(The Center Square) – Republicans are facing setback after setback as the Senate parliamentarian continues to slash major provisions from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, jeopardizing the megabill’s passage and angering lawmakers.
The House-passed OBBBA, a multitrillion-dollar budget reconciliation bill implementing President Donald Trump’s major policy priorities, is under the parliamentarian’s review after undergoing Senate committees’ alterations.
Several significant provisions in the bill, including some SNAP-related accountability measures and cost-cutting reforms to Medicaid, collapsed after Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determined they violated the Byrd Rule.
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.
Republicans have been scrambling to rewrite some of the provisions into compliance, with some success. A section MacDonough struck that would have fully defunded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was rewritten by a Senate committee and later approved, though it authorizes only half the funding cut of the original provision.
But parliamentarian rulings nixing provisions worth hundreds of billions in spending offsets have followed in quick succession since Thursday, including major student loan and financial aid-related sections, one of which would have reduced student loan repayment plan options.
MacDonough also determined Friday that a federal fund for private school vouchers, the deregulation of gun silencers, and stricter verification requirements for Earned Income Tax Credit claimants violated the Byrd Rule.
While Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., declined to overrule the parliamentarian’s authority, multiple Republicans vented their frustrations, viewing the slew of rulings as a partisan attack.
“How is it that an unelected swamp bureaucrat … gets to decide what can and cannot go in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill?” Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., posted on X. “The Senate Parliamentarian is not elected. She is not accountable to the American people. Yet she holds veto power over legislation supported by millions of voters.”
In a Friday social media post, Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., rhetorically asked his colleagues in the Senate why they are “allowing themselves to be bossed around by a democrat-appointed bureaucrat.”
But the parliamentarian’s rulings are just one of many obstacles to the OBBBA’s passage. Republican leaders are simultaneously negotiating with groups of GOP holdouts in both chambers, including Blue-state Republicans demanding a higher SALT deduction cap and fiscal hawks stipulating greater spending cuts.
Due to the cost of extending the expiring 2017 tax cuts — the greatest portion of the bill — the OBBBA could add anywhere between $2.4 trillion and $4.5 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade alone, depending on whether or not the parliamentarian approves the Senate’s request for permanent tax cut extension.
