After almost 27 hours and 46 amendment votes, Senate Republicans passed their large tax and spending package right before noon Tuesday by a vote of 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote.
The bill now heads back to the House, which is expected to take it up as early as Wednesday morning.
Colorado Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper voted against the bill, called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” that contains much of Trump’s and Republican’s priorities, including more funding for border security and defense, extending most tax cuts from Trump’s 2017 bill that expire at the end of the year, and ramping up domestic energy production, in particular using fossil fuels. It’s paid for in part through cuts to health care, federal food aid, changes to student loan programs, and ending clean energy tax credits passed through the Inflation Reduction Act. The bill also raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, the largest increase in U.S. history.
Bennet said he wasn’t surprised by the outcome.
“This is a bill that’s going to make the wealthiest people in America wealthier and the poorest people in America poorer, which is, I think, exactly the opposite of what we should be doing right now,” Bennet told CPR News.
He added it will blow a “massive hole in the country’s deficit.” Bennet took to the Senate floor late Sunday to rail against the bill and the trickle-down economics behind the bill. He said past tax cuts didn’t boost the economy and cut the deficit, but rather added to it.
“There are already people who feel like democracy isn’t working well enough,” Bennet said. “People feel like the American Dream is out of reach and for too many people, that’s how they’re going to feel as a result of this bill.”
According to the CBO, the Senate version of the bill would add $3.3 trillion over a decade to the debt. That’s a trillion more than the House version of the bill.
Hickenlooper was disappointed with the outcome, especially with regard to clean energy and health care.
“I think the number of people who are going to lose their health care, nursing homes are not going to get paid what they need to operate,” Hickenlooper told CPR News. He added even though the long-term consequences might not be felt until after the midterm elections, referring to provisions that are set to go into full effect in a couple of years. “They’re cagey, but I still think they’re going to hurt … I think there’s going to be a cost to be paid for all these things.”
The CBO also found that almost 12 million Americans would lose health insurance coverage in the Senate version – due to changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
Senate Republicans chose to use a “current policy” baseline to score the tax section of the bill and not the usual “current law” policy. It was a budgetary gimmick that essentially zeroed out the cost of extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts and allowed the bill to meet its targets under the budget resolution around reconciliation rules, the legislative process Congress is using to get around the filibuster in the Senate.
The bill makes permanent the income tax cuts from the 2017 tax bill that were supposed to expire at the end of this year.
The Senate also made permanent an increase of the Child Tax Credit to $2,200 per year, so long as one parent has a verifiable Social Security Number. The House version had that figure at $2,500 through 2028.
Bennet, who has long championed the CTC, wanted to see it expanded further, but that was not agreed to in a vote that fell along party lines.
The Senate version also cuts back a bit from the House version on how much state and local taxes people can write off on their federal tax returns. The Senate keeps the House’s $40,000 cap, but reinstates the $10,000 cap after five years.
As for some of Trump’s campaign pledges, the bill has a measure that would temporarily end taxes on tips. The Senate version is capped at $25,000. It also temporarily ends taxes on overtime. The deduction is capped at $12,500 and starts to phase out for those making more than $150,000 a year. These provisions would be in effect from 2025 through 2028 and then expire.
Additionally, the Senate version of the spending bill would create a tax deduction of $10,000 on car loan interest for new cars that are assembled in the United States.
The Senate goes a little further than the House version of the bill when it came to giving seniors an extra tax deduction. The Senate has it set at $6,000. The House had it at $4,000.
Both bills create a standard deduction for charitable donations. The Senate sets it up to $1,000 ($2,000 people filing jointly) with no expiration. The House had it at $150 expiring at the end of 2028.
The Senate’s version – much like the House version – also imposes work requirements to qualify for Medicaid. The Senate bill goes a step further, however, to require adults with children 15 and older to work.
The Senate also went further on the Medicaid provider tax, which states have used to get more federal Medicaid dollars. It reduces the tax starting in 2028 to 6% and then phases it down to 3.5% over five years. To address concerns some Senators had about the provided tax change, Republican leaders included a $50 billion stabilization fund for rural hospitals over five years. Still, that will be a fraction of the amount states will lose in federal Medicaid funds. Senate Republicans cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid in their bill.
An effort to put back in a provision that would reduce federal Medicaid dollars to states that offer state health insurance for undocumented immigrants failed. The Senate Parliamentarian had ruled it violated the rules around reconciliation, but Republican Sen. John Cornyn forced a vote. That could have impacted Colorado, which has a state insurance program for undocumented children and pregnant women.
The other big hit for Colorado will be when it comes to SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps. The Senate bill expands SNAP work requirements for adults 18 to 64 and shifts more costs to the state. How much it does will depend on a state’s SNAP error rate. The Senate version scaled back the percentage from the House version, but some states may not be able to cover the cost and people would lose coverage.
To get the support of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, leaders included a carve-out for Alaska and nine other states with the highest error rate. These states will have the state cost share delayed for two years.
In 2024, Colorado’s error rate was just under 10 percent, which would mean, under the Senate plan, the state would be on the hook for 10 percent of the cost of SNAP. In a letter to congressional leaders, Gov. Jared Polis wrote that it could cost the state up to $200 million more a year.
The Senate softened SNAP work requirements for adults with kids. The House applied work requirements to people with kids over the age of 6. The Senate raised that to adults with kids 14 and older.
Many expected the Senate to extend the exit ramp for a variety of tax credits, but for some, it made it quicker or more difficult to access. For example, the electric vehicle tax credit now expires at the end of September, while the House version extended it to the end of the year.
Hickenlooper offered an amendment early Tuesday morning to keep the 25D residential clean energy credit through 2026, to save jobs and give businesses an exit ramp. It was not adopted.
Some Republicans were unable to offer an amendment to soften the phaseout of clean energy tax credits. The Inflation Reduction Act spurred a lot of solar and wind investments and jobs in Republican states.
However, leaders did remove a controversial tax on solar and wind projects and created a carve-out from the tax credit phaseout for solar and wind projects that start construction one year after the bill’s enactment.
A controversial Artificial Intelligence provision was removed from the bill with an amendment that passed 99-1. The provision would have called on states to follow a 10-year “temporary” pause on AI regulations or lose out on $500 million in AI infrastructure and development funds. There was bipartisan pushback in the Senate, as well as from states, to the idea.
A deal between Republican Senators on the issue fell apart Monday night, with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who was opposed to the moratorium and offered the amendment stripping the language, wrote in a statement, “This provision could allow Big Tech to continue to exploit kids, creators, and conservatives.” She said, unless Congress passes her Kids Online Safety Act, it “can’t block states from making laws to protect their citizens.”
Colorado passed an AI law, but the state has been unable to find agreement over its actual implementation.
Senate Republicans also took provisions out of the final bill that would have changed the federal government’s pension program. Committee text had language that would have required most federal workers to contribute up to 15.6% of their salaries to retirement. There was a carveout for members of Congress and their staff and federal law enforcement. They would have only had to pay 9.4%. All those provisions were taken out of the Senate bill.
The bill overhauls student loan repayments. It ends some income-contingent plans, like former President Joe Biden’s SAVE plan, ends the Grad PLUS loan program and includes a $65,000 per student cap on Parent PLUS loans. It creates two new plans for loans after July 1, 2026. One would have a standard repayment, with people paying a fixed amount over 10 to 25 years. The other would tie payments to a borrower’s adjusted gross income, called the “Repayment Assistance Plan.”
The bill also ends Pell grants to students from higher-income families.
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