Live updates: Senate debates Trump’s policy bill as Republicans race to meet July 4 deadline

The Senate version of President Donald Trump’s agenda package would cost far more than the House-approved bill, according to analysis released today by the Congressional Budget Office.

The Senate legislation would add nearly $3.3 trillion to the deficit over a decade, according to CBO’s traditional scoring method, using what’s known as the “current law baseline.” It assumes the expiring provisions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts will lapse as scheduled at the end of the year.

The House version of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit, according to the CBO.

The main reason the Senate version is costlier is because it contains bigger tax cuts while shrinking some of the spending cuts and revenue raisers, said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group.

Trump and some GOP leaders, including Sen. Mike Crapo, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, have pushed to use an alternative scoring method, known as the “current policy baseline,” which seemingly greatly minimizes the deficit impact of the bill because it would not include the cost of extending the expiring 2017 tax provisions.

Critics of the method, however, say that it doesn’t change the fact that the package would increase the deficit. The tax provisions in the Senate bill would add nearly $4.5 trillion to the deficit over a decade, according to a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis released yesterday.

Using the current policy baseline, the Senate version would reduce the deficit by roughly $508 billion over the next decade, according to a separate CBO estimate released Saturday night.

Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect the Senate bill’s impact on the deficit using the current policy baseline. It would reduce the deficit by roughly $508 billion over a decade.