Whether or not you think it is beautiful, this bill is certainly big. And according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, it will add a whopping $3 trillion to the public debt. Its key measures include:

• An extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of the year.
• An increase in the debt ceiling of $5 trillion.
• Tax deductions on tips, overtime, and loans for cars made in America.
• A new work requirement of 80 hours per month for Medicaid and caps on Medicaid “provider taxes.”
• Work requirements for food stamps.
• An additional $350 billion in spending on defense and border security.
• An end to some tax credits for green energy.

To help make sense of the economic and political consequences of the huge spending package, we gathered together a range of views from experts across the political spectrum, including a former Speaker of the House, a former Treasury secretary, as well as top economic and political analysts and commentators. As you’ll soon see, opinions on this bill vary widely. And we think that hosting such robust disagreement on our pages is the best way to serve our readers. We begin with a stout defense of the legislation from Newt Gingrich and a full-throated denunciation from Larry Summers.

—The Editors

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, 1995–1999

President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is an amazing achievement on several grounds.

First, it is an enormous policy bill about taxes, regulatory processes, badly needed reforms and spending cuts. The sheer scale of the bill is stunningly audacious.

Second, the Senate, which had strongly favored a two-bill approach and might have postponed the tax cuts until they were too late to impact the 2026 election, finally agreed to the Trump-Johnson position of one bill. In terms of the probable outcome of the off-year election (which is the central turning point of the Trump presidency) getting this done by July Fourth was crucial, and the Senate agreed to it. Senator John Thune’s leadership was essential in getting the Senate both to agree to one bill and to move so quickly.

Third, with very narrow margins in the House and Senate, the Trump-Johnson-Thune team managed to first pass a House version, then have the Senate use that House bill as a baseline to be amended, rather than come up with its own bill and go to conference. And then the team of President Trump and Speaker Johnson (after a lot of hours of talking) found the votes to pass the Senate version without amendment.

Fourth, while the Democrats repeated a dishonest mantra about the kind of people who would have been hurt by Medicaid cuts and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries set a House record for a mini-filibuster, the bill is in fact a trap for the Democrats. Having voted no will bring a whole range of consequences that, when combined with the economic growth that will follow, virtually guarantee President Trump a midterm 2026 victory comparable to FDR in 1934.

This was an amazing achievement and will be studied for years.

Larry Summers, economist and former Treasury secretary, 1999–2001

The Big Beautiful Bill’s addition of trillions to the national debt needlessly risks, but certainly does not guarantee, stagflation or financial crisis. For sure though, giving a million dollars on average to the richest one in 1,000 families and paying for it by denying healthcare and basic social services like rides to doctor appointments is grotesque. The BBB is by far the biggest rollback of the social safety net in our history. Depending on just how you evaluate it, it’s five to 10 times what President Reagan did. I’m ashamed for our country.

Jason Furman, economics professor at Harvard University and former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2013–2017

In 2010, the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission came up with a bipartisan plan to tackle public debt. Fifteen years later, the One Big Beautiful Bill is its mirror image, an inversion of everything that attracted centrists—as well as President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner—to that compromise. Let me list some of the main ways:

Deficit reduction. While Bowles-Simpson was focused on deficit reduction, the new law does the opposite. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that it will add at least $4 trillion to the debt. That is even more expensive than it would have been to extend all the expiring tax cuts. The result is that the deficit, already the largest as a share of the economy in American history except for during World War II, the financial crisis, and Covid, will keep on rising.

Protecting the vulnerable. Bowles-Simpson made a principle of protecting the vulnerable and had limited cuts to low-income programs. The new law reduces spending on Medicaid, nutritional assistance, and other low-income programs by more than $1 trillion, a nearly 15 percent cut to Medicaid alone. Some of the ideas sound benign, like work requirements, but attempts to make them work in practice have failed—failing to result in more work while throwing people off coverage due to failure to comply with complicated paperwork requirements. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects this would increase the number of uninsured by 12 million people.

Reform and simplify the tax code. The law makes some improvements to business taxation, even if they were not paid for: restoring business expensing and making it permanent, for example. But on the individual side, it introduces new complications like tax-free tips, overtime, and a new deduction for auto-leasing interest.

