The hideous truth about Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’

First published at International Socialism Project.

Donald Trump ruined everyone’s Fourth of July holiday by signing what he so fatuously called the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It may be the single most damaging piece of legislation signed into law since . . .  Who knows?

Ronald Reagan’s first budget in 1981, which marked a major conservative turn in US social and economic policy, seems moderate by comparison. Comparisons to other historically racist, repressive, and anti-immigrant laws of the past — the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 or the 1924 Immigration Act or even the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 — are not out of the question.

For such a radical change in social and economic policy, it barely squeaked by. Vice President JD Vance had to break a 50-50 tie in the US Senate to pass it. And it received 218 votes in the US House, the one vote majority in the 435-member chamber.

There are many horrible things shoe-horned into its nearly 1000 pages, as Republican congressmembers who voted for it without reading it will discover. And while the GOP members might be pleasantly surprised by what they find, the rest of us will be horrified. To focus our analysis, we will sum up three major impacts of this big, ugly mess.

The rich are made richer

The bill makes permanent the 2017 tax cuts that were tilted to the rich. According to one estimate of full impact — with both cuts to taxes and to income support programs considered — the poorest 20 percent of households stand to lose income while the richest .01 percent will gain $301,550.

Still, the tax part of this bill preserves the status quo. At the same time, it exempts larger fortunes from estate taxes, and it increases the deductibility from federal taxation of the amount of money taxpayers pay in state and local taxes. The “pro-working class” tax reforms that Trump and the GOP will tout — no taxes on tips, added tax deductions for seniors 65 and over, and no taxes on overtime earnings — are heavily circumscribed and temporary. All of them disappear by 2028.

Even if one accepted the standard “trickle-down” argument that cutting taxes on the rich will lead to a boom in investment and growth, it’s hard to see how largely preserving the status quo will provide “rocket fuel” for the economy, as Rep. Darren LaHood (R-Ill.) put it. Even more fanciful is the notion that economic growth unleashed will lower the government’s budget deficit and allow the tax cut to “pay for itself.” This has become an article of Republican faith approaching almost religious status, despite 50 years of empirical evidence to the contrary. But Republicans have sustained their strategic goal of starving the government for funds, and putting the onus on a future Democratic administration to raise taxes to cover more government spending.

Most people will hardly notice a difference in their situation from the tax part of this bill. That can’t be said about other parts of the bill, specifically the cuts to the social safety net.

The poor are made poorer 

To get the funds to make the 2017 tax rates permanent, to increase the military budget to more than $1 trillion for the first time, and to establish a vast deportation machine, Trump and the Republicans stole from the poor. Over the next decade, the bill cuts almost $1 trillion from Medicaid (medical insurance for low-income people) and about $500 billion each from food assistance and Medicare (medical insurance to the elderly). This is the single largest cut ever in the already thin social safety net.

As Sasha Abramsky, writing in The Nation, put it: 

If you thought the safety net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, were a mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now a generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.

Cuts to Medicaid will cost 12-17 million people health insurance coverage, depending on which estimate is more accurate. About 3 million will lose access to food assistance. But the impacts go far beyond those cuts. Safety net hospitals, especially those in rural areas, will cut services and jobs, if not close altogether. Cuts to subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance will drive up out-of-pocket costs. Soon, everyone’s health insurance will feel increased costs and declining coverage.

This had nothing to do with rooting out “waste and fraud” or securing these programs for the future, as Republicans claimed. Many of them just lied through their teeth, saying that the program didn’t cut Medicaid, even though the black-and-white of the bill said so. The key point is that this represented in crystalized view, the right’s full agenda: tax cuts for the rich, safety net cuts for the poor, and showering of money on the military and other repressive apparatuses of the state.

“They pushed right up to the limit of what their budget could do and still hold enough votes to win a majority,” the liberal writer Paul Waldman explained. 

And with every immigrant parent torn from their children’s arms, every family that loses their health coverage, every young person who decides to forego college, every rural health clinic that shuts down, every research grant that gets revoked, every solar energy project that gets dismantled, they can sit back, smile, and say, ‘This is why we came to Washington. No matter what happens tomorrow, it was worth it.’

Anti-immigrant repression will be turbocharged

One of the biggest “winners” in this bill is the immigration enforcement apparatus that stands to receive more than $170 billion over the next four years. To put that perspective, the current budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency — whose masked agents are kidnapping people off street corners and from workplaces — is just under $10 billion.

The amount of money devoted to this arrest/detention/deportation operation will be more than is allocated to other federal agencies like the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons — even the US Marine Corps. This means that the sort of operation that ICE conducted in Los Angeles earlier this year will be expanded, not only in LA, but in every major city in the country simultaneously. And with an unaccountable militarized police force operating nationwide, no one — including US citizens — will be safe.

The bill authorizes spending of more than $45 billion to build a network of detention facilities like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” that will mostly house people who are not charged with a crime, but who are slated for expulsion from the US. The assault on the social fabric and civil liberties that is coming will be unprecedented since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

Because most of these facilities will be privately-operated and crash-built, the opportunities for corruption will be limitless. Talk about “waste, fraud and abuse!” They could even be a source of forced labor for industries like farming and construction that depend on immigrant workers.

With states and localities losing Medicaid, one of the largest federal sources of local and state budgets, they will be hard-pressed to resist the one source of federal money where the spigot is fully open — that is, the billions that will be available to sign up local law enforcement as a “force multiplier” for ICE. And if rural hospitals close down, the GOP is hoping that ICE prisons will provide substitute jobs that will entrench them in local political economies for the foreseeable future.

Unpopular

For now, the “big, beautiful bill” is, by most reliable measures of public opinion, extremely unpopular. In fact, it is the second-most unpopular bill considered in Congress since 1990s (second to Trump’s 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act), according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris. The party-line vote, where no Democrats in either the US House of Representatives or the Senate voted for it, means that the GOP owns it, and its consequences.

The Democrats expect that its unpopularity, and its negative impacts, will help them to win one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. But November 2026 is a long way off.

Moreover, Democrats don’t have clean hands. Their messaging on the bill focused on how it would slash Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Fair enough. But in 2023 and 2024, in an effort to restore “normalcy” after the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration ended the expansion of Medicaid, tossing 16 million people from the program. This was one of the contributing factors to Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump in the 2024 election.

Democrats were also reticent about condemning the expansion of ICE and its gulag. Again, that’s to be expected from a party that has spent the last few years running away from any pro-immigration stance. Recall that 48 House Democrats and 12 Democratic senators voted with the GOP for the Laken Riley Act, which is helping ICE round people up, and 75 of them joined a resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE.

All of this means that the Democrats, the courts, and other institutions are not coming to save us. In fact, many of them are being coerced or corrupted into accepting Trump’s austerian authoritarianism as the new normal. The labor and social movements can only depend on ourselves to prevent the US’s further slide into the abyss.

Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017).