrick, who said he voted against it because the cuts to Medicaid were too deep. Trump has vowed to oppose both of them in the 2026 midterm elections due to their votes. Ultimately, the OBBB passed the House with a vote of 218-214, with the two Republicans and all Democrats voting against it.
The deficit increase was an issue for the OBBB in the senate as well, which passed it before the House vote. Numerous Republican Senators voiced similar concerns as the Freedom Caucus had, and ultimately Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Thom Tillis voted against the bill. Vice President J.D. Vance cast the tiebreaking vote so the OBBB passed the senate by the narrowest of margins.
Elon Musk Attacks OBBB, GOP
Numerous other conservatives in the U.S. have expressed concern about the impacts of the bill on the deficit, including technology CEO and former member of the Trump administration Elon Musk. When Trump was first elected, Musk served as a special advisor to the president and led the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was meant to find trillions in savings in the federal government. Musk only found a few billion in savings, which are completely wiped out by the OBBB.
Musk ultimately left the Trump administration at the end of May on bad terms over his opposition to the OBBB. Musk and Trump descended into a flame war on their rival social media platforms X and Truth Social about the bill, which culminated in Musk accusing Trump of being part of the Epstein files. While Musk has retracted that claim, he has continued attacking Trump and the Republicans for the OBBB.
“It is obvious with the insane spending of this bill, which increases the debt ceiling by a record FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS that we live in a one-party country – the PORKY PIG PARTY!! Time for a new political party that actually cares about the people,” Musk posted on X.
Musk is pitching a new political party, which he calls the America Party. Musk says the party would represent the “80 per cent in the middle” of American politics—the number of people he believes are not aligned with the furthest right and left ends of the American political spectrum. Musk was not born in the U.S., so he cannot become president. However, as the richest person in the world with a net worth of over $400 billion, he can afford to bankroll any candidate of his choosing.
This is not the first time in American politics that a political centrist has attempted to form a new party representing “the middle”. Following his loss in the 2020 Democratic primary, businessman and attorney Andrew Yang founded the Forward Party. Using the slogan “Not Left. Not Right. FORWARD,” the party pitches itself toward centrist moderates who “are not represented by legacy parties”. The Forward Party is currently trying to get onto the ballot in all 50 states by 2028.
Trump hit back hard at Musk for his criticisms of the OBBB, posting on Truth Social that Musk was upset about the OBBB eliminating electric vehicle credits, which benefit Musk’s flagship company Tesla. Trump also said Musk receives more subsidies than anyone from the U.S. government and that if those ended, he “would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa”.
“Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible?” Trump said to reporters at the White House on Tuesday.