Debate for the House Republicans’ tax bill is underway — and experts are watching to see which of President Donald Trump’s priorities make the final cut.

The House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax, released the full text of its portion of the bill Monday afternoon, and started to debate over provisions on Tuesday.

GOP lawmakers included several of Trump’s campaign priorities, including tax cut extensions, no tax on tips and tax-free overtime pay. Rather than cutting taxes on Social Security, the plan includes an extra $4,000 deduction for older Americans.

The early bill did not include a higher tax rate on some of the wealthiest Americans or plans to end the so-called “carried interest loophole,” which are both ideas that Trump supported.  

However, the final bill could change significantly before the committee vote.

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The early version of the GOP tax bill would cost about $3.7 trillion over 10 years, according to estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation. That’s under the Republicans’ $4.5 trillion limit, which could leave room for other priorities to be added or increased during Tuesday’s negotiations, experts say. 

“It’s really important for any additional tax cuts to be paid for,” which will impact individual provisions, said Shai Akabas, vice president of economic policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center.

As the debate heats up, here are two key areas to watch.

The House text released Monday would boost the SALT deduction limit to $30,000 for most taxpayers. This would phase out once modified adjusted gross income exceeds $400,000.   

Some lawmakers have already pushed a higher SALT deduction cap, which could still be possible with wiggle room in the budget, experts say.    

Republican lawmakers also want to expand the child tax credit, a change that was passed via a bipartisan House bill in February 2024.

TCJA temporarily increased the maximum child tax credit to $2,000 from $1,000 per child under age 17, and boosted eligibility. These changes are scheduled to sunset after 2025.

The preliminary House GOP text calls for raising the credit to $2,500 per child through 2028, as long as both parents have a Social Security number. The $1,400 refundable portion, which is available without taxes owed, would be indexed for inflation.

However, the proposal “does nothing for the 17 million children who currently don’t get the full $2,000 child tax credit because their families’ incomes are too low,” said Chuck Marr, vice president for federal tax policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  

Republican lawmakers may be looking at substantial cuts to Medicaid in upcoming reconciliation legislation.

But one method of restricting access to coverage — work requirements — could have disastrous results for Americans, based on efforts in Arkansas and Georgia to implement such policies, according to a new report issued by Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. Those rules typically require people to meet certain thresholds, such as a set number of hours of work per month, to qualify for Medicaid coverage.

While labeled as “work requirements,” they would be more correctly called “work reporting requirements” because they involve so many rules, forms and other red tape that they can prevent working Americans from accessing coverage, according to Warnock.

“These work reporting requirements are not incentivizing work; there’s no evidence of that,” Warnock said in an interview with CNBC.com.

“What we see is that this is a good way to kick a lot of people off of their health care — hardworking everyday Americans who are struggling,” Warnock said.

A Republican House budget resolution included about $880 billion in spending cuts through 2034 from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In a March report, the Congressional Budget Office found Republicans cannot achieve their budget goals without cutting Medicaid.

House Republicans on Sunday released draft legislative language of the reconciliation bill. Work requirements are among the eligibility policies on the table.

Based on the current proposal, 9.7 million to 14.4 million people would be at risk for losing Medicaid coverage in 2034 if they are unable to show they meet the work requirements, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., who is chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in support of the work hurdles.

“When so many Americans who are truly in need rely on Medicaid for life-saving services, Washington can’t afford to undermine the program further by subsidizing capable adults who choose not to work,” Guthrie wrote in the op-ed published on Sunday.

“That’s why our bill would implement sensible work requirements,” Guthrie wrote.

Those requirements would be in line with current policies, according to Guthrie, where working adults, seniors on Medicare and veterans have all worked in exchange for health coverage eligibility.

However, Warnock argues that thinking is backwards. By providing health care coverage without those requirements, that will then help encourage people to work because they are getting the care they need to be healthy, he said.

“If you provide basic health care to the people who are eligible, you actually have more people working,” Warnock said. “You have a stronger economy.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and some other state Republicans have spoken about the program as a success.

