One Big Beautiful Bill — or One Ugly, Expensive “Abomination“?
AT A GLANCE
• Trump’s new bill is a massive spending package covering taxes, defense, immigration, and welfare.
• Critics such as Elon Musk and Thomas Massie opposed it for adding trillions to the national debt.
• It boosts military and border spending while cutting green subsidies and tightening welfare rules.
• The Senate delayed approval due to rules violations and Medicaid issues.
The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is usually thrown about in the context of romantic attraction. But we’re making an exception in the case of the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
To President Donald Trump, his signature bill is something to behold. “There’s something for everybody,” he told a crowd during a June 26 White House press conference. He’s right. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) is about 900 pages long and jammed with, well, everything. Technically an omnibus bill, the proposal is a train of expenditures. It allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to major agenda items such as immigration enforcement and military buildup. But it is also infused with policy on energy, welfare, federal healthcare, environmental regulations, and taxes, most notably an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, better known as the Trump tax cuts.
Early Opposition
But not everyone sees the bill as much of a looker. As the unofficial head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tech billionaire Elon Musk spent the first few months of Trump’s second tenure trying to rein in government spending. His zeal for cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, driven by appropriate concern for the nation’s perpetually rising debt, ignited a whirlwind of attacks against his Tesla business and him personally. He eventually let his disdain for the legislation slip: He called it a “disgusting abomination” in a post on his social-media platform, X, and chastised House members for passing it. He told CBS News, “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.” Musk issued fresh attacks against the bill in late June.
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