When Is the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Getting Passed?

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If all goes according to plan, possibly the most consequential legislation of President Donald Trump’s second term will be passed soon.

The “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill is a 10-year fiscal plan that would fulfill a number of Trump’s campaign promises, such as funding border security and extending his 2017 tax cuts before their expiration at the end of the year.

But when will the bill get passed, and is there any chance it fails?

A Very Flexible Deadline

Leadership’s deadline in both chambers for passing the bill has changed multiple times, but the current target is July 4.

In January, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., said he wanted to get the bill to the president’s desk by “in a worst-case scenario, Memorial Day”—an ambitious deadline which may have helped apply pressure for the bill’s passage.

The bill ended up passing through the House right before the Memorial Day recess on May 22. Johnson characterized this as meeting his original timeframe.

“I know some of y’all smiled and probably mocked me a little bit when I said early on we were going to do this by Memorial Day. You didn’t believe it, I know you didn’t,” he said with a grin shortly after its House passage.

Now, the new deadline for getting it to the president’s desk is Independence Day, July 4.

Vice President JD Vance, who had lunch with Senate leadership in the Capitol Tuesday, told reporters, “I can’t predict the future, but I do think that we’re in a good place to get this done by the July 4 recess.”

But the last day that the Senate and House are scheduled to be in session before recess is June 27—this coming week.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has indicated he will keep senators working through recess if they cannot pass it in time.

The hard deadline is likely when the federal government breaks through its statutory debt limit, an almost apocalyptic scenario which would mean the government could no longer borrow money.

This has never happened before, and the Congressional Budget Office predicts the debt limit will be surpassed in mid-August to late September if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling.

Can the Bill Pass by Then?

This timeline means the Senate would have to quickly resolve a number of outstanding disagreements over overall deficit levels, Medicaid reforms, and the phase-out of Biden-era green energy incentives.

This is doable, but perhaps the greater difficulty is coming to a compromise in the Senate that would still please the House of Representatives.

Around a half dozen blue-state Republicans are demanding that the Senate not touch their state and local tax (SALT) deduction deal from the House’s framework—which allows residents of high-tax states to deduct up to $40,000 in SALT taxes from their federal tax returns.

These members, infuriated by the Senate’s tentative plan to lower the cap down to $10,000, have indicated they won’t support a bill without a SALT cap increase.

Meanwhile, House Freedom Caucus fiscal hawks are also uneasy over some of the changes in the Senate’s framework.

These include making more tax cuts permanent (which they think necessitates more spending cuts) and slowing down the phase-out of green energy incentives from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

The bill “is definitely dead if it were to come over to the House in anything resembling its current form—the IRA provisions, the deficit damages, some of the other policy changes that we think are concerning,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told reporters on a call Tuesday.

What If the Bill Fails?

If the bill were to fail, it would be an absolute disaster for Republican congressional leadership and the broader Trump administration agenda.

To be sure, there is an almost universal consensus in the party that Republicans must pass some sort of ambitious new fiscal framework which undoes the work of the Biden administration. The details are what is controversial.

House leadership has consistently said that the alternative to passing this bill is chaos and a failure to enact the president’s campaign promises.

“The entire agenda’s wrapped in this legislation,” Johnson said in a recent interview.

“And if we fail in this endeavor it means … we’re going to run out of time, the tax cuts will expire … debt cliff comes upon us in about mid to late July. We will have no foreseeable way out of that dilemma.”

Roy told The Daily Signal he’s unaware of a backup plan if the bill comes to the House and is impossible to pass after the Senate’s changes.

He said he wished the Republican budgetary goals could have been split up into multiple bills, but that he’ll try to work with the one-bill strategy.

If the bill fails, Roy says, “they are going to be needing to have an alternative to deal with the debt ceiling, to deal with any other upfront spending reductions they want to get done, and or the border issue in particular, and or defense.”

Turning down the big, beautiful bill would be an incredibly risky move, which would likely draw the fury of the president, congressional leadership and possibly the Republican voting base.

“The White House and the leadership are committed to getting this bill done in one bill. I still think it can be, but not if they’re going to go down the road that the Senate just outlined,” Roy added.

Future Bills

One more thing. Johnson has said that this may not even be the only big, beautiful bill Republicans pass in this Congress.

Congress is generally allowed one budget reconciliation bill per fiscal year, and the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

“We’re going to have another reconciliation bill that follows this one, possibly a third one before this Congress is up, because you can have a reconciliation bill for each budget year, each fiscal year. So that’s ahead of us,” Johnson has said.

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