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.