H.R. 1, nicknamed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act after the president who is pushing for it. It passed the House last week by a single vote, and now the 1,000-page bill is in the Senate as part of a budget process.
Ryan Walker is executive vice president of Heritage Action, the political arm of the well-known Heritage Foundation. He tells AFN the bill is being supported by analysts at Heritage because it addresses border security, energy production, and tax relief, which are all issues Heritage cares about.
On border security, Walker says, it supports deportation efforts by the Trump administration by increasing manpower. It streamlines the bureaucratic process to obtain permits for nuclear power and natural gas, he says, and it helps taxpayers by making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent.
"Heritage Action believes that, at the end of the day, the bill does a number of very important things," Walker says.
Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, tells AFN his organization is backing the bill because it makes “substantial strides” to ensure U.S. border enforcement will continue beyond Trump’s one term.
“It provides billions of dollars for border infrastructure, like the wall, new technology, additional manpower to enforce our laws, more detention space, more money for ICE officers to do interior enforcement,” he says. “You go down the list. It provides the funding that is necessary to make sure that our borders remain secure."
