11 hours ago

How Republicans Got Lisa Murkowski To Vote For The Tax Cut Bill

WASHINGTON ― Senate Republicans had to make Alaska-friendly changes to their bill cutting taxes and Medicaid in order to win over Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

The Senate couldn’t have passed the so-called Big Beautiful Bill on Tuesday without Murkowski serving as the 50th vote and Vice President JD Vance providing the tiebreaker.

Murkowski used her leverage to make the bill’s cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program less severe in Alaska, but not necessarily anywhere else.

“When you look to to the Medicaid and the SNAP provisions, I committed myself, and my team from the very get-go of this process that we were going to try, every day, to contribute to a better outcome for the people in my state,” Murkowski told reporters after the vote.

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The bill’s biggest Medicaid cut results from “work requirements” limiting benefits to nondisabled adults who can’t prove to state program administrators that they’re either working, volunteering or enrolled in school at least 20 hours per week. Other cuts targeted the way states tax health providers to help pay their portion of Medicaid costs, and for the first time the bill would require states to pay a portion of SNAP benefits based on their rates of erroneous payments.

“We have unique conditions in Alaska that make work requirements really hard. We have a higher error rate when it comes to SNAP benefits that was going to penalize us, and again, not able to meet the requirements meant people would be impacted. That weighs very, very heavily,” Murkowski said, adding that in Alaska’s isolated economy it’s not as easy for people to get jobs.

Originally, Republicans wanted states with SNAP error rates above 6% to shoulder 5% of the cost of benefits, with greater cost-sharing for states making more errors. (Most erroneous SNAP payments are overpayments, or households receiving too large a monthly benefit.)

The national SNAP error rate in 2024 was about 10%, and Alaska’s rate was more than 24%. The final Senate bill text includes a bizarre provision delaying the cost-sharing burden for states with error rates exceeding 20%, essentially creating an incentive for states to overpay their SNAP recipients.

“Did we make some changes in the SNAP provisions that will allow for a delay, that will allow for greater flexibility to the state? Absolutely,” Murkowski said.

She added that was able to “plus up” a fund for rural hospitals from $25 billion as originally proposed to $50 billion. The fund was originally conceived as a way to win over Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and other Republicans wary of new limits on state Medicaid funding based on taxes charged to Medicaid providers.

“So that is going to be a help to our rural communities, our rural hospitals, in our communities. That is going to be very key,” Murkowski said, adding that the bill also contained an improved Medicaid federal funding match provision that would benefit Alaska.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who voted against the bill, said Republicans could have won his vote by changing a provision related to the government’s legal borrowing limit, but they chose “pork and subsidies for Alaska” instead.

Asked about Paul’s comment by NBC News, Murkowski froze and gave a reporter a death stare.

“I advocated for my state’s interests. I will continue to do that and I will make no excuses for doing that,” she said.

Another Alaska-specific provision of the bill would increase the value of a tax deduction for “Native Alaskan subsistence whaling.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) praised Murkowski as a legal thinker who pays close attention to policy.

“I’m just grateful that, at the end of the day, she concluded what the rest of us did, at least most the rest of us did, and that is that this was the right direction for the future people today,” Thune said.