WASHINGTON — When Republicans left Capitol Hill in July for their annual recess, they were instructed to go home and sell President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Now they’re being told to do that — but maybe without the now-infamous moniker.
The White House met with House Republicans behind closed doors on Wednesday to talk “Love At First Vote,” a briefing by top Trump administration officials on how to advertise the president’s massive tax package that was passed by Congress earlier this summer.
Part of that strategy was changing how lawmakers refer to the bill by instead calling it the “Working Families Tax Plan,” lawmakers inside the room told the Deseret News.
“I’ve actually always not been extremely impressed with the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ name that we’ve put on this bill,” Utah Rep. Mike Kennedy told the Deseret News. “It is a working families tax cut bill. And that’s a message that I’ve been trumpeting myself.”
The briefing was led by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, deputy chief of staff James Blair, and Tony Fabrizio, the top pollster for the Trump 2024 campaign. Their presentation cited specific policy areas that found “there are certain messages that they did find were more resonant with voters than others,” Kennedy said.
The top advisers told Republicans that when they go home they need to specifically talk “about each point” in the bill and “how they are winners,” the lawmaker said. Two main policies that should be touted, they said, are no taxes on tips and no taxes on overtime pay.
The reason why, they argued, is because the package containing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts is being “misunderstood” because of Democratic attacks that it cuts funding to health care and other welfare programs.
“We are not cutting Medicaid,” House GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain said, despite the bill reducing government funding for the program by $1 trillion. “We have to do a better job of correcting the truth with the other half of the truth.”
The presentation included public polling of the bill that indicated that the public has a negative perception of the bill as a whole, which Republicans suggested was because voters have “been so misinformed by Democrats’ fearmongering.”
“The idea is to focus on the fact that it is a working families’ tax plan,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said after the meeting. “Once people find out what’s actually in it, they’ll be very supportive.”
The name change also signaled to Republicans that branding the package around the terminology of “big, beautiful bill” was a misstep when they could’ve made the name more self-descriptive — for example, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
“What I picked up from the conversation was I think we missed an opportunity to call it the ‘Working Families Tax Cut Bill,’” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., told reporters. “We basically missed an opportunity.”
But top Republican leaders pushed back on the characterization that calling it the “Working Families Tax Cut Bill” was a full rebranding.
“House Republicans went out, panned out across the country over the district work period, and got a lot of work done,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on Wednesday. “And they were talking about the one big, beautiful bill, which has also become known as the working families tax cut act, because that’s what it principally represents.”
Utah Rep. Blake Moore, who holds the No. 5 position in GOP leadership, echoed that sentiment, telling the Deseret News it would be “news to me” if Republicans were told not to use the “big, beautiful bill” language anymore — noting that was not a piece of guidance from party leaders in the House.
“We’ve always said you should be able to communicate it as for working families,” Moore told the Deseret News. “We’ve always had working families as an aspect of it.”
The meeting comes after Trump publicly admitted last week that he no longer wanted to call his signature tax package the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Those sentiments stemmed from a majority of voters saying they think Trump is making the federal government worse, according to a survey from Pew Research Center.
“I’m not going to use the term ‘great, big, beautiful’ — that was good for getting it approved, but it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about,” Trump said. “It’s a massive tax cut for the middle class.”