• Senate opens debate on president’s controversial ‘One Big Beautiful’ spending bill
• Democrats look to force line-by-line reading of 1,000-page draft

WASHINGTON: US senators debated into the early hours of Sunday Donald Trump’s “big beautiful” spending bill, a hugely divisive proposal that would deliver key parts of the US president’s domestic agenda while making massive cuts to social welfare programmes.

Trump is hoping to seal his legacy with the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which would extend his expiring first-term tax cuts at a cost of $4.5 trillion and beef up border security. But Republicans eyeing 2026 midterm congressional elections are divided over the package, which would strip health care from millions of the poorest Americans and add more than $3tr to the country’s debt.

The Senate formally opened debate on the bill late Saturday, after Republican holdouts delayed what should have been a procedural vote — drawing Trump’s ire on social media.

Senators narrowly passed the motion to begin debate, 51-49, hours after the vote was first called, with Vice President JD Vance joining negotiations with holdouts from his own party.

Ultimately, two Republican senators joined 47 Democrats in voting “nay” on opening debate.

Trump attacked Tillis, who opposed the bill’s cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for lower-income Americans, which he said would be devastating for his native North Carolina. Tillis is up for reelection next year.

Democrats are also bitterly opposed to the legislation and Trump’s agenda, and have vowed to hold up the debate. They began by insisting that the entirety of the bill be read aloud to the chamber before the debate commences. The bill is roughly 1,000 pages long and will take an estimated 15 hours to read.

“Republicans won’t tell America what’s in the bill,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. “So Democrats are forcing it to be read start to finish on the floor. We will be here all night if that’s what it takes to read it.”

Once the bill has been read, lawmakers will begin up to 20 hours of debate on the legislation. That will be followed by a marathon amendment session, known as a “vote-a-rama,” before the Senate votes on passage. Lawmakers said they hoped to complete work on the bill on Monday.

Republicans are scrambling to offset the $4.5tr cost of Trump’s tax relief, with many of the proposed cuts to come from decimating funding for Medicaid, the health insurance programme for low-income Americans.

Republicans are split on the Medicaid cuts, which will threaten scores of rural hospitals and lead to an estimated 8.6 million Americans being deprived of health care.

On Saturday, former Trump advisor Elon Musk, with whom the president had a public falling out this month over his criticism of the bill, called the current proposal “utterly insane and destructive.”

“It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future,” said Musk.

Independent analysis also shows that the bill would pave the way for a historic redistribution of wealth from the poorest 10 per cent of Americans to the richest.

The nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee released an analysis projecting that the Senate bill’s tax provisions would reduce government revenue by $4.5tr over the next decade, increasing the $36.2-tr US government debt.

The White House said this month the legislation would reduce the annual deficit by $1.4tr.

If the Senate passes the bill, it will then return to the House of Representatives for final passage before Trump can sign it into law.

The House passed its version of the bill last month.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2025