America's Talking - Senators Worry About Spending, Debt Increase in Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

(The Center Square) – Republicans’ behemoth budget reconciliation bill still faces major hurdles after passing the U.S. House last week, with multiple senators raising concerns about the legislation’s cost. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act in its current form hikes the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and funds large swaths of Trump’s tax, border, energy, and defense agenda, including codifying President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. The legislation consists of 11 separate House committee prints that collectively fulfill the April budget resolution’s 10-year spending and savings instructions. Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_91f88393-7ac6-4eef-8bfb-17f6f071e382.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. While the U.S. House passed President Donald Trump's big, beautiful budget bill, there's still plenty of work to do in the U.S. Senate. While Democrats decried the bill is cutting too much from past budgets, Elon Musk said it's still too expensive and undermines the work he's done with Doge, the Department of Governess, efficiency that he's stepping away from.

joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, where are we at with the continuing resolution? Sure. I mean, we are in the negotiation stage on the Senate side. So the House Speaker Mike Johnson, though many doubted his ability to get it across the finish line. He did. And he got the votes needed to pass this big, beautiful bill. It started across several different committees. You know, they basically passed a first version that said, hey, the committees need to cut all this spending to make this bill work. So then the committees did their thing.

They put forward these proposals that would cut the necessary spending to partially pay for the tax cuts. There's also some policy, a lot of policy provisions in there as well. And then they cobble together all these committee items into a bill, old school style. They are not just continuing resolutions at the last minute, but actually an appropriations bill that comes from the committees and spends the money. And they got it across the finish line. But now the Senate is doing their own rigmarole. And there's some Republicans in particular who are a little skeptical, one maybe the most vocal is Rand Paul, you know, not too surprising. He's more of a budget hawk. And of course, this bill does add, you know, depends on who you ask, but it's going to probably add trillions,

maybe five trillion dollars to the national debt over the next decade. And so, you know, adding trillions of dollars to the debt, largely because of the extending the Trump tax cuts that were passed in 2017 and extending them. But there's some other things in there like, you know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. It's probably going to make it through in the final version of this bill. And so it is expensive. And there's some Republicans having heartburn about that. Senator Ron Johnson at Wisconsin, you know, he had some strong words.

He said this is mortgaging our children's future. And so basically Johnson and Senate Republicans are kind of wanting to get something through, but reckoning with the high cost of this bill, it's unclear if they're going to, how they're going to pay for it, or if maybe they can get enough votes to pass this without having to make too many major changes to Johnson's version. Yeah, so there's a couple of, you mentioned a couple of U.S. senators who are critical of the spending and increased debt in the bill. Curious what you made of Elon Musk comments, though.

Sure. I mean, that was, I think, a big blow to the Trump team. You know, it's interesting because, you know, getting Musk on his side was generally seen as a major win for Trump. Of course, Musk used to support Trump's enemy, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Musk had a big hand in helping Trump get elected financially and strategy and otherwise. And his tenure in the administration was pretty short. he's not the only Trump administration official to not stick around very long.

But he did something now that he's out of the administration that he probably never could have done while he was in the administration. And that is be critical of the president. And of course, Doge, you know, was working very hard to expose government waste. At first, Musk said that he could cut $2 trillion in government waste, which if that was done on an annual basis, would eliminate the deficit. And then he cut that down to maybe one trillion. and here in the end, he's only going to cut about $150 billion. It's unclear. I think some of that was because of a lack of political will, I should say, from Trump

and other Republicans. I mean, it's, you know, why wasn't there a Doge bill, right? Everything we heard about Doze was they don't have the authority to do it. You know, Trump doesn't have the authority. Every time Musk and Doge would do something, they would get sued. It would get blocked by the courts because they don't have the authority. We know who does have the authority is Congress. Congress has all the authority.

But they're never one. as a Doge bill. And because of the layoffs and the speed with which he moved and, you know, different things. Musk's popularity really dropped with a lot of people and Doge's popularity suffered as well. And so he kind of lost the political momentum before he was able to make his change as permanent. And now here we are with this Trump spending bill, which is going to rack up way more deficit spending in a year probably than Doge ever saved. Casey, another thing that Trump said will help close the debt anyway was his, and budget deficits, were his tariffs on foreign goods being shipped into here.

President Trump was dealt another blow this week when a court ruled that Trump himself doesn't have the authority, doesn't have unlimited power to impose these tariffs. Now, Trump administration said they're going to appeal that all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it's just another obstacle on the way there. He said the tariffs that were going to be charged on these foreign goods coming in would help balance the budget. So there's a lot of moving parts here. Yeah, I mean, Trump was hoping to raise a lot of revenue with the tariffs. There was always kind of a dispute about how much money he could raise.

But it was generally agreed that he could raise money with these tariffs and, you know, raise a significant amount, maybe not enough to pay for this bill, but a noteworthy amount. And the devil's in the details because the tariffs and the trade deals change weekly, right? So it's hard to calculate a number, but billions, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars probably. And now we're not going to get that, at least in the short term. It appears that way. I mean, these are the most active courts I've ever seen pushing back on a president. I mean, you could say Trump is more unprecedented than past presidents, and that's why they're doing this.

Trump accuses them of being activist, judges. Right, he does. Yeah. They're, you know, their political desires. Yeah, and he might be right about that, at least for some of them. The more judges oppose you, the harder it is to say they're activists because at a certain point it's like the whole judicial branches against you. But, you know, some of these judges, their rhetoric and who appointed them, you know, you can see why Trump might say that Democrat appointed.

Been pretty, maybe some of them, you know, have a history of liberal rulings and all that. So, you know, the country, I think, is aware that there are a lot of liberal activists. judges out there, but they still have the power to stop him. Now, the Supreme Court could turn it over. I will just say that just because Trump loses, even if he does lose this case, it doesn't mean he can't do tariffs at all. It just means that he can't do them in the way that he's been doing them using the legal justification that he's been using. Right. So it doesn't forever say the president can do tariffs. I mean, the Supreme Court could issue some more broad precedent to undo some of Trump's tariff policy. but it's been generally understood that the president has some discretion when it comes to tariffs. So I think Trump's going to end up being able to do something here, but he's going to, as you said,

he's going to be slowed down and gummed up again in the legal process. And that's going to just make it harder to cement his agenda early on in this presidency. Well, back to the budget. The U.S. Senate returns to D.C. next week where senators will begin working on the House-passed, big, beautiful bill. So listeners can keep up with that story and more at thecentersquare.com. Casey, thank you for joining us.