WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Senate voted 51-50 on Tuesday to pass its version of President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” after a contentious process that retains a weaker version of language to defund the abortion industry but no longer denies public money to gender “transition” procedures.
Passed in May by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate for consideration, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) aims to enact large portions of Trump’s legislative agenda at once through the budget reconciliation process, which requires only a simple majority vote in the Senate rather than the typical 60-vote threshold for standalone legislation.
The House version contained extensions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, various other tax changes proposed by Trump on the campaign trail, and several other conservative priorities, including funding for border security efforts, eliminating many “green” energy subsidies, and more.
However, it has faced conservative opposition over estimates that it will add a minimum of $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, with the bill’s failure to include or be prefaced by codifying the spending cuts of the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project led to a dramatic falling out between Trump and former DOGE head Elon Musk.
On Tuesday, senators voted 50-50 on the BBB, with three Republicans – Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina – voting against. Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote.
It now returns to the House for further revision, where several GOP members have publicly and privately fumed over the Senate’s various changes, including removal of controversial language that would have blocked states and localities from regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years, and preserving various so-called “green” energy subsidies the House version would have cut. Among the changes are to much-anticipated provisions on defunding the abortion and gender-reassignment provisions.
Abortion
The Senate BBB states that “No Federal funds that are considered direct spending and provided to carry out a State plan under title XIX of the Social Security Act or a waiver of such a plan shall be used to make payments to a prohibited entity for items and services furnished during the 1-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.” A “prohibited entity” is any that provides abortions for reasons other than rape, incest, or supposed threats to the mother’s life.
However, the ban only applies to entities that receive more than $800,000 in fiscal year 2023, and more significantly, the single-year time frame is a far cry from the decade to which the original language applied, ensuring a future Congress would have to vote much sooner to keep the abortion industry defunded, and running the risk of the funding automatically resuming if the 2026 midterm elections deprive Republicans of control of at least one chamber.
“The one-year defunding of Planned Parenthood passed by the Senate is just the beginning,” Live Action founder and president Lila Rose responded. “It is the first step toward fully and permanently ending all taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood and shutting this corrupt and violent organization down for good. The House should amend this bill to restore the original 10-year defund. The American people do not want to subsidize the killing of children.”
Family Research Council president Tony Perkins went further, declaring that the abortion defunding is effectively “gone,” because “let’s be honest — a one-year pause in federal funding does not reach the threshold of federal defunding.” If that and other problems were not addressed, he added, FRC would reserve the right to score a vote for the final BBB against lawmakers.
Gender transitions
The House version of the BBB contained language forbidding Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and Affordable Care Act (ACA) funds from going to “coverage of gender transition procedures, including surgery, puberty blockers, or cross-sex hormones.
However, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who is tasked with conforming legislation to Senate rules (in this case what provisions qualify as budget-related and therefore can be passed with a simple majority rather than 60 votes), ruled that the transition language did not. As such, the Senate version does not even contain the word “gender,” let alone any reference to or prohibition of “gender transition procedures.”
“Prayers are needed as the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ returns to the U.S. House for final passage,” Perkins said. “Pray that congressional leadership will work with the Trump administration to find executive action that can offset the conservative, pro-life, and pro-family policy commitments that were stripped out in the Senate.”
Return to the House
What will come out of the House’s revisions is anybody’s guess, beyond the certainty of more short-term drama.
“I’m not happy with what the Senate did to our product. We understand this is the process. It goes back and forth, and we’ll be working to get all of our members to yes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday.
Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina struck a more defiant tone, calling on his colleagues to simply re-vote on its original version and then “pack our bags and go home and tell them (Senate Republicans) to get serious. That math doesn’t work out. They’ve added $670 something billion dollars.”
Meanwhile, the conservative House Freedom Caucus is circulating a memo titled “The Senate OBBA Failures,” citing several of the aforementioned issues among others. “This was not what Leader Thune and Speaker Johnson promised,” it laments.
The White House previously assured fiscal conservatives that spending cuts would come in the form of separate rescission bills, starting with a $9.4 billion package of cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid programs. It cleared the House, but no action has yet been taken in the Senate, and no further rescission packages have been announced.
Regardless, settling on something to send to the president’s desk is a foregone conclusion thanks to pressure from the top, albeit most likely not before the original July 4 deadline.
Most holdouts in either chamber who initially bemoaned the price tag, such as Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, eventually gave in, and voices in each chamber criticizing the others’ work all profess allegiance to Trump, who has shown little interest in the details and instead demanded swift approval of both versions. The president has condemned and pressured only those lawmakers who express opposition, such as Paul, Tillis, and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, rather than applying leverage to whatever lawmakers stand in the way of addressing their concerns.
Vance argued June 30 that the BBB’s immigration enforcement provisions alone were important enough to pass the entire bill regardless of its other aspects and suggested (without offering or elaborating on examples) that most objections “fail a very basic test” of not being able to get 50 votes in the Senate.
“THE ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL DEAL IS ALL ABOUT GROWTH,” Trump declared Wednesday on Truth Social. “IF PASSED, AMERICA WILL HAVE AN ECONOMIC RENAISSANCE LIKE NEVER BEFORE. IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING, JUST IN ANTICIPATION OF THE BEAUTIFUL BILL. DEFICIT CUT IN HALF, RECORD INVESTMENT — CASH, FACTORIES, JOBS POURING INTO THE USA. MAGA!!!”
