Republican Rep. David Schweikert says it will likely be months before Congress passes President Donald Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
Last week, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed the bill, which would renew Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
But Schweikert said the bill still has to pass the U.S. Senate, where some Republicans have expressed concerns about provisions scaling back programs like Medicaid and federal food assistance.
“Be prepared,” Schweikert said. “There’s a lot more work and a lot more votes and a couple more months to go to finish this.”
He said the bill likely has to go through a “conference committee,” made up of members of the U.S. House and Senate who convene when the chambers pass different versions of the same bill.
“Then the conference committee has to report back to the Senate and the House and then there’s a vote there. Then there’s a final where it’s put back together,” Schweikert said.
Schweikert defended controversial spending reductions in the bill that will affect programs like Medicaid and federal food assistance.
Republicans have argued the changes to Medicaid, such as increased work requirements, will simply prevent waste, fraud and abuse, though Democrats have claimed those cuts will actually result in millions of people losing the health coverage they rely on.
Schweikert said spending cuts are needed to make room to renew Trump’s tax cuts.
“We’ve tried to add a number of things over here that will give us some GDP growth, but now you have to find some offsets to at least try to communicate to the debt markets that you’re not just borrowing everything,” he said.
Even with those cuts, the Congressional Budget Office projected the bill that passed the House would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion.
Schweikert was the only member of Arizona’s Republican delegation not to vote for the bill, though he says he supported it. Schweikert said he missed the vote because he fell asleep in his office.
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