Everything on the table. All of these problems were the result of the failure to put everything on the table. Bowles-Simpson included tax increases and spending cuts. It looked throughout the budget for those spending cuts. The new law took tax increases as well as Medicare and Social Security off the table, admittedly items that Democrats are also largely hostile to including in a budget agreement.

The new law is not the last word, it never is. Let’s hope what comes next does more to reduce the deficit, protect the vulnerable, reform the tax code—and does all that by putting everything on the table.

Tyler Cowen, economist and Free Press columnist

I view the Big Beautiful Bill of Trump as one of the most radical experiments in fiscal policy in my lifetime.

In essence, Trump has decided to push all of his chips to the center of the table and bet on the American economy. I would not have proposed this bill, as critics are correct to note that it increases the estimated U.S. debt by $3 to $4 trillion over the next 10 years. That is a massive boost in leverage at a time when America’s fiscal position already appeared unsustainable.

Nonetheless it is worth trying to steelman the Trump decision, and understand when it might pay off. The biggest deficit buster in the bill is the extension—and indeed boost to cuts—in corporate income tax rates. That means more resources for corporations, and stronger incentives to invest. The question is what the American economy can expect to get from that.

Since 1980, returns on resources invested in American corporations have averaged in the 9 to 11 percent range. There is no guarantee such returns will hold in the future, or that they will hold for the extra investment induced by the corporate tax cuts (e.g., maybe companies will just stash the new profits in Treasury bills). Still, an optimist might believe we can get a high rate of return on that money, thereby making America much wealthier and also more fiscally stable.

A second possible ace in the hole is pending improvements in artificial intelligence and their potential economic impact. It is already the case that U.S. productivity has risen over the last few years, and perhaps it will go up some more. That could make our new debt burden more easily affordable.

Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute

Between now and the 2026 midterms, congressional Democrats and their allies will campaign aggressively against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, focusing most of their fire on its controversial Medicaid provisions. Drawing on projections from the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s official budget scorekeeper, they will argue that millions of families will be stripped of their subsidized medical coverage to defray the cost of tax cuts for the rich. This should be a potent line of attack, one that has paid political dividends for Democrats since the 1990s.

There’s just one small problem: The cuts aren’t real.

To lower the staggering sticker price of the reconciliation bill, Republican lawmakers had to identify hundreds of billions of dollars worth of CBO-approved budget cuts. But they also had to convince hospitals in their home districts that those budget cuts wouldn’t actually materialize. They did this by coming up with a series of pseudo-reforms that state governments could easily game.

Take Medicaid work requirements, perhaps the most polarizing provision of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In theory, imposing work requirements should reduce the number of people who are eligible for Medicaid, and so the CBO dutifully found that this policy would generate meaningful savings. In practice, however, state governments can keep people on Medicaid rolls by signing them up for part-time “community engagement” activities.

And by making it seem as though President Trump has imposed Dickensian work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries, state legislatures in Texas, Florida, and other states that have hitherto resisted expanding Medicaid might decide that the program isn’t so bad after all—a change of heart that would boost federal spending by hundreds of billions.

So instead of inflicting savage austerity on the working poor to buoy the billionaire class, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act could wind up having no discernible impact on the relentless rise of the American welfare state.

Kyla Scanlon, economic commentator (subscribe to her excellent Substack) and the author of In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

The One Big Beautiful Bill is a major restructuring of U.S. fiscal policy. It combines extended Trump-era tax cuts with new deductions on overtime, tips, and loans for American-assembled cars, while cutting back on programs like Medicaid. Supporters pitch it as pro-growth, a bet that targeted tax relief will stimulate productivity.

But we have to look beyond its implications on just domestic policy.

The bill comes at a time of immense global economic fragmentation and rising competition with China. While the U.S. cuts taxes in the hope that it will create new industry, China continues to directly invest in advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, and industrial capacity. The structure of the law will likely put the U.S. even further behind, with cuts to renewable energy and a prioritization of the past over the present.

By leaning into deficit expansion without any form of clear industrial strategy (just talk to a manufacturer), the U.S. risks weakening its position relative to other nations. This is a very clear choice about how America competes—with itself, with the world it helped build, and the world that might soon leave it behind. The extraordinary cost will come due eventually, and America’s young people will be left to pay it.

