President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" has made it through Congress, after House fiscal conservatives gave up demands of deeper spending cuts and moderate Republicans came to terms with the size of Medicaid cuts. The fact that House Speaker Mike Johnson got pulled from both sides of his party meant that neither side could be assured of a better deal if revisions proved necessary.
Wall Street never thought it was possible that the GOP would fail to renew the 2017 tax cuts, since that would tank the economy. The most important market reaction may come from bond investors. The 10-year Treasury yield perked up to 4.34% on Thursday. But so far, there's no sign of concern that the beautiful bill will make U.S. deficits too large to comfortably finance.
The Deficit Effect
The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the final changes to the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (or OBBBA) added $110 billion to deficits vs. the prior version. Some of those last-minute changes were focused on extending the time for renewable energy projects to take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act production tax credits. The Senate also doubled the size of an emergency fund to support rural hospitals facing Medicaid cuts to $50 billion.
Based on the current-law baseline, which assumes expiration of most 2017 tax cuts at the end of this year, CBO said that the OBBBA has $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $1.1 trillion in spending cuts, raising deficits by $3.4 trillion. Based on current policy, CBO said the Senate bill would cut spending by $1.25 trillion and lower taxes by $850 billion, lowering the deficit by about $400 billion.
The prior score showed that the Senate cut a few hundred billion less than the House in food aid and student loans. That only partly explains why the bill — despite bigger cuts to projected Medicaid spending — fell about $900 billion short of the fiscal bar set by the House, which required that tax cuts exceed spending cuts by no more than $2.5 trillion over 10 years. The Senate also spent an extra $344 billion than the House version on business tax incentives for expensing equipment purchases and funding research and development.