Republican Senate leaders are facing increasing setbacks in their race to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a multitrillion-dollar budget reconciliation package implementing the president’s tax, energy and national defense priorities.
Senate committees had drafted their revisions to the House-passed OBBBA and submitted them for review under the Senate parliamentarian. As The Center Square reported, those changes included doubling down on the Medicaid provider tax cap and making key portions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent rather than keeping the House’s 10-year extension.
Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., aimed to have the finalized OBBBA on the floor by Wednesday, giving the House enough time to approve the Senate’s changes before sending the bill to the president’s desk by the desired July 4 deadline.
But progress stalled Monday after the Senate parliamentarian ruled that a major source of offsets — the bill’s reforms to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — violated the chamber’s Byrd Rule.
Among other budgetary checks, the Byrd Rule limits budget reconciliation bills to provisions with direct budgetary impacts. If the parliamentarian finds provisions that violate this rule, lawmakers must either strip them from the bill or lose the ability to pass the legislation in the Senate with a simple majority vote.
The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled Sunday night that Republicans’ plans to make illegal immigrants ineligible for SNAP violated the Byrd Rule. She also condemned Republicans’ cost-sharing plan, which would have required states to cover at least half of the program’s administrative costs and 5% of their benefit cost share, with their contribution increasing the higher the state’s payment error rate.
Republicans have little time left to either rewrite their changes into compliance or find an estimated $128 billion in 10-year savings from another source. The savings are a critical part of the massively expensive bill, since lawmakers need to either offset projected federal revenue loss with spending cuts and growth projections, or utilize unconventional accounting tactics, which the parliamentarian is unlikely to authorize.
The Senate’s problems don’t end there, however. The parliamentarian also struck several measures related to state-level immigration enforcement, including limits on grant funding for sanctuary cities or any city that the U.S. attorney general determines is violating immigration enforcement laws.
Provisions making it more difficult for litigants and federal judges to obtain or issue nationwide preliminary injunctions against the federal government also received the parliamentarian’s disapproval.
The decisions follow last week’s rulings that some environmental and banking provisions in the OBBBA, which also achieved billions in savings, do not comply with the Byrd Rule, as The Center Square reported.
