If Senate Republicans begin debate as soon as Saturday on their newly retooled tax package, they may do so without a full grasp of its costs, at a moment when fiscal experts are sounding increasingly dire alarms that the measure could severely worsen the nation’s ever-expanding debt.
The hasty pursuit of a vote is designed to satisfy President Trump’s self-imposed deadline to finalize the bill by July 4. But it also means that Republicans are at risk of forging ahead with an incomplete understanding about an economic agenda that could alter the nation’s fiscal trajectory for a generation.
The latest version of the party’s signature legislation arrived just before midnight on Friday. Spanning roughly 1,000 pages, it still seeks to cut federal taxes, scale back safety-net programs such as Medicaid and boost spending on immigration and defense, though Republicans tweaked some of the ways that they would achieve each of those aims.
Many of the changes reflect deals cut with individual Republicans who were at risk of voting against the bill and other, more mechanical rewrites to their cuts on Medicaid, energy tax credits and food stamps. Those updates will allow Republicans to try to advance the bill using a fast-track budget process in the Senate without any Democratic support.
The revisions, taken together, could add or subtract to the overall costs of the package, but Republicans may not know precisely by how much when they hold their first vote this weekend.
There is still no final fiscal breakdown, known as a score, from either the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office or the Joint Committee on Taxation, which advises lawmakers on the budget implication of their legislative agenda.
Only the joint committee has rendered a partial verdict, having studied just the tax components in the Senate’s earlier, unrevised proposal. Computed in the traditional way, analysts found it would cost $4.2 trillion over the next decade.
Otherwise, the two congressional budget watchdogs have not been able to offer more comprehensive projections about the sprawling bill, or the effects of their proposal on the broader economy. Studying the House version of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in late May, they determined it would add more than $3 trillion to the debt within the next decade, even after accounting for potential economic growth.
Economists across the political spectrum have come to similar conclusions about the package and its price, drawing sharp rebukes from Mr. Trump and his aides. The White House continues to insist that the bill will supercharge economic growth, and when combined with the president’s other policies, generate as much as $11 trillion in deficit reduction.
Nor have congressional analysts determined the ways in which the Senate’s new vision would affect families’ finances across different income brackets. Earlier reports about the House tax legislation projected that the bill would fall hardest on the poor, who would see cuts to federal aid, while reserving the greatest financial benefits for the rich.
For now, the best estimates for the Senate legislation are either outdated or preliminary, though they suggest the version winding through the chamber may carry a similar fiscal burden or turn out to be even more expensive.
In one analysis, released earlier this week, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected that the Senate proposal could add as much as $4.2 trillion to the debt by 2034, after accounting for expected changes to the bill. Marc Goldwein, the senior vice president of the deficit-reduction group, acknowledged the true cost was unclear because “we don’t have a score.”
The cost could rise because of the specific changes Republicans made overnight, some experts said. The revised measure now provisions $25 billion for rural hospitals affected by Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, for example, as well as an increase in the cap on the state and local tax deduction demanded by lawmakers in the House.
Martha Gimbel, a founder of the Budget Lab at Yale, pointed to those additions as she predicted that “everything is moving in a more expensive direction.”
But that, she added, is the problem. “None of us have had time to sit down and figure this out,” she said.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
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