Senate Republicans Ready Vote on Tax Bill, Still Awaiting Its Final Cost

New York Times

7 hours ago

If Senate Republicans begin debate as soon as Saturday on their newly retooled tax package, they may do so without a full grasp of its costs, at a moment when fiscal experts are sounding increasingly dire alarms that the measure could severely worsen the nation's ever-expanding debt.
The hasty pursuit of a vote is designed to satisfy President Trump's self-imposed deadline to finalize the bill by July 4. But it also means that Republicans are at risk of forging ahead with an incomplete understanding about an economic agenda that could alter the nation's fiscal trajectory for a generation.
The latest version of the party's signature legislation arrived just before midnight on Friday. Spanning roughly 1,000 pages, it still seeks to cut federal taxes, scale back safety-net programs such as Medicaid and boost spending on immigration and defense, though Republicans tweaked some of the ways that they would achieve each of those aims.
Many of the changes reflect deals cut with individual Republicans who were at risk of voting against the bill and other, more mechanical rewrites to their cuts on Medicaid, energy tax credits and food stamps. Those updates will allow Republicans to try to advance the bill using a fast-track budget process in the Senate without any Democratic support.
The revisions, taken together, could add or subtract to the overall costs of the package, but Republicans may not know precisely by how much when they hold their first vote this weekend.
There is still no final fiscal breakdown, known as a score, from either the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation, which advises lawmakers on the budget implication of their legislative agenda.
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