Last month, after the House of Representatives passed their version of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the megabudget bill backed by President Donald Trump, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee took to X to lament the high price tag — an estimated $2.4 trillion.
“Congress continues to add to the debt at an astounding rate of $2 trillion per year — with our national debt growing faster than our economy,” he wrote. “Unless we turn this around quickly, our debt and deficit will increasingly threaten our ability to fund the basic operations of government.”
Businessman and former Trump adviser Elon Musk shared Lee’s post and wrote, “This is debt slavery for the American people.” Lee concurred: “Well said,” he wrote.
A month later, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Senate version of the megabill would add a whopping $3.4 trillion to the U.S. deficit— a trillion more than the House bill that Lee had derided just weeks earlier.
But when the bill came to the Senate floor, Lee voted for it anyway.
Why did Lee back a bill sinking the county’s deficit deeper into the red just weeks after decrying such an effort? Utah’s senior senator won’t say.
Lee did not respond to The Salt Lake Tribune when asked about his vote, nor did the prolific X poster share his reasoning on social media.
‘The pros and cons’
The “Big Beautiful Bill” is Trump’s signature domestic policy bill. It includes, among other things, an extension of tax cuts originally passed during the president’s first term, an expansion of the Child Tax Credit and major changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act that could leave millions of Americans across the country without health insurance. Democrats in Congress estimate that 188,000 Utahns' health care is at risk.
Trump signed the bill into law on Friday.
An earlier version of the legislation included a Lee-sponsored provision that aimed to sell off millions of acres of public land. After weeks of bipartisan backlash, Lee relented and withdrew the land sale.
Lee also had a chance to play a significant role: With a 50-50 vote in the Senate, Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote. One more Republican “no” would have halted the bill’s progress, and in the days since its passage, Lee has had little to say.
As of Thursday night, Lee had only obliquely addressed the bill on X, noting its passage without comment Wednesday and attacking Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer before sharing a post from Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy celebrating the bill following its final passage.
It’s a far cry from the senator’s usual flurry of online activity. Since May 22, when the House passed its version of the budget bill, he has tweeted about the bill, the debt or the deficit more than three dozen times, often calling for the Senate bill to do more to bring down government spending.
“Interest on the national debt consumed 1/4th of all federal revenue in May,” he wrote on June 12. “This is only going to get worse — much worse — unless Congress adopts aggressive reforms. This must start with the Big, Beautiful Bill.”
On June 18, he posted: “The deficit will eat us alive if we don’t get it under control. If not us, who? If not now, when?”
For now, those questions remain unanswered.
Former GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who served in the U.S. House from 2009 through 2017, told The Tribune he understood why Lee chose to vote for the legislation, despite his failure to secure the land sell-off and his concerns about how it would add to the deficit.
“You have to look at the pros and the cons, and if there are more pros than cons, then you vote for it,” Chaffetz said in a recent interview. “This is President Trump’s signature bill, and there’s a lot more to like than to dislike. It would never be fiscally conservative enough for me, and probably the same for Mike Lee. But is it better than where we are today or doing nothing at all? Yes, by far.”
The reconciliation process — a budget rule the Senate uses to bypass the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster — is “unique,” the former congressman added, and the fact that the tax cuts included in the bill were set to expire, he said, was particularly compelling.
“You’re either going to take a massive tax increase or you’re going to decrease taxes. So for conservatives like myself, that’s a no-brainer,” Chaffetz said. “Unfortunately, they’re not single-issue bills. These are massive bills with multiple subjects, and inevitably, you can get beat over the head for voting in favor of something, but you have to weigh the totality of it.”
‘He doesn’t really care’
Reed Galen, the former co-founder of the conservative anti-Trump PAC The Lincoln Project who now oversees a coalition of pro-democracy organizations called The Union, said he was less understanding.
“For all of his talk about the debt, he doesn’t really care,” Galen said of Lee. The Utah senator wants to be able to say he fixed “waste, fraud and abuse” and that “he took it to the bureaucratic class,” he said.
“And the truth is that he just wants to do what Donald Trump wants him to do. It’s all performative bulls---,” Galen added. “That’s all it is.”
Galen, a campaign strategist who has worked for John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger and George W. Bush, also said he felt that Lee had lost leverage and credibility with his Senate colleagues after he faced significant public outcry in recent weeks over a series of posts he made seemingly mocking the assassination of a state legislator in Minnesota.
“I’m speculating here, but there’s a part of me, too, that believes that between his his abominable tweet about the people who were killed in Minnesota and the fact that he had to back away from the public land sales, that this is as singed as he’s probably felt since he’s been in office,” Galen said.
“The only thing that would make Mike Lee more of a troll,” he added, “is if he lived under a bridge.”
For Chase Thomas, the deputy director of Utah advocacy group Alliance for a Better Utah, pushing for Lee to vote against the bill was complicated. The group has been raising the alarm about cuts to health care funding and to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), among other things.
“There’s just so many provisions of this bill that are going to impact Utah’s working families that it’s very concerning,” Thomas said.
And although those were not the concerns Lee raised about the bill, Thomas said, the alliance hoped Lee would vote against it for his own reasons.
“If only he would have stuck to his values this time, it would have been great,” he said.
For Galen, the whole process has raised questions about Lee’s legacy. Will Lee go down as another master of the Senate?
He thinks not.
“He just does whatever Donald Trump wants them to,” Galen said. “There’s no checks and balances. There’s no desire to be a co-equal branch. It’s ‘Whatever I can do for the leader, I’ll do.’”
Politics reporter Robert Gehrke contributed to this story.
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