The multitrillion-dollar tax and spending package House Republicans passed last month is heading to the Senate, with lawmakers hoping to pass a finalized bill by July 4.
If passed in its current form, the bill — dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — would, among other measures, make President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent and add new tax breaks for tipped and overtime workers as well as older Americans.
The bill’s critics are hoping it may see some change’s in Congress’s upper house. Those include six Nobel-prize winning economists, who this week penned an open letter published through the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
“As economists who have devoted our careers to researching how economies can grow and how the benefits of this growth can be translated into broadly shared prosperity and security, we have grave concerns about the budget reconciliation bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 22, 2025,” the letter says.
Losses for the ‘bottom 40% of households’
The economists’ main issue: cuts to Medicaid (the federal and state health-care program for low-income and disabled Americans) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps), which they see as essential for American families.
The House version of the bill would cut Medicaid spending by $700 billion and slash SNAP by $300 billion — the largest cut in either program’s history.
“These steep cuts to the social safety net are being undertaken to defray the staggering cost of the tax cuts included in the House bill, including the hidden cost of preserving the large corporate income tax cut passed in the 2017 tax law,” the letter says. “But even these sharp spending cuts will pay for far less than half of the tax cuts (not even including the cost of maintaining the corporate income tax cuts of the 2017 law).”
These and other critics of the bill cite research that estimates the law will add to the national deficit — to tune of about $3 trillion to $5 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — while failing to lift up low-income Americans.
“Given how much this bill adds to the U.S. debt, it is shocking that it still imposes absolute losses on the bottom 40% of U.S. households,” the letter says.
It remains to be seen if spending cuts will remain in the bill as-is.
“Overall, the [Senate] bill is not going to be that much different,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, recently told CNBC, but added that he expects “a lot of debate” about the Medicaid provision in particular.
One set of provisions — making the tax rates and brackets from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent — would maintain the status quo for taxpayers. That law’s tax cuts, which were set to expire at the end of the year, included a major hike to the standard deduction, which “greatly simplified the tax code for millions of taxpayers,” say analysts at the Tax Foundation.
Proponents of the bill say these and other tax cuts will spark U.S. economic growth and laud the administration for delivering on several campaign trail promises.
When it comes to cutting spending on social programs, Trump sees the reductions as an exercise in government efficiency. “We don’t want any waste, fraud or abuse,” he said in a recent Newsmax interview. “Other than that, we’re leaving it.”
The economic Nobelists don’t see it that way.
“The House bill addresses none of the nation’s key economic challenges usefully and exacerbates many of them,” they write. “The Senate should refuse to pass this bill and start over from scratch on the budget.”
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