philbo wrote: Fri Jun 06, 2025 6:47 am
I gotta wonder, though: who actually knows what is in Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill"? The people voting on it aren't being given enough time even to scan its contents, let alone work out the implications. The OBR was working from a version changed multiple times since. Trump has no f.cking clue whatsoever beyond whatever headline tax cut he can crow about. Johnson is allowing additions that he can't have had time to read... given the multiple sources of amendments, it wouldn't surprise me if nobody knows exactly what is being voted on.
I have worked on bills of this size (in pages, not necessarily dollars). The number of people who have literally read every word will be very small, probably all staff rather than elected officials. There will be a larger number, again probably almost all staff, who have read section-by-section summaries of all of it, prepared by other staff. Almost nobody will have thought about the implications of all the individual pieces, but there will be teams of staff who have, collectively. The Representatives who voted on it will mostly have relied on advice from trusted staff in their own offices, the offices of relevant House committees, and the offices of their party leaders -- along with input from various interested outside parties, of course, who will also have had staff reading it. This is all normal and is really the only way a 1000+ page bill can work.
While the changes from the version on which CBO based its cost estimates may be large in absolute dollars, I doubt they are large in comparison to the bill as a whole.
And TBH it doesn't really matter much how sloppy the House bill is, because now the Senate will produce its version, and then a conference committee (or some equivalent process) will go through both versions, literally line by line, before coming up with a final version.
I'm sure nobody on this forum will like the final version, and it will undoubtedly still contain a few outright mistakes, but not really because the House rushed its version through before any Members had time to read it. They vote based on the big picture, plus the details of any smaller bits that are of particular importance to them, and that's just always going to be the case.
