Sen. Mike Lee, House conservatives demand changes to Trump’s tax billĀ 

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WASHINGTON — Fiscal conservatives are demanding a number of changes to the Republican-led reconciliation package, including the elimination of some provisions that were key to getting the bill through Republicans’ slim majority in the House last month.

The House Freedom Caucus began circulating a memo Monday evening outlining dozens of changes to the tax package, which passed the House in a narrow 215-214 vote in late May. The bill is now being considered by the Senate, but House conservatives have made it clear they are not satisfied with the final product — and are demanding their colleagues in the upper chamber make edits.

“Through the negotiations in the House and the hard work of the president and the White House, we took significant steps to improve the reconciliation package known as ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,'” the memo reads, according to a copy obtained by the Deseret News. “However, there remain substantial concerns and a great deal of misinformation circulating about the bill. … Below, please find specific recommendations for the Senate to deliver a product we can pass in the House.”

At the top of the list — underneath a headline that reads: “The Senate Needs to Improve the House OBBB” — the fiscal conservatives are demanding Senate Republicans find deeper spending cuts than those included in the current resolution.

The tax reconciliation package currently allows for up to $3.7 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. However, the bill includes only $1.3 trillion in spending cuts to offset those costs, raising concerns among Republicans that the package will raise the national debt.

While GOP leaders, including Utah Rep. Blake Moore, argue the report doesn’t factor in the economic growth that will likely come from the tax cuts tucked into the package, members of the Freedom Caucus say “savings are backloaded and are subject to the whims of a future Congress, heavily affected by future policy changes and tax extensions, and unlikely to fully occur.”

Notably, the conservatives are also demanding the Senate scale back an agreed-upon increase to federal deductions for state and local taxes paid.

‘Good luck with that’

Republican leaders offered to increase the current deduction cap to $40,000 — up from the current $10,000 limit — for individuals who make $500,000 or less a year. That cap would then increase by 1% every year over the next decade and remain permanent after that period.

The policy mostly affects high-tax states, but the changes were made to appease a group of blue-state Republicans who repeatedly threatened final passage if a higher deduction was not included.

Members of the House Freedom Caucus have pushed to undo that deal, arguing it “disproportionately benefits high-income households in high tax (Democrat-run) states,” according to the memo.

That’s unlikely to go over well with the faction of New York Republicans who spent months negotiating an increase to federal deductions for state and local taxes paid. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., who helped lead that charge, has warned for weeks that if the Senate changes the numbers, he and his fellow New York Republicans would reject the bill.

“Cool. Good luck with that,” Lawler said in a post on X shortly after the memo was released.

‘Hold the line’

The memo also urges Senate Republicans to “hold the line” on certain provisions included in the House version, including language that would fully repeal green energy credits passed by the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Hold the line on the House OBBB reforms to significantly strengthen the rollback of IRA subsidies for wind and solar to end during President Trump’s term — otherwise they will inevitability be renewed as in the past,” the memo states, “and, by that point, the grid will become generally unreliable with no quick fixes to inevitable widespread unaffordability and power outages.”

That demand comes in response to a push by some Republicans in the Senate — including Utah Sen. John Curtis — who want to preserve some of the clean energy tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, arguing they are crucial for Trump’s agenda to remain energy independent.

Conservatives are similarly pushing for deeper cuts to Medicaid benefits, outlining specific changes that would “protect the most vulnerable” while addressing “money laundering, fraud, and abuse.”

Suggested language would be to implement specific definitions to crack down on Medicaid coverage for undocumented immigrants as well as stricter work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

‘Make the changes they want’

The demands come as Senate Republicans have hinted at major changes to the House-passed reconciliation bill — with some suggesting to ease the deep spending cuts already passed while others have argued the package does not go far enough.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, has been at the forefront of demanding those changes, telling the Deseret News that “everyone understands there are going to be some modifications made to the House bill.”

“Nobody believes that the House bill, unadorned, unmodified, is going to pass,” he said.

For example, Lee supports maintaining the full repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act green energy credits as well as cracking down on illegal immigrants relying on Medicaid.

Meanwhile, the president is telling the Senate to “make the changes they want” — sending mixed messages as Republicans consider alterations to the budget framework advancing policies on the border, energy, national defense and tax reform.

Some of the hard-to-convince lawmakers hope their stubbornness will ward off any of their Senate colleagues from making drastic changes, noting the drawn-out process in the House should deter them from doing so.

“I think after seeing how painful of a process this is and how difficult it is to get anything through this side, I think that will send a strong message in the Senate that you can’t really change it,” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., a member of the Freedom Caucus, told the Deseret News last month.

Contributing: Brigham Tomco

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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