It was the exact opposite of what nearly everyone on Capitol Hill expected.

Rather than soften its edges, Senate Republicans took the sprawling Republican megabill the House sent them and sharpened it further, making the heart of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda more politically explosive.

GOP senators made steeper cuts to Medicaid, hastened cuts to wind and solar energy tax credits and also managed to add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the deficit compared to the House plan.

Usually, it’s far-right conservatives in the House proposing politically precarious policies, leaving the careful moderates in the Senate — the “cooling saucer,” according to the old Hill cliche — to dial them back.

This time, Senate Republicans were dead-set on making an expensive suite of pro-growth business tax cuts permanent. That required finding deep offsetting cuts, and the cold, hard calculus by the Senate GOP’s chief architects was that enough of their 53-member conference would ultimately swallow their protests and go along.

That bet paid off Tuesday with a 51-50 nail-biter vote. But now GOP senators are having to do some explaining to House Republicans who are already balking at the remodeled bill — particularly moderates who were counting on senators to water down the Medicaid and clean-energy provisions.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said House members who thought the Senate would walk back some of its changes had “miscalculated.”

“We are a more conservative body,” Cramer said in an interview, adding that there are moderates in the House who “cringe at the sound of any word that starts with ‘Medi.’”

As for conservatives who are cringing at the higher deficits created by the Senate bill, they’re not finding much sympathy among their Senate counterparts, who ended up embracing a controversial accounting tactic that effectively zeros out the cost of extending expiring tax cuts.

“We actually make the business provisions permanent, right? That’s the main difference,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview Monday about complaints by the House Freedom Caucus that the bill would add $651 billion to the deficit. Johnson was among a group of Senate fiscal hawks who railed against the legislation for months, then fell in line for the final vote Tuesday, just like their colleagues anticipated.

No permanence enemies

In the end, the fiscal impact of the bill grew in two directions: Despite Senate leaders’ vow to find more spending cuts, their bill might well have increased spending on net as a result of negotiations with holdouts who successfully pushed for increased funding for rural hospitals and carve-outs on safety-net program cutbacks.

“The bill includes over $500 billion in new spending, and at the end to get the vote of the Alaska senator, billions and billions more were added,” said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the three Republicans who voted against the bill Tuesday.

House members, he added, are “going to look at it and see that it’s much less conservative than it started out to be and it’s going to add much more to the debt.”

Strict Senate budget rules also meant that some House spending cuts had to be scaled back or dropped altogether, so senators had to dig deep to find offsets elsewhere — especially given the $466 billion cost of adding the permanent business tax cuts to the bill versus just extending them through 2029, as the House did.

Yet there was no serious discussion about leaving those tax cuts behind. Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo and other tax-writing Republicans considered it their top priority. Thune called it a red line for many of his members, and it was one that ultimately influenced some of the Senate’s most politically fraught decisions.

In an interview after the bill’s passage, Thune acknowledged that the decision to make the business tax cuts permanent impacted the savings and overall strategy for the bill.“We really believed that permanence was the key to economic growth because it creates certainty,” he said. “All the models that we saw showed that you got more growth with permanence.”

To compensate, Finance Committee Republicans significantly dialed back some of Trump’s marquee campaign promises to enact tax relief for tipped wages and overtime work. Many of those senators privately scoffed that the populist tax policies were not particularly pro-growth, as opposed to the write-offs for business equipment and research and development expenses.

Even more explosive, however, is how they chose to wring additional savings out of Medicaid. The joint federal-state health program had already emerged as a political hornet’s nest in the House, where members balked at various proposals that would turn off the federal money spigot and force states to kick residents off their health plans.

Eventually the House landed on a compromise proposal of capping medical provider taxes, a popular financing mechanism for state Medicaid programs. Many Republicans objected, but it beat several alternatives, such as explicitly reducing the federal cost share formula for Medicaid enrollees.

Medicaid backlash

Many Republican senators prepared to make their peace with the proposal, including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who said in a Monday interview that he was privately prepared to accept the House’s provider tax cap with minor tweaks after a hospital association in his state formally blessed it.

But before Hawley could announce his support, the Senate Finance Committee released a draft that discarded the freeze and instead drastically scaled down the tax. Instead of waving a white flag, Hawley went on the warpath, urging Thune to drop the Senate proposal and backchanneling with House leadership to undermine it.

