WASHINGTON — Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Thursday that she’s still digging through the details of the giant budget reconciliation bill and can’t say yet whether she’ll vote for the legislation that would fulfill many of President Trump’s campaign promises.
She described the bill as malleable.
“Everyone is pulling this Gumby in lots of different directions, right? And so we are not, I think, resolved as a conference as to what that bill looks like,” she said, referring to the Senate Republican conference.
Murkowski’s take on the bill is closely watched, and a huge scrum of reporters surrounded her when she paused in a Capitol hallway to take a question. Trump can only afford to lose the votes of three Republican senators, and Murkowski has made it clear she doesn’t like major elements of the legislation. But how she’ll ultimately vote is unknown, even to the senator herself, because the bill is a work in progress.
She said President Trump hasn't pressed her to support what he dubbed the "One Big, Beautiful Bill."
"If it works for Alaska, he's not going to need to pressure me," Murkowski said. "If it works for Alaska, it it works for me. It gets my vote."
Murkowski has previously stated that she won’t vote for a bill that takes health insurance away from her constituents. An analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the bill would leave 11 million fewer people insured while adding $2.4 trillion to the budget deficit.
Still, Murkowski said she and Sen. Dan Sullivan are examining proposed changes to Medicaid and SNAP benefits to see if they’re realistic for Alaska to administer.
“Is this something that can be made to work? Does there need to be a waiver? Does there need to be a carve out? Does there need to be some additional support, less enforcement? So these are some of the things that we're working through right now,” she said.
Also under discussion, she said, are the clean-energy tax credits that the House version of the bill would get rid of. Murkowski likes the credits, and more than 4,000 Alaskans claimed them on their 2023 taxes.
“I happen to think that if we've got some tax policies that are working to help advance our energy initiatives around the country, as diverse and as varied as they are, wouldn't we want to continue those investments?” she said.
The bill, weighing in at more than 1,000 pages, has a lot of features she does like, such as new oil lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and billions of dollars to build ice breakers and other Coast Guard security cutters.
“It would be game-changing for Alaska with the Coast Guard provisions that are included in the reconciliation piece,” she said. “So you look at some of these aspects, … these are great. But then how does the rest of this bill come together?”
That’s the challenge for Senate Majority Leader John Thune. He needs to alter the bill enough to get at least 50 Republicans onboard, but not alter it so much that it will fail when it goes back to the House, where it initially passed by a single vote. Thune’s goal is to get the bill to the president’s desk by July 4.
