GOP holdouts sound alarm on $36T debt crisis as Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' passes House vote
But while House GOP leadership preached party unity as they passed The One Big Beautiful Bill Act by just one vote, two House Republican holdouts were unwavering in their concerns about the $36 trillion national debt crisis and ultimately voted "no."
Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, took their concerns to social media on Thursday, telling their constituents exactly why they bucked the Republican Party on Trump's key legislative agenda.
"While I love many things in the bill, promising someone else will cut spending in the future does not cut spending. Deficits do matter and this bill grows them now. The only Congress we can control is the one we're in. Consequently, I cannot support this big deficit plan. NO," Davidson said early Thursday morning before the vote was final.
Mike Johnson, Donald Trump Get 'Big, 'Beautiful' Win As Budget Passes House
Massie responded soon after, telling Davidson he agreed and "if we were serious, we'd be cutting spending now, instead of promising to cut spending years from now."
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House Gop Leadership Takes Victory Lap After Passing Trump's 'One Big, Beautiful Bill'
"I'd love to stand here and tell the American people, 'We can cut your taxes and increase spending and everything is going to be just fine.' But I can't do that because I'm here to deliver a dose of reality. This bill dramatically increases deficits in the near-term, but promises our government will be fiscally responsible five years from now. Where have we heard that before?" Massie said on the House floor.
The Kentucky congressman, who regularly sports a national debt clock pin, presented a bleak reality for Trump's "big, beautiful bill" on Thursday as most Republican holdouts rallied behind the final manager's amendment. "This bill is a debt bomb ticking," Massie said.
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about Massie and Davidson voting against the bill, she said the president believes they should be primaried.
"I don't think he likes to see grandstanders in Congress. What's the alternative? I would ask those members of Congress. Did they want to see a tax hike? Did they want to see our country go bankrupt? That's the alternative by them trying to vote 'no.' The president believes the Republican Party needs to be unified," Leavitt said.
Gop Holdouts Unmoved By Trump's 'Big, Beautiful' Trip To Capitol Hill
Massie, who has been campaigning on Trump calling him a grandstander, even fundraised on Leavitt's comments, writing on X, "The big beautiful bill has issues. I chose to vote against it because it's going to blow up our debt. For voting on principle, I now have the President AND his press Secretary campaigning against me from the White House podium. Can you help me by donating?"
Former Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., who served as Chair of the House Freedom Caucus, has spoken out against the country's debt crisis amid House negotiations, piled on the national debt criticism on Thursday, writing, "The Big Ugly Truth is that the Big Ugly Bill will push the Big Ugly Debt over $60 trillion."
Good found himself out of the job when he lost the Republican primary to now-Rep. John McGuire of Virginia last year.
He was one of just a handful of House Republicans who endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries, and then Trump threw his political might behind McGuire.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a multitrillion-dollar piece of legislation that advances Trump's agenda on taxes, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt.
While the bill seeks to make a dent in the national debt crisis by cutting roughly $1.5 trillion in government spending, the U.S. still has over $36 trillion in debt and has spent $1.05 trillion more than it has collected in fiscal year 2025, according to the Treasury Department.
"I think the most essential truth in American politics is that nobody actually really cares about the national debt or deficit. It's too abstract to saturate public sentiment," Fox News Digital columnist David Marcus said after the bill passed.
Fox News Digital's Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report. Original article source: GOP holdouts sound alarm on $36T debt crisis as Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' passes House vote
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Trump can't save Olympic sports through executive order, but he can by funding them
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Commentary: Paramount appeased Trump — but now it has to battle Colbert and all his friends
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Trump sued the network last year as an individual, claiming the show distorted a 2024 interview with Kamala Harris, Trump's foe in the presidential election, to give her favorable treatment. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump appointed loyalist Brendan Carr to head the FCC. Then Trump converted the formerly independent agency into an arm of the White House's policy and political operations. One of Carr's first moves as Trump's FCC boss was opening an investigation into the CBS for its interview with Harris, an unprecedented effort to use government power to intimidate a news organization. 'The chairman of the FCC has cagily created a new and coercive technique for operating outside the agency's established statutes and procedures to attack corporate decisions he and Donald Trump do not like,' former FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler, now of the Brookings Institution, wrote in February. 'Prime targets are media company editorial decisions.' 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President Trump's executive order on college sports: Here's what it actually means
