“Significant changes are in store for President Donald Trump’s signature $3.9 trillion tax-cut bill as the Senate begins closed-door talks this week on legislation that squeaked through the House by a single vote,” Bloomberg reports.

“Senate Republican leaders are aiming to make permanent many of the temporary tax cuts in the House bill, a move that would increase the bill’s more than $2.5 trillion deficit impact. But doing so risks alienating fiscal hawks already at war with party moderates over the bill’s safety-net cuts.”

Roll Call: Delicate balancing act for Senate on reconciliation tax package.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) “was listing all the ways that President Trump’s efforts to slash the federal government had harmed Alaska, from the funding freezes on programs the state depends on to the layoffs of federal workers who live there, when she delivered something of an understatement,” the New York Times reports.

Said Murkowski: “It’s a challenging time right now. I could use nice words about it — but I don’t.”

“At a time when the Republican Congress has grown increasingly deferential to Mr. Trump, Ms. Murkowski has veered in the opposite direction from her party, using sharp words and her vote on the Senate floor to push back on him and his administration time and again.”

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Sen. David McCormick (R-PA) debated the “pressing issues of the day, in the latest installment of a series of forums designed to foster good-faith, bipartisan dialogue at a time when such exchanges are increasingly rare in Washington,” the Boston Globe reports.

They “disagreed over the proposed extension of tax cuts known as the Big Beautiful Bill, currently before the Senate. However, they found common ground on most other topics, particularly foreign policy and border security.”

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) responded to her line at a town hall meeting about Medicaid cuts — “Well, we all are going to die.” — with a creepy video of her walking through a cemetery.