If you’ve been watching the media coverage of President Trump’s new signature legislation — the so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill” — you’ve probably heard a lot of misleading claims. Critics on the left and in the media (and frankly, some on the right) have gone into overdrive trying to discredit the bill with bad-faith talking points and outright lies. But as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller explained, these talking points don’t survive even the most basic scrutiny.
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Let’s start with one of the most common attacks: The bill doesn’t “codify the DOGE cuts.”
Obviously, when we voted for Trump, we voted for the Department of Government Efficiency, and all the glorious purging of waste and fraud that would come with it. But there’s a reason why that’s not happening in this bill.
“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,” Miller explained in a post 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.”
So while the DOGE cuts themselves are outside the scope of this reconciliation bill, that doesn’t mean they’re not happening. More importantly, Miller noted that the bill does deliver where it can — big time.
“The bill saves more than 1.6 TRILLION in mandatory spending, including the largest-ever welfare reform. A remarkable achievement,” he said.
Then there’s the claim that the bill somehow increases the deficit. This one is pure fiction, Miller says, based on a misleading CBO accounting gimmick.
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“Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent,” he explained. “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.”
Translation: The Biden-era CBO projections are rigged to make Trump’s policies look worse than they are. Maintaining current tax rates is not a “cost”— it’s keeping things exactly the same.
Related: Don’t Let CBO Scoring Fool You
Another lie Miller dismantled is the idea that the bill “spends trillions.”
“This is just completely invented out of whole cloth,” he wrote. “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, critics are pretending that baseline government operations — which this bill doesn’t touch — are part of the spending. That’s not just dishonest, it’s deliberately misleading.
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“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,” Miller noted.
Miller summed it up clearly: “The bill has two fiscal components: a massive tax cut and a massive spending cut.”
That’s what the media won’t tell you. But the numbers don’t lie — and neither does Trump’s track record. This is real fiscal reform, and it’s long overdue.
Don’t let misleading headlines fool you—Trump’s fiscal reforms cut waste while safeguarding taxpayers. Join VIP using code FIGHT for 60% off and help us deliver the facts the media won’t.