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Thursday morning in the nation's capital, NCAA president Charlie Baker spoke to a few dozen members and guests of the National Press Club — an operation located in Washington's downtown, just a short walk to the White House. Just hours later, the association's years-long fight for federal intervention in college sports received, perhaps, a boost from the man living just a few blocks away. President Donald Trump released his long-awaited executive order related to college athletics, announcing in a five-page order titled 'SAVING COLLEGE SPORTS' that he is directing members of his cabinet to create policy around several aspects of the industry that protect the NCAA and conferences from enforcing and creating rules to govern it. But what exactly does Trump's executive order mean? What will it change, if anything, about college sports' athlete compensation and transfer environment? The short answer, at least for now, is not very much. The longer answer is … well … there are still questions. What are the most important items in the order? Trump's executive order has been a long time coming. In fact, just last week Yahoo Sports obtained a copy of a draft of the order, which isn't wholly different to the one he signed and released on Thursday. Above anything else, the order's preamble describes the college athletics landscape as having been subject to unfair court rulings that 'created an out-of-control, rudderless system' which is 'under unprecedented threat.' 'Waves of recent litigation against collegiate athletics governing rules have eliminated limits on athlete compensation, pay-for-play recruiting inducements, and transfers between universities, unleashing a sea change that threatens the viability of college sports,' Trump writes in the order. He goes on to write critically that some schools are paying their athletes as much as $50 million this year from a combination of House settlement-related revenue share and third-party NIL. 'A national solution is urgently needed to prevent this situation from deteriorating beyond repair and to protect non-revenue sports, including many women's sports,' he writes. How he plans to do this is to direct various members of his cabinet — the attorney general, secretary of labor, secretary of education, etc. — to create policy around several concepts that the NCAA and conferences have been requesting help on from Congress for years. Among those: Protecting scholarships for non-revenue sports: The executive order, most notably, requires schools to maintain or even increase the number of scholarships they provide to non-revenue sports. This is geared to protect Olympic and women's sports that are at risk of elimination as schools direct more funding away from those and to the sports that generate the revenue like football and men's basketball. Those with $125 million or budgets (most of the power league schools) must provide more scholarship opportunities than they did last year, for instance. Those with budgets of $50 million must provide at least the same, as seen in a screen shot of the section here. Prohibit third-party, 'pay-for-play': You might call this the prohibition of booster collective pay to athletes, which, in a way, codifies the House settlement terms that prohibit collective pay to athletes if they are not deemed to be for legitimate endorsement or commercial opportunities. This issue is at the heart of negotiations among attorneys that is expected to result in a resolution soon that permits collectives to operate in a more open capacity than first thought. The executive order reinforces that provision in the House settlement. How does Trump plan to enforce these parameters? Well, that remains a bit murky, but he suggests in the order that members of his cabinet, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, have 30 days to create a plan on the enforcement of such, including potentially withholding federal funding for violators, opening up Title IX investigations, etc. Athlete employment: Trump directs the Secretary of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board to 'clarify the status of college athletes' — an obvious gesture toward the ongoing debate over courts potentially deeming college athletes as employees. As stated in the order preamble, Trump is against college athletes becoming employees and is clearly, with this directive, ordering cabinet members and the NLRB — he appoints the board — to rule that college athletes are students. Ironically enough, while many college leaders fight against employment, some of them believe collective bargaining is the only solution for the industry. Limited liability protection: This is another issue the NCAA and conferences have spent millions of dollars and six years lobbying for. They want to be protected from legal challenges so they can enforce their rules over things such as transfers, roster limits, booster pay — many of which have been deemed illegal by courts. Trump clearly disagrees with these court rulings, as he notes in the preamble. The order directs the attorney general and the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission to create policies to protect the 'long-term availability of college athletic scholarship and opportunities' when such is 'unreasonably challenged under antitrust' law. The attorney general and the FTC have 60 days to create such a plan, the order says. What are the immediate impacts of the executive order? The answer here is potentially … nothing. Trump's cabinet members — many of whom are quite busy with other more pressing matters — will need to make policy around these subjects. The specifics of that policy will dictate exactly how pivotal, if at all, this order is. What is a certainty is that whatever policies are created are not law and will likely be subject to legal scrutiny. Congressional action and court rulings are law in this country — not executive orders, legal experts tell Yahoo Sports. Baker even suggested this during his talk Thursday morning. 'You can't fix this stuff from executive order,' he said. 'Our focus for now really needs to be trying to get stuff dealt with through the legislative process.' As it turns out, Wednesday was a historic day for college sports with regard to congressional legislation. An all-encompassing federal college sports bill made its way out of committee for the first time since the NCAA's lobbying efforts began nearly six years ago. The SCORE Act, bipartisan but pro-Republican and NCAA-friendly legislation that many Democrats are against, received the necessary votes to advance out of committees and is eligible for debate on the House floor when members return in September from their traditional summer break. In many ways, the Score Act grants the NCAA and conferences similar protections as Trump's order. Above anything, Trump's executive order may get Congress to more urgently and swiftly push the bill across the goal line. However, if it does advance out of the House, the SCORE Act faces stiff pushback in a divided U.S. Senate, where at least seven Democrats are needed to overcome the filibuster and reach the 60-vote margin for any bill passage. The Senate, though, has been working toward the introduction of its own legislation, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, who, much like Trump, has made college sports regulation a priority. He's been in negotiations now for months with several Democrats, most notably Chris Coons, Richard Blumenthal and Cory Booker. No agreement has been reached despite more than a year of intense talks. Will Trump's executive order change that? It's one of many questions on the topic that remains a mystery.
