US House passes bill to redirect money from social welfare to defence
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WASHINGTON: The Republican-led US House of Representatives voted on Thursday to approve President Donald Trump’s sprawling tax relief and spending cuts mega-bill that critics warn would decimate health care while ballooning the debt.
The “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” — which now moves to the Senate — would usher into law Trump’s vision for a new “Golden Age,” led by efforts to shrink social safety net programmes to pay for a 10-year extension of his 2017 tax cuts.
The bill, passed by a single-vote margin, would fulfill many of Trump’s populist campaign pledges, delivering new tax breaks on tips and car loans and boosting spending on the military and border enforcement.
Democrats call the bill ‘devastating’ for middle class Americans
“Legislation of this magnitude is truly nation shaping and life changing,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson ahead of the largely party-line vote, which capped a marathon debate that went through the night.“ It’s the kind of transformational change that future generations will study one day. They’ll look back at this day as a turning point in American history.“
The mammoth package passed along party lines — 215 votes to 214 — after Republican leadership quelled a rebellion on the party’s right flank that threatened its passage. It is the centrepiece of Trump’s domestic policy agenda that could define his second term in the White House, and he took to social media to celebrate its success.
‘Devastating’
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted it would boost the incomes of the richest 10 per cent while making the bottom 10pc poorer, through hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to health care and food aid.
Democrats called the bill “devastating” for the middle class, pointing to CBO estimates that its cuts to public health insurance for low-income Americans would deprive 8.6 million people of coverage.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the bill “the largest cut to health care in American history… in order to enact the largest tax breaks for billionaires in American history.”
Trump has seen his polling numbers plummet in his early months back in office, but success in the House for his signature legislation underlined his continued sway over the party’s quarrelsome and deeply polarized lawmakers.
Trump posted: “This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!”
But the package had faced skepticism from Republican fiscal hawks who say the country is careening toward bankruptcy, with independent analysts warning it would increase the deficit by as much as $4 trillion over a decade.
Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2025