Hawley, who described himself as “stunned” by the Senate’s provider tax language, said he never got an explanation for why leadership went down that route. In the interview, he held up and rubbed his fingers together — indicating that he believed they were looking for money.

“I think it’s a matter of our mark, the Senate mark, made a lot more of the business tax cuts permanent,” he said.

While leadership was ultimately able to get Hawley on board — he won approval for a radiation victims compensation fund he’s championed and other smaller goodies — the decision to go deeper on Medicaid lost Republicans two key senators during the final vote on Tuesday afternoon — Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis.

Both purple-state senators urged the Senate to revert to the House Medicaid language. Tillis privately warned leaders the Senate proposal would devastate his state and cost him reelection. Days later, he announced he would not run again and publicly torched the bill, saying it would “betray the promise Donald Trump made.”

The Senate’s Medicaid swerve has also put Speaker Mike Johnson in a bind. When he was locking down support for the House to pass its version of the bill, he privately reassured his members that the Senate would soften his chamber’s Medicaid cuts. Over the past week, he continued to reiterate to them that the Senate would end up closer to what the House passed. Now, he has to explain to increasingly frustrated House moderates why that didn’t happen.

But even as House Republicans were publicly banking on the Senate to soften the Medicaid cuts, Senate Republicans were pushing to go further. During an early June Finance Committee meeting with Trump at the White House, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming described to the president how the provider tax amounted to “money laundering” and would constitute cracking down on fraud, according to a person granted anonymity to disclose private discussions.

The parliamentarian and the billionaire

Other unpredictable events forced Senate Republicans to lose out on hundreds of billions of dollars in savings. After lengthy debates between Republican and Democratic staff in June, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised that upward of $200 billion in House offsets would have to be left out of the bill because they didn’t comply with Senate budget rules.

House Republicans had also banked on $116 billion in revenue from retaliatory taxes aimed at dissuading foreign countries from implementing digital levies and a global minimum tax that the GOP detests. Shortly after the Senate included the proposal in its text — and a freakout by analysts on Wall Street — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a deal with G7 countries on the global tax and asked for the retaliatory taxes to be removed.

Other changes, like sharp cuts to certain clean-energy tax credits, seemed spurred more by politics than fiscal considerations. After the megabill passed the House in May, far-right influencers and lawmakers got increasingly vocal about what they perceived as deeply unfair subsidies to green industries.

Trump began calling Thune to urge him to take an axe to wind and solar energy incentives that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden, even after softened language backed by Senate moderates was inserted into the Finance Committee text. Trump told the same to Senate conservatives, many of whom had been swayed by fossil-fuel advocate Alex Epstein. They invited Epstein to address a Senate lunch in June to win over skeptical colleagues.

Even a late intervention from the world’s richest man couldn’t move the needle. Elon Musk publicly lashed out at Republicans for scaling back the tax credits, including making a public appeal to Speaker Mike Johnson to keep them online. He also personally approached Thune in recent days as the Senate debated the bill. Thune declined to comment on the conversation, but afterward Musk continued attacking the bill, arguing that it would hurt America’s ability to compete with China.

Senate holdouts did manage to clinch the removal of a controversial tax on solar and wind energy projects in 11th-hour negotiations, as well as a carve-out from the phaseouts for projects that start construction immediately. But the harsh language pushed by Epstein, which required most other wind and solar projects to be placed in service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the incentives, stayed in the final Senate product.

Tillis, liberated of political niceties after announcing his retirement, railed against the clean-energy changes on the Senate floor on Sunday, arguing that they would gut power projects that are already being developed.

Taking aim at Epstein, Tillis chalked up the changes to “people who have never worked a day in this industry, maybe philosophized and written a few white papers on it, but haven’t gotten their hands dirty.”

Ben Jacobs contributed to this report.

Senate Republicans narrowly passed Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” Tuesday, taking a significant step toward the president’s goal of signing the legislation later this week.

The vote was 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina joined Democrats and voted no.

The bill is expected to be the party’s marquee legislative achievement heading into next year’s midterms. The GOP’s slim House majority is at risk, and in the Senate, Tillis’ retirement announcement this week handed Democrats a major opening.

In addition to extending the president’s 2017 tax cuts, the bill includes scaled-down versions of his campaign priorities, such as “no tax on tips,” while overhauling social safety-net programs, and providing new border and military spending. It also hikes the federal debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

“This is about extending that tax relief so the same people that benefited from it back in 2017 and for the last eight years don’t end up having a colossal, massive tax increase hitting them in the face come Jan. 1,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.

