Sen. Lankford outlines Senate review and changes head for ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’

Shortly after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the One Big Beautiful Bill early Thursday morning, sending the massive reconciliation package to the Senate, Senator Lankford spoke about what will happen now.

CAMERON: So, the House did it – Speaker Johnson achieved his goal of passing the big bill by the Memorial Day weekend.

LANKFORD: The House did it what it had to do. They got all these different ideas from 220 different Republicans, merged them into one bill, they got it passed. The Big Beautiful Bill now comes to the Senate--we have actually started a list of things we want to be able to do—dates we want to change, policy ideas, things that we have—but we will start with the House bill and then do some adaptions from that, and so when we pass it, the House will still recognize it when it comes back because it is their base bill that we have. But we are going to have some Senate tweaks on that and it’ll take us several weeks to be able to get that done.

CAMERON: The process in the Senate will be a bit different—the rules for you guys are a little diffferent.

LANKFORD: The Senate has a different requirement. We have what they call the Byrd Rule in the Senate, that is it’s gotta be looked at by the parliamentarian to evaluate: is this more budget or is this more policy? If it’s more policy than budget, it has to get kicked out in the Senate. That’s the law, it’s not just a rule, that’s the law. And so the house doesn’t have that same law that applies to them but the Senate does.

CAMERON: What are some of the specific ‘tweaks’ you’d like to make or you know some of your colleagues want to make?

LANKFORD: Some of the deadlines that they put out for how they want to reduce spending and put it out several years away. The Senate’s been very focused on, let’s get started earlier on some of this. We’ve $2 trillion in overspending, we have to start addressing it as soon as we can. The nonprofit sector is in area that I’ve been very passionate about, as well. In 2017, we removed the charitable deduction for people that don’t itemize their taxes; well, that’s 91% of Americans lost the ability to write off their nonprofit donations. I’d like to be able to get that back in.

CAMERON: What other, if any, changes to the tax portion of the bill would you like to see?

LANKFORD: Everyone knows full expensing for small businesses helps small businesses and doesn’t change the tax revenue actually coming into the Treasury—it changes the time it comes in, but not the amount of revenue that actually comes in, so I wanna make that a permanent policy. No question, that is one of the single most significant things that will actually affect the growing economy is to encourage small businesses and other businesses to be able to have larger capital expenses, to be able to write those off sooner, including oil and gas, and I believe it’s one of the things to House left out in the final draft that I saw.

CAMERON: I understand many Republican Senators are not happy with the increased SALT cap in the House bill. Will that be changed?

LANKFORD: Right now, federal taxpayers — and the way that the House bill was written, it gets worse — but federal taxpayers in New York and New Jersey, Illinois and California will pay less in federal tax than what a person in Oklahoma who makes the same amount of money pays. Because they have higher state taxes, they can write off what their state taxes are and pay less in federal tax, which means Oklahomans have to pay more in federal tax should be able to cover the difference. I would expect to see some changes in that—that’s been a point of contention between the House and the Senate.