Congressional Budget Office Archives

Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie revealed in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller that he could vote “yes” on President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” if a “skinny” version of the legislation materializes.

Massie has said he will not support the bill in its current form because it does not cut government spending substantially enough. Massie’s opposition to the bill is one reason Trump and his political allies have threatened to primary him in the 2026 midterms. Pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is also trying to primary Massie, according to a source who spoke to the Caller.

There is a version of the bill, though, Massie said he could support. In a group text with about ten other congressmen, called “Budget Hawks,” Massie said they have floated the idea of splitting the bill in two.

“I can tell you the conservatives in the house are getting antsy with every change that happens in the Senate, and there’s a concern that maybe they need to just skinny this thing down and try to do just a few things,” he asserted, adding that they may try to do “two bills instead of one.”

“The first one should be just the absolute essentials to the president’s priorities, which would be, secure the border and extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” he explained.

Massie said he could theoretically support that bill depending on its impact on the deficit.

“It would be a lot of speculation to say that’s where we’re going to end up. But if we did end up there, and there was a repeal of the Green New Deal subsidies, I could be for that, possibly — I’d have to see the total budget impact in the House,” he told the Caller.

There have been several changes to the Senate version of the bill that have raised red flags for Massie. They stripped the REINS Act Provision — something Massie personally lobbied for in the House version — which requires congressional approval for major federal regulations before they take effect. The Senate is also mulling over a longer phaseout of renewable energy tax credits and whether to reduce the income cap for State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions. Massie said that lowering the threshold would benefit blue states more than red states.

“If they make that tweak, let’s say they limit the SALT deduction to people who make less than $400,000 a year, that means that more of the benefit of that tax provision will go to blue states instead of red states, because to be under whatever the threshold is — let’s just say $400,000 a year annual income and have $40,000 of state and local taxes or property taxes — means that you’re probably in a blue state,” he explained.

“I think the ultimate bill that the Senate passes, if they can pass one, is going to have an even worse impact on the deficit than the House bill,” he said.

Massie speculated that the president’s July 4 deadline is unlikely to be met by Congress and that House Speaker Mike Johnson’s promise to force Congress to meet over the holiday is likely an empty threat meant to appease Trump. The real deadline, Massie alleged, is sometime in August.

“I think they’ll use the threat of canceling the August recess … they’ll take a week off the August recess and say we’re in session, and then they’ll give it back to us if this bill passes,” he said.

Another sticking point for Massie is that he is using a shorter window to score the bill’s impact on the deficit. While the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) typically scores bills on a ten-year timeline, Massie is only looking at the next three or four years. Trump’s plans for no tax on tips and overtime, and tax reform for seniors, for example, are set to expire after three years in the bill.

“The deficit impact is great over the next three years in the Big Bill that passed the House, and it’s only five years out when it starts to go in the other direction because they plan on having those tax cuts expire, and they plan on having that military spending expire,” he told the Caller. “But what will happen four years from now … is they’ll say, oh my gosh, that Congress four years ago and that president set up this fiscal cliff, and the impact to our military is going to be too great [if they let] the spending expire.”

“So we’ve got to use the current policy as the baseline,” he said.

Massie alleged that the House is effectively doing nothing while they wait for the Senate to deliver its version of the Big Beautiful Bill.

“The House is just sort of over here … treading water,” he asserted. “We’re just not doing much in the House. Where the speaker has the House looking like it’s busy … it’s not really that busy.”

AUTHOR

Amber Duke

Senior Editor. Follow Amber on Twitter.

For months, the bright lights have been on the House, capturing the made-for-TV drama of the Republicans’ Houdini-like wins. And while people have come to appreciate House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as a sort of consensus whisperer, no one is quite sure what to make of his Senate counterpart. But now that Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is in the reconciliation hot seat, America is about to see what Mitch McConnell’s replacement is made of. And as far as first tests go, this is a biggie.

Thune, who’s had a front-row seat for the House debate, knows that the job that awaits is no picnic. Like the speaker, he understands a thing or two about small margins. With just three votes to spare and 53 different opinions on next steps, corralling his caucus will require a mix of patience and thick skin. After listening to his caucus pick apart the draft passed by Johnson’s chamber, Thune’s early message is one of caution. “It’ll have to track very closely to the House bill,” he warned Monday, “because they’ve got a fragile majority and struck a very delicate balance.”

That in itself is a shift from earlier weeks, when Thune seemed to agree with the Republicans eager to make sweeping changes. Now, the South Dakotan says more reservedly, “[T]here are some things that senators want to add to the bill or things we’d do slightly differently.” Based on the soundbites coming out of his caucus, that’s putting it mildly. Goldilocks herself would go mad trying to find the sweet spot between the five factions of senators with competing goals.

