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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
GOP senators’ top concerns with Trump’s big agenda bill, in their
own words
By Lauren Fox, Morgan Rimmer and Manu Raju, CNN
Updated:
7:00 AM EDT, Sat June 7, 2025
Source: CNN
Republicans have set an ambitious deadline of trying to pass President
Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda , kickstarting an intensive
negotiation in the US Senate where Republican lawmakers are all over
the map when it comes to the specific changes they want to see made to
the House-passed bill.
The challenge ahead for Senate Majority Leader John Thune is he can
only afford to lose three votes, but he must find consensus between
conservatives in his conference who are pushing for more spending cuts
and others who already fear that some of the and rollbacks to clean
energy tax credits that were a cornerstone of the House bill went too
far.
It’s a herculean task and one made more complicated by Elon . Adding
to the challenge is the fact that whatever the Senate settles on will
need to go back to the House and win approval there before the
President can sign it and pass it into law.
Here are senators describing in their own words their concerns and what
they want to see changed in the weeks ahead. The interviews were
conducted in the first week in June after lawmakers returned from
recess. The transcripts below have been lightly edited for clarity.
Concerns about changes to Medicaid
Why it matters: New to how states can levy provider taxes made up a
significant amount of the ways to save money in the House bill.
Speeding up how quickly those work requirements were implemented also
went a long way to secure support from the conservative House Freedom
Caucus. Yet a handful of GOP senators say they need to look closely at
how the changes could affect their states and their constituents. And
some Republicans in the Senate are warning that the changes may need to
be scaled back, a potential problem for House conservatives.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri:
“I’m concerned about people who are here legally, residents of my
state, citizens of my state who are working and would lose health care
coverage. I am not going to vote for that … There are a host of
concerns but Medicaid is the big kahuna and that is where I am training
my focus and my fire. I’ve got 1.3 million Missourians on Medicaid,
or CHIP, so that’s the hill to fight on.”
Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia:
CNN: “Do you have concerns about the changes to the provider tax on
the Medicaid side?”
Justice: “The provider tax is really important. I mean, you know, to
to a lot of states, you know that we, we, we can’t let that just get
undermined, because you get that undermined and everything you can hurt
a lot of our nursing homes a lot.”
Reporter: “My follow up question is does the House bill cut Medicaid
to the bone? When you say that, are you worried that they’re gonna
have bigger cuts are you fine with the House as it is?”
Justice: “I do not think it cuts it to the bone, or any of the bone,
but but there’s, you know, you get you gotta get through all the fine
print and everything, because there could be things that absolutely
hurt people and everything.”
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine:
“I’m still going through the issues that I see as problematic.
I’m looking at the changes in education programs like Pell grants.
I’ve told you many times that I’m looking at the impact on rural
hospitals. I support the work requirements that are in the bill. I
think that makes sense.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia:
“There is a lot of concern. I did a couple roundtables at home, and
so, you know, we talked about it, where I can look and see more deeply.
There were some nuances to it that I hadn’t actually understood
before that are in the House bill. We haven’t had a chance to digest
how it’s going to impact our hospitals.”
Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas:
“I’ve said before that I want to see very – I want to make sure
that we’re not harming hospitals that we just spent COVID money to
save. So, that’s part of it, but I also care a lot about, with
disabilities and so, Medicaid is an important issue. So, we’ll see
how, what the Senate does and I’ll be lobbying to try to get
something that’s acceptable to me.”
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina:
“We have to take a look at states that have expanded Medicaid, to
make sure that we’re making a smart decision for millions of people
who are under expansion – North Carolina, 620,000 Medicaid recipients
alone. So, we’ve got to work on getting that right, giving the state
legislatures and others a chance to react to it, make a recommendation,
or make a change. And that’s all the implementation stuff that
we’re beginning to talk about now that we’re in possession of the
bill.”
Concerns about the deficit and government spending
Why it matters: In the Senate, a handful of lawmakers have made clear
they don’t think the House bill does enough to curb the country’s
spending problems. The argument was bolstered this week by two things.
First, Musk attacked members for backing the bill he argued didn’t go
far enough. Then, the Congressional Budget Office released a report
that they anticipated the bill in its totality would over the next 10
years.
The challenge here is that finding additional cuts that 51 senators can
support and 218 House Republicans can sign off on is tough to do. Some
of the largest savings that could have been made to programs like
Medicaid were rejected in the House already by swing district
Republicans who argued that the .
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin:
Johnson: “I talked to the President today… he’s encouraged me to
support the bill and I said – listen, we all want him to succeed but
my bottom line is we need to seriously address the debt and deficit
issue.”
