In May 2025, Republicans in Congress worked to make some of U.S. President Donald Trump's agenda into law — in a piece of legislation that Trump called "One big, beautiful bill." The bill, H.R .1, is unofficially called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Despite major pushback from Democrats and even some Republicans, the bill passed the House by just one vote and the Senate with Vice President JD Vance's tiebreak, before being signed into law by Trump on July 4.
But posts on social media sites like Facebook and Reddit went further, alleging that the bill contained a provision that would allow the president to "delay or cancel elections — legally."
Snopes carefully reviewed the mammoth of a bill looking for provisions that would match that description. There were none — therefore, the claim is false.
The bill's table of contents provides a brief description of what each section does.
As examples:
- Title III (Housing, Banking and Urban Affairs), includes Section 30001, "Funding cap for the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection," which cut funding for the CFPB almost in half,
- Title VIII (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions), Subtitle B (Loan Limits), contains Section 81001, "Establishment of loan limits for graduate and professional students and parent borrowers; termination of graduate and
professional PLUS loans," which dramatically reduced the amount of federal loans that college students can take out.
But nothing in the bill's table of contents even appeared remotely like it would give the president power to delay or cancel elections.
If such a provision were hidden in the bill, it would have to contain either the word "president" or "executive," since that's who the power would supposedly go to. But searching the bill for those keywords also turned up nothing relevant.
The term "president" came up 15 times in the bill, on topics as broad as radio frequency ranges, to Medicaid eligibility, to presidential protection, but never in relation to elections. The term "executive" came up 26 times, mostly in relation to government departments with the word in their name, but again, never in relation to elections.