Republicans Spin New Name for ‘Big Beautiful Bill'

Speaker Mike Johnson
Sipa USA
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey

Good evening. More than 1,000 current and former Department of Health and Human Services employees signed a letter today saying that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is endangering the nation's health and calling on him to resign. Kennedy is expected to face tough questioning tomorrow at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee.

Here's what else we're watching while waiting for our numbers to hit in the $1.4 billion Powerball drawing.

As Polls Sour, Republicans Go for a Rebrand of 'Big Beautiful Bill'

The White House and top Republicans are pushing a new sales pitch for the signature package of tax and spending cuts President Trump signed into law two months ago.

A trio of top Trump political and communications aides reportedly told House Republicans at a briefing Wednesday to refer to the legislation as a "working families tax cut" rather than use the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the name bestowed by Trump and GOP lawmakers. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump 2024 political director James Blair and Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio reportedly laid out the new messaging strategy at a morning meeting with GOP members.

As the White House and congressional lawmakers strategize their messaging ahead of next year's midterm elections and look to counter Democratic attacks, administration officials started using the "working families tax cut" language in recent weeks. Vice President JD Vance recently field-tested the new sales pitch at an event in battleground Georgia.

House Speaker Mike Johnson demonstrated the new approach at a mid-morning news conference.

"House Republicans fanned out across the country during the district work period and got a lot of work done," Johnson told reporters, "and they were talking about the One Big Beautiful Bill, which has also become known as the Working Families Tax Cut Act because that's what it principally represents."

Other House GOP leaders also used the new name during their news conference.

Johnson insisted that the language change is "not a rebranding" and said Republicans are looking to counter misrepresentations about the content of the new law.

"I'm not surprised that some of the early polling was less than favorable in some areas of the country," he said, "because there has been a full-on strategy by, frankly, the mainstream media and the Democrats, of course, to try to misrepresent what's in the bill. If you look at the polls of all the individual provisions of the bill, it's wildly popular."

Trump admitted last week that the name Republicans gave the legislation based on language he repeatedly used - the One Big Beautiful Big Act - had a serious political flaw. "I'm not going to use the term 'great, big, beautiful,'" Trump told reporters. "That was good for getting it approved, but it's not good for explaining to people what it's all about."

The new law includes an extension of the GOP's 2017 tax cuts along with new tax breaks based on Trump campaign promises, like no tax on tips and overtime pay, and provides billions in extra funding for the military and Trump's immigration crackdown. It also includes steep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, and is projected to leave millions of Americans without healthcare coverage. Analyses have found that the benefits of the legislation will flow largely to wealthy households while those families at the bottom of the income scale will be hurt - and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law will add $4.1 trillion to the deficit over a decade.

As Johnson indicated, polling has found that Americans largely oppose the law. Democrats said the shifting Republican language was further indication that the law has flopped with voters.

"The so-called rebrand of the Big, Ugly Law is an admission that the GOP's signature legislative 'achievement' is a toxic failure. Only Republicans seem surprised that ripping away health care and gutting rural hospitals just to hand billionaires a massive tax break is completely out of step with what the American people want," Justin Chermol, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement.

Quote of the Day

"If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we're going to use that authority aggressively to protect the American people and then we can have a debate about what those reforms statutorily should look [like] permanently."

  • White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, speaking at a conference of conservatives on Wednesday about the Trump administration's efforts to give the president more control over federal spending, including unilateral moves to restrict funding approved by Congress.

Vought detailed the Trump administration's emphasis on moving quickly and aggressively, even if it means not waiting for Congress to legislate or appropriate. He touted Congress's passage of the first rescissions package in decades, clawing back some $9 billion in funding, as a "great victory" and defended the White House's new "pocket rescission" package of $4.9 billion in spending cuts.

The Government Accountability Office has said such rescissions are illegal, but Vought criticized that agency and other elements of the federal bureaucracy. "We're not big fans of GAO," he said. "They are a quasi-legislative independent entity ... something that shouldn't exist."

The head of the GAO reportedly pushed back in a statement: "Clearly Russell Vought does not value transparency and accountability," Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said. "GAO's mission is to support Congress in carrying out its constitutional responsibilities. During my tenure as Comptroller General alone, GAO's work has saved taxpayers over $1.2 trillion and resulted in tens of thousands of improvements to how federal programs work."

Number of the Day: 68

The Treasury Department has published a preliminary list of 68 jobs eligible for the new "no tax on tips" deduction enacted as part of the Republican megabill. The law allows some workers to deduct up to $25,000 in qualified tip income from their taxes every year through 2028. Among the jobs on the list are bartenders, wait staff and other food servers, gambling dealers, golf caddies, digital content creators, concierges, maids, plumbers, locksmiths, nannies, babysitters, tutors, tattoo artists, manicurists and shampooers.

For the First Time Since the Pandemic, There Are More Unemployed Than Jobs Available

The labor market continued to cool in July, as U.S. employers posted 7.18 million job openings, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. The tally fell short of expectations for the month and came in below the 7.36 million job openings recorded in June.

While the data suggests that the labor market continues to soften modestly, some analysts emphasized a significant, negative shift in the data: For the first time since the pandemic, there are more job seekers than jobs available, with 7.24 million unemployed compared to 7.18 million open positions.

"This is a turning point for the labor market," Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote on social media, where she also posted the chart below. "It's yet another crack."

Axios's Neil Irwin noted that there were significant, negative revisions to the June numbers, as well. "The number of job openings in June was revised down by 80,000, and the number of people who lost their jobs involuntarily that month was revised up by a whopping 192,000 from the earlier estimate," he wrote.

The downward revisions echo the revisions to the May and June data laid out in the July jobs report, which produced a far gloomier picture of the labor market over the past few months - and led to the firing of Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by President Trump, who claimed the data was "rigged" in order "to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad."

Rate cut on course: The report boosted the already strong expectation that the Federal Reserve will cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a point at its meeting in mid-September. Treasury yields declined on Wednesday as investors digested the news.

The August employment report coming this Friday will provide another set of data about the health of the labor market and the broader economy. "The expectation is that the Fed is going to move in September, and the Friday data is important," Gargi Chaudhuri of BlackRock told Bloomberg. The August employment data "would have to be a very strong or very weak" for the Fed to deviate from its expected path, Chaudhuri added.

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