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Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham is preparing for the possibility that major provisions get squeezed out of President Donald Trump’s megabill. His solution: another tax and spending cuts bill.
As the Senate gears up to change the House-passed “big, beautiful bill,” its Republicans are considering potential edits — and Graham’s backup plan is aimed at making sure the party, and the president, can stomach the potential exclusion of some of their top priorities.
The South Carolina Republican told Semafor that the current legislation is not the end of the story, adding that he could foresee a total of three party-line bills if that’s what it takes: “Let’s try to reach a compromise on this bill. And we got two more to do.”
“There’s some things that the president wants, like no tax on tips and overtime. All this may be hard to fit in completely. So let’s have as big a bill as the market will bear, but realize that more is coming,” Graham said in an interview.
“How much more can you do at this stage in the process” is the central challenge that senators are confronting, he said. Graham made clear that he’s assured Sen. Ron Johnson — a Wisconsin Republican who wants more spending cuts — that another bill may be coming.
That would be a return to a strategy that Senate Republicans, including Graham, favored at the start of the year; senators pitched a smaller national security bill before the complex tax cuts bill. The House’s surprising ability to pass one megabill, and Trump’s embrace of Speaker Mike Johnson’s one-bill preference, upended that approach.
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The White House’s involvement in megabill talks is ramping up. Vice President JD Vance came to the Capitol on Tuesday morning and told Semafor he was there for meetings on the legislation.
GOP senators are trying to figure out how to add spending cuts to the bill while preserving as many of Trump’s campaign-trail promises as they can, particularly his proposed tax cuts for older Americans, tipped workers and overtime.
“Obviously they were big priorities for the president, and I would expect to see a number of those campaign commitments adhered to in the legislation,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said on Tuesday.
Some Republican senators have quietly raised concerns about those Trump-backed provisions not juicing the economy as much as other measures in the bill, suggesting they may be pared back. Similarly, adding more spending cuts could alienate moderate GOP members.
“It just becomes: How much can you put into the bill before you lose the votes?” Graham said. “We’re not going to get the bill through the Senate without more spending cuts. I think if you do too much, you’re going to lose the House, so there will be round two.”
Enacting two party-line bills is challenging. Republicans’ Obamacare repeal effort failed in 2017, and they then pivoted to a successful tax law using reconciliation. In 2021, Democrats quickly passed a huge Covid relief bill, then got bogged down in a larger social spending bill before passing a slimmed-down version a year later.
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- Johnson and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., are eyeing changes to Trump’s tax priorities, Politico reports.