White House’s Steve Miller defends Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, says DOGE cuts were never on the table

Steve Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, took to X this week to challenge growing claims that the administration’s Big Beautiful Bill fails to lock in the aggressive DOGE cuts that were central to the president’s plan to drain federal waste.

In a blunt response posted online, Steve said the rumors were “false” and based on a complete misunderstanding of how reconciliation bills work.

“The first is that it doesn’t ‘codify the DOGE cuts,’” Steve wrote. “A reconciliation bill, which is a budget bill that passes with 50 votes, is limited by Senate rules to mandatory spending only—e.g., Medicaid and Food Stamps.

The Senate rules prevent it from cutting discretionary spending—e.g., the Department of Education or federal grants.” Steve made it clear that DOGE’s entire budget falls under discretionary categories. “The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory,” he added.

He said that because the bill is restricted to mandatory items, it was never even possible for the bill to codify DOGE’s budget slashes. Still, the legislation includes what he called “the largest-ever welfare reform” and a spending cut of more than $1.6 trillion, which he claimed was more than enough to qualify it as a landmark in cost-cutting.

Steve says tax rules aren’t deficit spending

Steve didn’t stop at the DOGE argument. He also attacked criticism that the bill would increase the deficit, calling it a “lie” pushed by bad math from the Congressional Budget Office. His explanation was technical but direct: “Income tax rates from the 2017 tax cut are set to expire in September. They were always planned to be permanent.”

So when the CBO argues that keeping those same tax rates would raise the deficit, Steve calls it fiction. “By definition, leaving these income tax rates unchanged cannot add one penny to the deficit.”

He said the real picture shows that the bill reduces the deficit, not raises it—if you’re using the correct benchmark. “The bill’s spending cuts REDUCE the deficit against the current law baseline,” he said. “Which is the only correct baseline to use.”

Next, he took on the accusation that the bill secretly dumps trillions of new spending into government programs. Steve called that one “completely invented out of whole cloth.” His post reminded people that the bill isn’t a ten-year budget plan. “It doesn’t ‘fund’ almost any operations of government,” he wrote. “Which are funded in the annual budget bills (which this is not).”

He added a scenario: if Congress passed just a one-paragraph reconciliation bill that only cut $50 billion in food stamps, critics would still claim it adds trillions in spending just by counting unrelated future costs. “They are counting ALL the projected federal spending that exists entirely outside the scope of this legislation,” Steve said. “Which is of course preposterous.”

The only actual funding, according to him, is limited to border security and national defense priorities requested by President Trump. The rest of the bill, Steve said, was focused on “a massive tax cut and a massive spending cut.”

Court freezes DOGE transparency as watchdogs demand documents

While Steve was busy explaining the bill’s fine print, the Supreme Court stepped in on Friday to help the Trump administration keep a lid on internal documents tied to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary administrative stay, blocking a lower court’s order that had forced DOGE to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The fight started when watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) demanded documents from DOGE in January, right after Trump got back into office. CREW later sued to force compliance. The issue? Whether DOGE counts as a government agency, which would make it subject to FOIA laws.

DOGE has been a central part of Trump’s mission to gut government bloat. It’s led efforts to fire federal employees and slash grants. The Trump team insists DOGE isn’t an agency—it’s a presidential advisory body, and therefore not bound by FOIA.

Complicating things even more, DOGE replaced a prior agency called the U.S. Digital Service. The White House now refers to it as the U.S. DOGE Service (USDS). That rebranding, though, didn’t stop Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington from ruling in March that DOGE is “likely” a federal agency and that delaying access to the records would irreparably harm the public.”

Cooper ordered DOGE to hand over documents on a rolling basis and to do so “as soon as practicable.” He also told them to preserve “all records” that could be relevant. The Office of Management and Budget admitted it has over 100,000 pages related to the case. DOGE itself holds about 58,000 more.

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