Christopher Caldwell, Free Press contributor and author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

There are painful asymmetries in the budgetary culture of a welfare state. The generation that enacts welfare programs, as the New Dealers did, gets a windfall: They gain coverage without having paid taxes. The generation that reforms welfare programs, as ours must, is left holding the bag: They lose coverage after having paid lots of taxes. Since neither political party wants to bring this bad news, deficits grow steadily. Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt. Bush Jr. doubled it. So did Barack Obama.

Trump’s bill takes us $3 trillion above the trajectory Biden was already on. Although that’s only about a twentieth of what the debt will be 10 years from now, we’re running out of room.

Yet this bill has promising elements. In welfare-state fiscal policy, spending is more important than taxing. Money spent is gone. Taxes not raised will eventually get imposed on society by markets. That is what happened in 2021-2022, when Biden tried to stimulate an economy that was already roaring after Covid. The public was “taxed” via Bidenflation.

Trump’s bill, whatever one thinks of its priorities, really does cut spending: It lops as much of Obamacare as the public wants lopped. And it does so largely by restraining Medicaid. That’s a core federal entitlement. In other words, this bill has, for the first time, breached the debt-generating heart of the welfare state. If it works, a more confident Republican party can return for more savings. If it doesn’t work, they’ll get two stern messages: first from markets, then from voters.

Ruy Teixeira, Free Press columnist

Democrats are licking their chops at some of the provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And rightfully so. The Medicaid cuts in particular, twinned with tax cuts that skew toward the affluent, are a very poor look for an increasingly working-class GOP.

In arguing against these cuts, the Democrats will be helped immensely by two underlying factors. First, Medicaid is a healthcare issue, and healthcare is the only area that is both highly salient to voters and where voters clearly prefer Democrats over Republicans.

Second, Medicaid is an enormous and enormously popular program, whose enrollment has been expanded far beyond the truly indigent by the Affordable Care Act. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, two-thirds of American adults have a personal (self, family, or close friends) connection to Medicaid.

Small wonder that Medicaid is hugely popular with the public, including working-class voters. More than three-quarters (77 percent) have a favorable view of the program, including 85 percent of Hispanics, 81 percent of those with under $90,000 in household income, and even 63 percent of Republicans. Just 19 percent think we are currently spending too much on Medicaid, and 81 percent are opposed to cutting the program (including 74 percent of Republicans).

This obviously creates huge vulnerabilities for the GOP, which is increasingly dependent on support from working-class voters. The party now dominates representation of the lowest-income Congressional districts. And research by The Wall Street Journal indicates that the GOP has more than doubled its share of the highest Medicaid enrollment districts since 2009.

This is a big opportunity for the Democrats. They will have to be careful however that this opportunity does not distract them from remedying their own copious vulnerabilities, which will not be accomplished by pillorying Republicans on Medicaid. In that case, whatever working-class voters they win over by taking aim at the OBBBA may quickly desert them.

Charles Lane, Free Press columnist

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes it official: The U.S. government has no real intention of balancing its budget or even trying.

Some of us are old enough to remember 1992, when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, egged on by a third-party candidate, budget hawk Ross Perot, competed for the presidency by promising to cut a national debt then equal to 46 percent of gross domestic product. Within a decade, a Republican Congress and the Clinton administration had recorded a budget surplus.

Three decades, several wars, a global recession, and a pandemic later, populism is in fashion and fiscal responsibility is dead.

President Trump and the Republicans own the OBBBA. Democrats would raise taxes on “the rich”—but not on the 95 percent earning $400,000 or less—and spend the proceeds on new programs. Both parties pledge no cuts to Social Security and Medicare—which, together with interest payments, account for half of all spending.

If all goes according to plan in the OBBBA, the government will borrow 7 percent of GDP annually for the next decade, up from an already extraordinary 6 percent under the Biden administration, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Total debt will hit 127 percent of gross domestic product by 2034—the highest ever.

Can we get away with this? Past warnings of fiscal disaster have not panned out. Risk-averse investors around the world kept buying Treasury bonds because “there is no alternative.” The OBBBA assumes this will continue, despite competition from Europe’s new debt-financed defense spending and doubts about U.S. reliability due to Trump’s tariffs.

If a crunch comes, we might stop declaring, “There is no alternative,” and start asking: Is the U.S. too big to fail?