White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller addressed false claims that are circulating about the One Big Beautiful Bill.
The first claim he tackled is that the legislation doesn’t “codify the [Department of Government Efficiency] cuts.”
“A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by senate rules to ‘mandatory’ spending only — eg Medicaid and Food Stamps,” he wrote on X. “The senate rules prevent it from cutting ‘discretionary’ spending — eg the Department of Education or federal grants. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory. The bill saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform. A remarkable achievement.”
Next, Miller discussed claims that the bill increases the deficit—a sticking point for some GOP lawmakers.
“This lie is based on a CBO accounting gimmick,” he said. “Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent. CBO says maintaining *current* rates adds to the deficit, but by definition leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit. The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline, which is the only correct baseline to use.”
Miller then turned to “another fantastically false claim” that the One Big Beautiful Bill spends trillions of dollars.
“This is just completely invented out of whole cloth,” he said. “This is not a ten year budget bill—it doesn’t ‘fund’ almost any operations of government, which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not). In other words, if this bill passed, but the annual budget bill did not, there would be no government funding. Under the math that critics are using, if we passed a one paragraph reconciliation bill that cut simply 50 billion in food stamp spending, they would say the bill ‘added’ trillions in spending and debt because they are counting ALL the projected federal spending that exists entirely outside the scope of this legislation, which is of course preposterous. The only funding in the bill is for the President’s border and defense priorities, while enacting a net spending cut of over 1.6 TRILLION dollars.”
Finally, Miller clarified that “the bill has two fiscal components: a massive tax cut and a massive spending cut.”
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