Before passing the legislation, Republicans gave a break to green energy subsidies, handed billions more to hospitals, and removed any limit on AI regulation.

As National Review reports, the Republican majority in the Senate passed its updated version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by the narrowest possible margin, with Vice President Vance required to cast a tiebreaking vote after a 50–50 split. President Trump’s signature legislative package now heads back to the House for another vote and potentially further revisions. Yet many GOP House members from both ideological ends of the caucus are not exactly enthused about the product they are receiving. According to The Hill, one representative wonders how the bill they sent to the Senate just over a month ago got “so much f***ing worse.”

I can’t disagree with this anonymous member of Congress. As I wrote yesterday, the ‘big, beautiful bill’ became significantly less beautiful over the last week as procedural and political limitations combined to make the bill’s carve-outs wider, its offsets smaller, and its expansion of the national debt much greater. I also covered the major changes that various Republican senators wished to make to the bill — some that aimed to reduce its overall cost, others to add to it. My hope, however implausible, was that the more prudent amendments would make it into the legislation while the pricier ones would be excluded.

Instead, the opposite happened. In order to get to 50 votes, Republican leadership made a few last-minute tweaks to the Senate’s version of the bill that made it even worse:

It appears that nearly all of the damaging changes to Republicans’ megabill came down to one factor: Fiscal conservatives who might have been willing to withhold their votes to advance their cause were vastly outnumbered by colleagues looking out for their states’ immediate interests. Senators such as Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) fought relentlessly to secure handouts for their states — and did not sign onto the legislation until they got them. Fiscal conservatives will need to demonstrate similar resolve if they ever want to bring deficits under control.