By Charlie Martin

Written by Charlie Martin

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Editor’s note: the author is right, the BBB is confusing, but this excellent article makes a strong case for why this piece of legislation is not the catastrophe some of us believe it to be. It funds the President’s agenda, meaningfully reduces real mandatory spending, and sets the Administration up nicely to follow through on DOGE cuts. We reserve to ourselves the right to dislike how drastically it raises the debt ceiling, but nevertheless, after reading it, you may be singing: I Like Big Beautiful Bills and I Cannot Lie! Enjoy!

The Big Beautiful Bill continues to be confusing, and, frankly, I think it’s become confusing because a whole lot of people think it being confusing is to their advantage. So let’s try to drill down into the details and try to sort out the facts.

Now, Stephen Miller has tweeted an explanation a couple of times, apparently to little avail, but let’s look at it again, and work out the details.

Here’s the full text, to which I’ll be referring quite a bit.

 

I’ve seen a few claims making the rounds on the Big Beautiful Bill that require correction.

The first is that it doesn’t “codify the DOGE cuts.” A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to “mandatory” spending only — eg Medicaid and Food Stamps. The senate rules prevent it from cutting “discretionary” spending — eg the Department of Education or federal grants. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory. The bill saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform. A remarkable achievement.

I’ve also seen claims the bill increases the deficit. This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick. Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining current rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.

Another fantastically false claim is that the bill spends trillions of dollars. This is just completely invented out of whole cloth. This is not a ten year budget bill—it doesn’t “fund” almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not). In other words, if this bill passed, but the annual budget bill did not, there would be no government funding. Under the math that critics are using, if we passed a one paragraph reconciliation bill that cut simply 50 billion in food stamp spending, they would say the bill “added” trillions in spending and debt because they are counting ALL the projected federal spending that exists entirely outside the scope of this legislation, which is of course preposterous. The only funding in the bill is for the President’s border and defense priorities, while enacting a net spending cut of over 1.6 TRILLION dollars.

The bill has two fiscal components: a massive tax cut and a massive spending cut.

 

There are some facts of life that he tries to explain but doesn’t go into detail about, because, well, it’s just a tweet.

So here are the facts of life:

• The Big Beautiful Bill is a reconciliation bill
• Reconciliation bills have the advantage that they can’t be filibustered — a simple majority does the job
• . . .but that doesn’t mean filibusters aren’t an issue in the whole process
• One of the biggest restrictions on reconciliation is that the reconciliation bill cannot, by law, affect anything except mandatory spending, and what constitutes mandatory spending is also established by law.
• Reconciliation bills are not spending bills. They establish a budget, or propose a budget, but the actual spending must be established in a bill that starts in the House. A separate bill.
• Reconciliation bills are scored by the Congressional Budget Office, which imposes other restrictions
• Both the limits on a reconciliation bill and on CBO’s scoring are established by law, so if you want to change them, you run into that filibuster monster again.

So, a lot of the people screaming about the BBB not codifying the DOGE cuts are either ignorant or gaslighting you. The BBB doesn’t codify the DOGE cuts because by law it can’t. Keep that in mind as we go through the details.

*****

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