Hello and welcome to News Air from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm James Menendez.

And we're going to begin today in Washington, D.C. And the fate of President Trump's flagship domestic legislation, the one big beautiful bill act, this giant compendium of tax and spending measures was approved by

the U.S. Senate on Tuesday after more than 24 hours of debate and wrangling, but only by the

narrowest of margins. Three Republican senators opposed the bill, and so it fell to Vice President

J.D. Vance to cast the tight breaking vote.

On this vote, the yeas are 50, the nays are 50. The Senate being evenly divided, the Vice

President votes in the affirmative. The bill as amended is passed.

Well, with Senate approval, the legislation now goes back to the House of Representatives

for a vote there, possibly as early as today, although once again many Republicans are also

unhappy about the bill. They only have a very slim majority in the House. Well, the BBC's

Washington correspondent is Anthony Zirka. Well, it has already passed slim majority in the House. Well, the BBC's Washington correspondent is Anthony

Zerker, well, it has already passed one vote in the House, so why is it back now? Well, yeah,

it started in the House. That's where legislation usually starts. The House passed their

version of the bill. They passed it over to the Senate, and then the Senate had changes. They actually added more to the

federal debt with this. They had steeper cuts in Medicaid and other health care programs and some

of the environmental programs, but it was a different bill. And once that happened, then the

House has to approve the new version of that bill. So it's a game of legislative ping pong back and

forth until both chambers agree on something. Given the changes that the Senate's approved,

what does that mean in terms of Republican opposition to the bill, do you think? Well, there was a very

fine, delicate balance that was made in the House of Representatives to try to keep their

thin majority

all on the same page on this. You had budget hawks on one side who wanted steeper cuts. But then

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