Georgia is among the states that opted not to expand Medicaid, and therefore make coverage more accessible, following the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Meanwhile, Arkansas did implement Medicaid expansion in 2014 and subsequently put work requirements in place from 2018 to 2019. However, those efforts failed, with 18,000 people losing Medicaid coverage in the first seven months and only a small share of people able to get coverage back the following year, according to a 2023 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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Low compliance with work requirements may come from a variety of factors that have nothing to do with employment, according to research from the Urban Institute. That may include limited access to the internet or transportation, health limitations or disabilities and low education levels.

Others may simply not quite meet the requirements their states have set out.

That is the case for Heather Payne, 52, of Dalton, Georgia, who suffered a series of strokes in 2022. As a result, Payne can no longer work as a traveling nurse and has opted to enroll in graduate school to become a nurse practitioner, a role that will be less physically grueling.

“I really do love nursing so much, and I cannot continue to do it the same way that I used to do it since my strokes,” Payne said.

While Payne is considered a full-time student, she is just short of the hours to qualify for Medicaid under Georgia’s work requirements. As a result, she is paying for private health care coverage with her tuition, which is adding to the debts she will have to pay off once she graduates.

Because her health insurance plan doesn’t cover all her care, she estimates she’s incurred “tens of thousands of dollars” in medical debt.  

Payne, who said she is “not very savvy on politics,” attended President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address in Washington, D.C., as Warnock’s guest in an effort to draw attention to the coverage gap.

The U.S. is one of the few industrialized countries without universal health coverage, which is “really kind of embarrassing,” Payne said.

“And instead of trying to go toward that, we’re trying to yank it away from everyone possible,” Payne said.

The Social Security cost-of-living adjustment for 2026 is on pace to be the lowest annual benefit increase in five years, according to new estimates.

But that may change depending on the pace of inflation in the coming months.

The 2026 COLA may be 2.4% in 2026, according to new projections from both Mary Johnson, an independent Social Security and Medicare policy analyst, and The Senior Citizens League, a non-partisan senior group.

If that increase goes into effect next year, it would be lower than the 2.5% boost to benefits Social Security beneficiaries saw in 2025. It would also be the lowest cost-of-living adjustment since 2021, when a 1.3% increase went into effect.

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The Social Security COLA provides an annual inflation adjustment to all of the program’s beneficiaries, including retirees, disabled individuals and family members.

The annual adjustment for the next year is calculated by comparing third quarter inflation data for the current year to the previous year. The year-over-year difference determines the annual increase. However, if there is no increase in the the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W, from year to year, the COLA may be zero. 

The CPI-W, used to calculate Social Security’s COLA, increased by 2.1% over the past 12 months, according to data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the months ahead, two factors may affect retirees’ cost of living, experts say.

Inflation, as measured by the broader Consumer Price Index, sank to its lowest 12-month rate at 2.3% in April since 2021.

Yet tariffs may push the inflation rate higher in the months ahead, if those taxes imposed on imported goods go into effect.

Tariffs would prompt higher consumer prices and inflation. If that happens in the months ahead, the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment estimate for 2026 may move higher.

“This year will be a closer year to watch because of the tariffs,” Johnson said of the 2026 COLA estimate, which is recalculated every month with new inflation data.

The official COLA for the following year is typically announced by the Social Security Administration in October.

The policy would apply to Medicare and Medicaid, in addition to the commercial market, according to the White House.

Changing drug prices would be unlikely to impact the COLA estimate, according to Johnson. But retirees would see an impact to the personal budgets if drug prices came down, she said.

Many details of the executive order still need to be fleshed out, noted Leigh Purvis, prescription drug policy principal at AARP Public Policy Institute. Yet the nonprofit organization, which represents Americans ages 50 and up, praised the Trump administration’s efforts to curb big drug companies’ ability to charge retirees high prices for necessary prescriptions.

“A lot of people are aware that prescription drug prices are too high, and I think a lot of people are aware that we’re paying a lot more than other countries,” Purvis said.

“So any efforts moving us in the direction of paying less and paying something that’s more comparable to the rest of the world, I think is something that people could probably get behind,” she said.