There’s the group demanding more spending cuts (Ron Johnson, Wis.; Mike Lee, Utah; Rick Scott, Fla.), and another worried they go too deep (Susan Collins, Maine; Lisa Murkowski, Alaska). There are the pro-Medicaid reform Republicans and the not-so-pro-overhaul Republicans (Josh Hawley, Mo.; Murkowski; Jerry Moran, Kan.; and Jim Justice, W.Va.). While some cheer the end of Biden’s “clean energy credits,” others pan them (Murkowski; Moran; Thom Tillis, N.C.; John Curtis, Utah). While Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) rages against the debt ceiling hike, the more rural state senators are fighting the other chamber’s changes to health and supplemental nutrition programs (Chuck Grassley, Iowa). And remember the SALT caucus of the House? Well, Senator Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) admitted, “There’s not one Republican in the United States Senate” who cares about the state and local tax deduction cap.

And that’s to say nothing of the give-and-take on tax levels, ranges of defense and border spending, and a million other flashpoints tucked in the 1,100-page draft. Add that to the Byrd Bath, which will decide what belongs in reconciliation and what doesn’t, and you have the makings of four long, stress-filled weeks. “There’s always some who think it’s too hot, some [who] think it’s too cold,” observer Neil Bradley shook his head. “Where do you find the point where a majority think it’s just right?”

Great question — one that Thune will be losing his share of sleep over. In the end, he told reporters, “We’ve got to do what we can get 51 [votes] for.”

Johnson can sympathize. In his weekend sit-down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, he spoke knowingly. “… [A]s all our friends in the Senate know, it took us over a year to reach that equilibrium point in the House,” he said on Saturday’s “This Week on Capitol Hill.” The most important takeaway, the speaker reminds Thune’s disgruntled Republicans, is that “we’re going to achieve over $1.5 trillion in savings. … It’s the largest amount of savings of any government that would ever be achieved in the history of mankind. It’s a good start. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start. And I think the Senate’s got to recognize that.”

One of the greatest misunderstandings — even with people in Washington — is that the reconciliation package was never meant to be the vehicle for all of the president’s spending cuts. When Elon Musk and others complain that the bill doesn’t reduce the deficit, there’s a fundamental disconnect about several things, the speaker underscores. For starters, he reminded everyone, “This is just the beginning of a long process. We’re going to have another reconciliation bill, possibly two additional bills, coming up in the near future.”

Secondly — and just as importantly — “you have to remember how the process works,” the speaker stressed. When Americans (including Musk) wonder why there aren’t more Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts in the “one, big, beautiful bill,” it’s simple. “There are two categories of federal spending,” Johnson pointed out. “One is mandatory spending, one is discretionary. The reconciliation package [deals] with the first category, not the latter. So it was not possible — literally, under the rules of the Senate — for us to put DOGE cuts in large measure in the reconciliation package. That has to be a separate instrument.”

And that “separate instrument” is what the White House is working on right now: a rescissions package to roll back discretionary spending that was already approved. Thanks to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, presidents can permanently cancel funding to executive agencies if it’s within a 45-day window and if a simple majority of Congress approves. As we speak, Donald Trump is teeing up the first “of many” rescission proposals, worth about $9.4 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse.

That, Johnson reiterated, is what Congress has been waiting for. “I mean, there was no playbook for what Elon Musk and DOGE were doing. They didn’t have a set of procedures to follow. They had to create them as they went.” And now, he continued, Republicans are ready to make those recommendations a reality. Nothing that Musk’s team did will go to waste, the speaker assured Americans.

“The work will go forward and continue, because what he’s done is he’s brought a spotlight into these agencies — into these bureaucracies that we were never able to see. We got a perspective on it that Congress was never allowed because the bureaucracy was hiding so much data. I mean, we didn’t know, obviously, that Congress was funding transgender operas in Peru and all these other crazy things that were happening under USAID,” Johnson said, shaking his head. Elon found it because he cracked the code. He got inside the belly of the beast with his algorithms, and he uncovered it, and we’ve got to wipe it out.”

But the headlines that the House is adding to an already ballooning deficit are baloney, the speaker argued. “I sent a long text message to [Musk] to explain to him and make sure that he understands that he was looking at [an] analysis of the bill that was not accurate.” He pointed to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the bill and emphasized, “CBO is historically inaccurate. It’s run by Democrats. … They’re not going to give us a fair score. But the important thing to remember about this is that they do not use dynamic scoring. They use static scoring. In layman’s terms, all that means is they don’t give us any credit for the growth. The Big Beautiful Bill is going to be jet fuel to the U.S. economy. It is a pro-growth economy builder. It’s going to lower tax rates, lower regulations, [and] incentivize U.S. manufacturing again. When that happens, we know what [the effect will be].”

Let’s not forget, the speaker reminded Perkins, “We already did this in the first Trump administration, [and we] had the greatest economy in the history of the world after the first two years, because we cut taxes and cut regulations. Now we’re doing it on steroids. So the tremendous growth that will be achieved by this is being totally discounted by CBO. They’re saying it will add to the deficit. It’s not true,” he declared. “By our calculations, we are going to reduce the deficit because of all the growth that we stimulated. Just watch and see that the critics are going to be wrong.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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Amber Duke

Suzanne Bowdey