The bill cleared the Senate in a 51-50 vote. Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Susan Collins (R-ME) were the three Republican defectors who forced Vance to intercede and break the logjam after hours of arduous debate on and off the Senate floor that threatened to derail Trump’s signature legislation at the eleventh hour.

The passage of the filibuster-skirting bill was the culmination of a messy and drawn-out budget reconciliation process and was preceded by days of debate, amendment votes, and backroom deal-making by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to win over enough Republican holdouts. Senators endured a grueling marathon amendment voting session in the hours leading up to the final vote, in which mainly Democrats and some Republicans forced dozens of roll-call votes over 26 hours beginning Monday morning.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will now be tasked with overcoming hurdles and complaints in his GOP conference. Complicating matters is that the Congressional Budget Office said the Senate version will add some $3.3 trillion to deficits over the next decade, which the House Freedom Caucus said violates the cost-cutting agreements in the budget framework.

Congressional Republicans and the White House insisted the megabill is deficit-reducing because it is based on extending the “current policy baseline,” a novel accounting method that suggests it is cost-free to make permanent the 2017 Trump tax cuts that would otherwise expire next year. The White House also argued that economic growth from the bill would offset the deficit hit.

Notably, the CBO’s $3.3 trillion number doesn’t measure the bill against current policy.

Democrats, and some GOP fiscal hawks such as Paul, decried it as a gimmick. The measure also raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

The heart of the legislation is extending and making permanent the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from Trump’s first term, which lowered individual tax rates to the current levels that are set to expire at year’s end. One of the biggest imprints the Senate made on the bill compared to a version previously passed by the House was to make permanent the business tax cuts, which the lower chamber only proposed to extend temporarily.

Tax cuts, illegal immigration, and energy

Senate Republicans settled on maintaining the House’s $40,000 cap on state and local tax deductions, a thorny issue for blue-state House Republicans whose constituents pay higher state taxes. The figure would quadruple the current rate of $10,000, as set by Trump’s 2017 tax bill.

SALT critics argue the deductions primarily benefit high-income earners in liberal states and subsidize spending by state and local governments led by Democrats. The provision was crucial to win over key SALT proponents such as Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY) and Nick LaLota (R-NY).

However, the $40,000 cap lasts only five years before snapping back to the $10,000 current limit.

Other new tax measures include versions of Trump’s campaign promises to exempt taxes on tips, reduce Social Security taxes, and eliminate taxes on overtime.

The bill would set a $25,000 limit for deductions on tipped income and phase out for single filers and joint filers who earn more than $150,000 and $300,000 annually, respectively.  

The legislation would allow up to $10,000 in auto loan interest to be deducted, phasing out for single filers who make annually more than $100,000 and $200,000 for joint filers. Only new cars assembled in the United States would be eligible.

A $6,000 deduction for seniors over 65 would be created as part of Trump’s pledge to end taxes on Social Security benefits.

Another area of tax policy closely watched and debated was the child tax credit, an increasingly popular benefit among populist conservatives who want to encourage more people to have families.

Under the Senate’s proposal, the credit would increase from $2,000 to $2,200 per child. That’s down from $2,500 under the House version. However, the Senate would make the increase permanent, whereas it would expire after 2028 in the House bill. Pro-family conservatives, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), wanted the credit as high as $5,000.

The Senate legislation also boosts the child and dependent care tax credit, known as the CDCTC.

On border security, the legislation includes nearly $200 billion over the next decade to beef up illegal immigration enforcement, which has been a major focus of the Trump administration. There is funding for the construction of additional southern border wall, immigration detention centers, state and local grants, surveillance technology, and broader enforcement and removal operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Justice Department.

“The Big Beautiful Bill will allow ICE to hire 10,000 new officers,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “ICE currently has 20,000 law-enforcement and support personnel in more than 400 offices. A larger force will provide ICE agents with the necessary protection so they can continue to carry out removals.”

In a bid to crack down on federal spending and illegal immigration further, the bill strips benefits for most noncitizens from government programs such as Medicaid and food stamps.

The bill makes major changes to healthcare, particularly to Medicaid, the government-run health insurance program for some 80 million lower-income adults and children. It creates work requirements for childless, able-bodied adults, and it would defund Planned Parenthood by prohibiting Medicaid funds from being used to reimburse health clinics that provide abortions.

The megabill would also rework the Medicaid provider tax framework that shrinks federal reimbursements to states for beneficiaries, a major concern of so-called “Medicaid moderates,” who feared the change could bankrupt rural hospitals in red states. The provision led Tillis to oppose the bill and others to threaten to withhold their support until concessions were made.

THOM TILLIS ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT AFTER OPPOSING TRUMP TAX BILL

On energy, federal subsidies for wind and solar projects are set to take a major funding hit by the rollback of clean energy tax credits from former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Senate Republicans opted to accelerate the credit phase-outs, similar to an earlier proposal from the House (the original Senate proposal was the soft one). But in a win for conservative conservationists, a controversial proposal from Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to sell tracts of public lands to help pay for Trump’s tax cuts was stripped from the text.

Food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be reduced by nearly $70 billion through work requirements and $40 billion with state matching funds. Another roughly $85 billion is cut elsewhere from the program.

Gabrielle Etzel, Callie Patteson, David Sivak, and Marisa Schultz contributed to this report.