The House’s passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill in the early hours of this morning has ratified Donald Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party. More than that, it indicates the need for Republicans to move beyond tax policy to secure a populist realignment.

Through sheer force of personality, the President dragged this colossal bill over the finish line after much back-and-forth. The final “manager’s amendment” literally renamed the bill’s proposed $1,000 “MAGA Accounts” — which would be given to American children born in the upcoming years — as “Trump Accounts”. In Trump’s Washington, personality is often policy. Because of the President’s strong bond with the Republican base, most GOP House members dread crossing him. This gives Trump particular leverage over members of the House Freedom Caucus, which often likes to stick its thumb in the eye of leadership. Most of these representatives come from heavily gerrymandered districts, where a Trump-backed primary challenge could be a major headache. Unsurprisingly, most of those Freedom Caucus objections melted into air once the bill was on the floor.

Trump has staked his legislative agenda so far on passing the bill, which would extend the 2017 tax cuts and realise some of his promises from the campaign trail last year, such as no taxes on tips. Its defeat would be a major rebuke to the President, so it had to pass.

However, the bill is itself a mixed bag in terms of policy, at least from a populist perspective. It increases the child tax credit, accelerates the permitting process for certain kinds of energy production, and keeps lower tax rates on working-class families. But upper-income earners will be the major beneficiaries of some of its new tax cuts. For instance, the state and local taxes (SALT) deduction is mostly a benefit for upper-income households in high-tax states. Republicans needed to boost this deduction to win over some representatives from affluent districts in the Northeast and California, but a recent Tax Foundation analysis found that those in the top 5% of incomes would reap most of the benefits from this expensive deduction.

While the final version of the bill dialled back from some of the Medicaid cuts demanded by budget hawks, it still included a new series of work requirements for Medicaid. Those requirements might be more palatable to populist Republicans than direct cuts — Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, one of the leading populists and opponent of Medicaid cuts, says he is basically supportive of some work requirements. But the implementation of those requirements could prove more politically troublesome.

The bill is projected to add hundreds of billions of dollars to federal deficits over the short term: many of the cuts marked as savings would take effect only years down the road and could thus easily be repealed by later Congresses. A recent disappointing Treasury auction shows that investors are increasingly wary about the skyrocketing debt burden of the United States, and this bill seems unlikely to quiet those fears.

Now, the One Big Beautiful Bill has to make its way through the Senate, which has different priorities. Beyond that, though, this proposed legislation indicates the diminishing utility of tax cuts as a prime lever for policy. As “New Right” economist Oren Cass recently observed, federal revenues as a percentage of the national economy have been significantly lower over the last 25 years than they were in the last quarter of the 20th century — yet economic growth has been much more sluggish. Republicans have been so successful in reducing the federal tax burden over the past 40 years that further tax cuts might not have the same growth payoff, especially if spending continues to increase.

The major policy achievements of a populist GOP — industrial resilience, expanding opportunity for blue-collar Americans, limiting the power of technocrats — will require far more than just one big beautiful bill.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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