The Tuesday morning vote followed nearly a full day of round-the-clock uncertainty over how the bill would come together, all set against a slow-moving amendment “vote-a-rama” taking place on the Senate floor.

It made for a messy ending to a months-long process. Thune, Majority Whip John Barrasso and other leaders shuttled between GOP holdouts as the votes dragged on overnight. After huddling with a band of fiscal hawks around 1 a.m., the normally chatty Thune said only that “progress is an elusive term.”

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski emerged as a particular focus of leaders’ attention. They already spent days working with her to address concerns about the bill’s impact on her state’s health care and economy — for instance, putting a expanded tax break for whaling boat captains in the bill. But some of their proposals ran into trouble from the Senate parliamentarian, leaving her vote in question until the very end.

As Republicans questioned if they would be able to win her over, Thune and key committee chairs met with Paul, thought to be their most dug-in “no” vote, to see if he might be gettable.

Now Republicans could face an even more painful headache across the Capitol: The package still needs to get through the House, which is expected to start voting as soon as Wednesday, driving Republicans right down to the wire on their self-imposed July 4 deadline.

That will be a heavy lift: Moderates are worried about changes to Medicaid and clean energy tax credits included in the Senate bill, and conservatives are up in arms that it doesn’t go far enough in cutting spending. But GOP leaders are betting they can get it through the way they did their initial draft earlier this year — by daring holdouts to vote against Donald Trump.

Many of the same provisions that are giving House Republicans heartburn also sparked GOP opposition in the Senate. Collins had warned for days that she was leaning against the bill absent her colleagues agreeing to soften a provision curtailing state provider taxes, which many states use to fund their Medicaid programs, and significantly increase a rural hospital fund.

But Collins’ amendment failed on a procedural vote. She accused Democrats of “hypocrisy” afterward for voting to sink a provision softening the bill’s blow but insisted it wouldn’t impact her final vote, adding: “I told all of you earlier in the week that I have problems with the bill.”

Tillis, meanwhile, compared the political ramifications of the Medicaid provisions to the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which was followed by political wipeouts for Democrats in subsequent elections. After getting attacked by Trump, and Senate leaders doing little to try to assuage his concerns on Medicaid, he announced on Sunday he would not run for re-election. That was in part to send a sign that he wasn’t flippable on the bill, according to a person close to Tillis granted anonymity to disclose private discussions.

Paul was long viewed as most likely “no” due to his firm opposition to the debt ceiling hike embedded in the megabill. But he was only one of four fiscal hawks that leaders had been watching.

The other three — Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida — ultimately voted for the bill, as several of their colleagues suggested they would weeks ago. The effort to win over the group included multiple meetings with Trump, outreach from Vance and an 11th-hour meeting late Sunday night with top Senate Republicans, including Thune.

As part of that meeting, Thune agreed to support a Scott effort to curb how much the federal government pays to cover some Medicaid enrollees starting in 2031. In exchange, Johnson, Lee, Scott and Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming all agreed to start debate on the bill. In the end, the amendment never got a vote after several Republican senators made clear they would not support it and it could not pass.

House Republicans and some governors bet that the Senate would water down the House’s Medicaid changes when the bill came across the Capitol earlier this year. Instead, the Senate Finance Committee went further than the House by incrementally scaling back the provider tax cap in expansion states instead of just freezing it.

The Senate’s passage of the bill is the culmination of more than a year of work, dating back to early 2024, when Barrasso held a meeting between Senate Republicans and Trump campaign officials to start discussing the agenda if their party won a trifecta. Senate Finance Committee Republicans also started meeting more than a year ago to start discussing the contours of their eventual reconciliation bill, and Thune convened meetings with his members to test how policy ideas would fare across the conference.

Thune and Johnson have been in close contact for months, including regular meetings and increasingly frequent phone calls as the Senate bill inched closer to the finish line. Yet Johnson will now need to sell his own members, nervous about the political and policy implications of the bill.

Democrats are planning to use many of those same arguments that Republicans are raising internally to hammer them heading into next year’s midterm election. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is warning that “the American people will not forget what Republicans do in this chamber today.”

“We heard what our colleague from North Carolina had to say about this bill. My guess is half, maybe even more than half of the Republicans in the Senate totally agree with him,” Schumer said. “But he had the courage to speak the truth. The backbone to speak the truth. But not our other colleagues.”