Budget office analysis makes the Republicans’ domestic policy megabill look even worse

With just hours remaining before House Republicans prepared to vote on their domestic policy megabill last month — the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the GOP’s legislative package. The findings from the non-partisan CBO were rather brutal: The analysis pointed to decreased resources for the poorest Americans, trillions of dollars in new debt, and the stripping of health care coverage from millions.

There was, however, one nagging problem with the projections: House Republican leaders wrote and rewrote their not-so-beautiful bill in the middle of the night, changing the reconciliation package repeatedly in response to private backroom deals. The CBO did its best, but it was trying to assess a moving target.

Nearly two weeks later, the budget office has finally had an opportunity to carefully scrutinize the final version of the bill — which narrowly passed the lower chamber ahead of Memorial Day weekend — and as NBC News reported, the CBO’s revised findings don’t do Republicans any favors.

The same CBO report similarly found that 10.9 million Americans would lose their health care coverage if the Republican legislation became law — a slightly larger total than the analysts’ original estimate — as a result of Medicaid cuts and regressive changes to the Affordable Care Act.

What’s the good news for GOP officials in this revised score? There really isn’t any.

It’s worth emphasizing for context that Republicans didn’t actually want any of this information — before or after the vote. Common sense might suggest that GOP officials on Capitol Hill would want to know basic details about their giant reconciliation package, such as how much it would cost and the practical implications of its provisions, so that Congress would at least try to govern with open eyes.

But that hasn’t been the case. Just as Republicans scrambled in 2017 to pass massive tax breaks without waiting for a score from the Congressional Budget Office, GOP lawmakers decided to do the same thing in 2025, deliberately choosing willful ignorance about their own legislation.

Congressional Democrats, however, were free to ask the CBO to scrutinize the House Republicans’ proposal, and that’s precisely what happened.

The bill is now pending in the Republican-led Senate, where significant changes to the bill appear inevitable. Watch this space.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.