US House advances Trump tax cuts mega-bill

By AFP 22 May 2025, 4:30 pm

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The Republican-led US House of Representatives has voted to approve President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax relief and spending cuts mega-bill that critics warn would decimate health care while ballooning the debt.

The “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” — which now moves to the Senate — would usher into law Trump’s vision for a new “Golden Age,” led by efforts to shrink social safety net programs to pay for a 10-year extension of his 2017 tax cuts.

The mammoth package passed along party lines — 215 votes to 214 — after Republican leadership quelled a rebellion on the party’s right flank that threatened its passage.

It is the centerpiece of Trump’s domestic policy agenda that could define his second term in the White House, and he took to social media to celebrate its success.

“‘THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL’ has PASSED the House of Representatives!” Trump posted. “This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!”

But the package had faced skepticism from Republican fiscal hawks who say the country is careening toward bankruptcy, with independent analysts warning it would increase the deficit by as much as $4 trillion over a decade.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted it would boost the incomes of the richest 10 percent while making the bottom 10 percent poorer, through hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to health care and food aid.

The White House Council of Economic Advisors has made hugely ambitious projections, well outside the mainstream consensus, that the package will spur growth of up to 5.2 percent.

And Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the bill “does not add to the deficit,” and would actually save $1.6 trillion through spending cuts.

But investors were unconvinced as the yield on the 10-year US Treasury note surged to its highest level since February on Wednesday, amid worries over the budget-busting bill’s bottom line adding to the $36 trillion US debt burden.