CNN: “Would you be open to passing something close to the House bill
now with a promise of changes in the future?”
Johnson: “Listen, I want to help the president succeed in this thing
so I’ve got a pretty open mind. My requirement has always been a
commitment to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending and a process
to achieve and maintain it.”
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky:
“Come the end of September, when our fiscal year ends, the
deficit’s going to be $2.2 trillion. That’s just not conservative.
They’re borrowing $5 trillion, that means they’re anticipating the
following year being over $2 trillion as well, so it’s just not a
conservative thing to do, and I’ve told them I can’t support the
bill if they’re together. If they were to separate out and take the
debt ceiling off that, I very much could consider the rest of the
bill.”
Sen. John Curtis of Utah:
Curtis: “If you look at the House bill, just to simplify it a little
bit, we’re going to spend in the next 10 years about $20 trillion
more than the revenue we bring in, and they’re cutting $1.5 trillion
out of $20 trillion. Most of us wouldn’t do that in our businesses,
in our homes, and certainly don’t do it in the state of Utah. And so
that’s a big concern to me.”
CNN: “So any substantial changes to get your support?”
Curtis: “I’m not drawing red lines, right, like I’m being
careful. But I think we have to do our best work to get my support.”
Concerns about clean energy rollbacks
Why it matters: At the end of the House’s precarious negotiations,
members of the House Freedom caucus got assurances that many of the
that were part of former President Joe Biden’s legacy would be rolled
back and that the process for ending them would begin sooner than the
original legislative text had laid out. It was a huge victory for
conservatives. But, in the Senate, a handful of lawmakers are worried
that the rollbacks and .
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska:
“On the energy tax credits – as you know, obviously a great deal of
focus on oil and natural gas in the state, but also on the clean energy
side as well.”
“I’ve made clear that I think these investments that we have made
as a country in some of these clean energy technologies, we’re seeing
that play forward in a lot of states, and so let’s be smart about
these, let’s make sure if you’re going to do phase-outs of this,
that they’re reasonable phase-outs. So I’m going to be advocating
for that.”
Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas:
“We’re going to pay attention to how it affects Kansas. One of the
issues is I think there is a lot of Senate sentiment that it’s too
rapid.”
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina:
“Look, the key there is to go at it through the lens of a
businessperson. It’s easy, you know, from a political standpoint, to
cancel programs that are out there. We need to be smart about where
capital has been deployed to minimize the impact on the message we’re
sending –that we’d send businesses, that every two or four years we
have massive changes in our priorities for energy transition. We just
got to get it right. It doesn’t mean that I think we have to extend
every program, necessarily, but I do think we have to hold businesses
harmless for the programs that are there, and then calculate what the
economic effect is going to be. If we don’t – this is not all their
spending, there’s economic growth behind a lot of these as well, as
we’ve seen in North Carolina.”
Concerns about state and local tax deductions
Why it matters: A group of New York and California Republicans fought
hard in the House to increase how much in state and local taxes
constituents can deduct on their federal returns. The deduction cap
went from $10,000 to $40,000 for people who fall below a certain income
threshold, but the benefit really helps voters in high-tax states. In
the House, Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority is built on winning some
of these high-tax districts. And several members in his conference made
it clear they’d vote against the bill without a boost to SALT. In the
Senate, the politics are very different.
The provision is costly and there aren’t any Republican senators
representing high-tax states like New York, California, New Jersey or
Illinois. Therefore, there is a lot of grumbling from GOP senators who
would rather spend the billions it costs to raise the threshold on
another area of the tax code.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo of Idaho:
“There’s not a single senator from New York or New Jersey or
California and so there’s not a strong mood in the Senate Republican
caucus right now to do $353 billion for states that basically the other
states subsidize. But that being said, you know, like I say on every
issue, nothing is resolved until it’s resolved and we are working
things out.”
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina:
CNN: “Is there any way the $40,000 cap survives?”
Tillis: “I hope not. But, you know, I’ll have to that is one where
I don’t. I believe when I draw a red line, I stick to it. I’m not
willing to draw a red line there, but I would be a lot happier, in
total, I’d be a lot happier seeing that number come down. I’ve said
it before. It’s because it’s personal to me. I took all the
criticism for making North Carolina not a SALT state, and now you’re
telling me I’ve got to subsidize the bad decisions made in Albany and
Sacramento. So it’s at the end of the day, if they do their work in
their state, they should be talking to state senators, not US senators,
to fix that problem.”
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