Sen. James Lankford said Tuesday that the Senate isn't looking to make major changes to the budget reconciliation bill the House sent over. Instead, the upper chamber's goal is to make minor changes while keeping the measure largely recognizable to the House GOP.
"There are several changes we're going to make on it, but we're glad that the House has sent over a really good bill," the Oklahoma Republican said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "It's a great starting point for us. We're going to have this bill, we're going to work from the House version of this bill and do as much as we can to make sure that the House bill is recognized by the House when it comes back to the House.
"So, we're going to take their framework, their details, their policy areas, and then do some minor tweaks on this," he said. "There were 215 Republicans in the House that all put their fingerprints on it. Now, this is the opportunity for 50 plus senators to do the same, and then to have one bill that's actually combined between the two bodies."
The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which will underpin President Donald Trump's second-term legislative agenda, passed the House last week in a 215-214 vote before being sent to the Senate.
Federal lawmakers returned from recess on Monday as Trump called on Capitol Hill Republicans to "work as fast as they can" to get the "big, beautiful bill" to his desk before the original deadline of July 4.
Asked about including the spending cuts recommended by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the budget reconciliation bill, Lankford said that Congress needs to "try to do as many of them as we possibly can," while acknowledging that it is limited by law.
"We have a $2 trillion deficit," Lankford said. "That's $2 trillion overspending just this year. That was the same as last year. This was the process that was set up by the Biden administration when in 2021, they did this giant Inflation Reduction Act and all the things that they put into place. So, we're trying to be able to chip away on those as fast as we can.
"Many of those policies we do take out in this reconciliation bill," he said. "We got a long way to go and, as you mentioned, it was what's called discretionary spending. We can't actually engage with that in a reconciliation bill. There are several things we can't do by law on it. It's not just by rule, it's by law. So, we're trying to do as much as we possibly can to be able to slow down our spending, but we're going to have a long way to go. This is going to be a decade-long process to be able to chip away."
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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