Washington DC - President Donald Trump mounted another push to get his "Big Beautiful Bill" passed as US senators began weeks of what is likely to be fierce debate over the mammoth policy package.

The House eventually passed the controversial bill, which funds an extension of tax cuts mostly favoring the wealthy through brutal cuts expected to strip health care from millions of low-income Americans.

The Senate now gets to make its own changes, and the upper chamber's version could make or break Republicans' 2026 midterm election prospects – and define Trump's second term.

But the 1,116-page blueprint faces an uphill climb, with some Republicans balking at $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, while the party's far-right blasts the bill as a ticking debt bomb.

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"We have enough (holdouts) to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit," Senator Ron Johnson, one of half a dozen Republican opponents to the bill, told CNN.

Democrats – whose support is not required if Republicans can maintain a united front – have focused on the tax cuts mostly benefiting the rich on the backs of a working class already struggling with high prices.

Several independent analyses have found that – even taking economic growth into account – the bill will add between $2.5 trillion and $3.1 trillion to deficits over the next decade.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, found that the combined effects of tax cuts and cost savings would be a giant transfer of wealth from the poorest 10% to the richest 10%.

The Senate wants to get the bill to Trump's desk by US Independence Day on July 4 – an ambitious timeline given Republicans' narrow three-vote majority and wide fault lines that have opened over the proposed specifics.

Independent analysts expect around seven million beneficiaries of the Medicaid health insurance program will be deprived of coverage due to new proposed eligibility restrictions and work requirements.

Polling shows that the vast majority of Americans oppose cutting Medicaid, including Trump himself, as well as some Republicans in poorer states that rely heavily on federal welfare.

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Yet on Monday, the president took to his Truth Social platform to decry "so many false statements (that) are being made about 'THE ONE, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL'" – before falsely claiming that it would not cut Medicaid.

"The only 'cutting' we will do is for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, something that should have been done by the Incompetent, Radical Left Democrats for the last four years, but wasn't," he said.