Who are the winners and losers? This bill constitutes the single biggest upward transfer of wealth in our nation’s history. Read what they didn’t want you to know:
“If Republicans are so proud of their Big Bad Betrayal Bill… why did they begin debate at 3:28 a.m.?” asked Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). “Why are they hiding from the American people?” The opposition to this bill grew rapidly, and they knew they needed to pass it quickly before more people learned the truth about the unprecedented cuts to the standard of living of our people.
The bill passed by the slimmest margin and Trump signed it, even though he has repeatedly pledged not to cut Medicaid. Even though this is a victory for Trump’s agenda for now, the Republicans’ intense battle within their party to get this passed has left it weakened and vulnerable when they have to meet with constituents. Republicans say these tax cuts will encourage investment to benefit all Americans, but the investments they speak of are those of the wealthy classes, not us.
This bill will explode the national debt by an estimated $3.4-5 Trillion, setting the stage for ongoing cuts to the remaining social services people need.
The bill’s lack of transparency over how the money will be spent grants Trump and his allies a tremendous amount of power, especially given the recent Supreme Court rulings granting the President new powers over detention and deportation. One hundred million dollars is set aside for the White House Office of Management and Budget, led by its radical director and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought. That office has aggressively refused to spend appropriated funds across multiple agencies. The $100 million slush fund could encourage more such illegality.
WHO IS HARMED
The bill increases the cost of health care, groceries, and utility bills for working-class people in order to give massive tax breaks to billionaires.
HEALTHCARE:
Estimates say 12-17 million people could lose health insurance over the next 10 years, both due to the Medicaid cuts and elimination of the extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies expiring at the end of the year. The bill makes the largest cuts ever to Medicaid, slashing it by over $1 trillion, eliminating at least 10.5 million people from the programs by 2034, including more than 13 million women of reproductive age (ages 19 to 49), according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. Women represent the majority of Medicaid enrollees.
One recent study estimates that the bill’s healthcare cuts would result in more than 51,000 additional, preventable deaths across the U.S. each year. It also cruelly contains the largest cut to nutritional assistance in American history, impacting five million families. National Nurses United: This is among the darkest days in the history of U.S. health care. These cuts devastate a health care system already in a near-constant state of crisis. Lawmakers have effectively signed the death warrants for millions today. April Verrett, president of SEIU: We will never forget that children will go hungry because of what they’ve done.
The bill adds onerous work and reporting requirements for Medicaid enrollees, especially those who may not have Internet access. People who are having difficulty finding employment, or who lack reliable transportation to work would be penalized. This includes at least more than 2.6 million adults with disabilities who don’t have SSI or SSDI and have difficulty working due to disability or illness. The bill forces millions of Medicaid recipients who make as little as $16,000 a year to pay a $35 co-payment each time they visit a doctor’s office. Research firm C2ES estimates that the United States will lose 2.3 million jobs as a result of the bill.
Medicaid payment to hospitals will be affected because the bill limits a financing strategy states have used to boost Medicaid hospital payments. This will force some hospitals to scale back service or close, especially rural hospitals, which have some of the lowest operating margins. This leaves disabled rural people as some of those most at risk.
Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute: The bill disproportionately harms low-income communities, people of color, and those already facing systemic barriers to care. The bill could force one in three Planned Parenthood health centers to close, cutting off access to contraception, STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings and abortion care for countless patients.
The bottom 40 percent of earners in the United States will see a net loss in income, with the bottom 20 percent of earners losing roughly $600 per year. These are the people who are already poor. The bottom 10% are the most affected, with cuts to SNAP and substantially reduced Medicaid, AND THOSE MAKING UNDER $15,0000 WILL HAVE THEIR TAXES INCREASED BY 74.3%! THOSE MAKING $15-30,000 WILL HAVE THEIR TAXES INCREASED BY 20.65!
IMMIGRATION:
Communities threatened by ICE roundups are hunkering down. People aren’t going to their jobs or school. Parents are keeping their kids inside. They aren’t riding the buses or going to the parks or to restaurants.
The bill limits the number of immigration judges to 800. The immigration court system is already chaotic and over-burdened. This will dramatically increase already high immigration court case backlogs, particularly for people held in detention facilities. They could be forced to wait months between hearings while immigrants with cases outside of detention will face even longer wait times.
The bill charges families of unaccompanied children up to $8,500 to sponsor a child and subjects them and their household members to intensive surveillance, and charges a $5,000 fee to sponsors if the child as a pending immigration court case. This will likely force children to stay in detention due to the inability of sponsors to afford these new fees. The fees will still shut out many children from obtaining an immigration status. Children in custody will be subjected to physical examinations to check for tattoos or other identifying marks.
SENIORS, SOCIAL SECURITY:
Richard Fiesta, Executive Director of the Alliance for Retired Americans outlined ways in which it will affect seniors at a time when 22% of our nation’s seniors are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year: More than half of nursing homes will have to cut staff, and one in four may shut down entirely, leaving families scrambling to find care. Doctors and hospitals may curtail services or stop accepting patients with Medicare. The bill eliminates Medicare eligibility for people with lawful immigration status, but they have already paid into the program! Low-income seniors and people with disabilities will pay more for prescription drugs and Medicare premiums, forcing them to choose between health care and other basic needs.
The reckless tax giveaways will shorten Social Security’s solvency by an entire year, putting the guaranteed benefits Americans earned at even greater risk. Six and one-half million older Americans could lose food assistance due to a 20% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The bill changes the enrollment process for the Medicare Savings Program, which helps poor seniors (who also qualify for Medicaid) afford their prescriptions. This could lead to more than 1.3 million poor seniors losing access to this program.
Michael Phelan, Social Security Works: Even after slashing nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, the tax cuts for the rich are still so big that it would also trigger $500 billion in automatic across-the-board cuts to Medicare.
ENERGY:
“This bill will strand thousands of wind and solar energy projects under development, jeopardize billions of dollars in private investment, and kill hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs — from electricians to contractors to local landowners and farmers who rely on these projects for stability,” says Jeff Cramer, president of the Coalition for Community Solar Access. Overall, the bill will make it too challenging to move forward with many new wind and solar energy projects, said Lena Moffitt, executive director at climate advocacy group Evergreen Action. It will likely deprive the United States of added electricity capacity at a time of soaring energy demand, due to data center and AI growth. The price of electricity is expected to increase by 17% because of fanatical Republican opposition to wind and solar energy.
WHO GAINS
The top 20 percent of earners will get an average annual tax cut of $6,000. The top 10% get lower income tax rates and changes to the estate tax. For married couples whose combined net worth is currently $14-30 million, the estate tax will be zero. Wealthy venture capitalists, most of whom are millionaires, can claim $10 million in income tax-free for investing in certain startup companies. The top 1% of earners will receive tax cuts totaling $1.02 trillion over the next decade. It is an amount roughly equal to the bill’s unprecedented cuts to Medicaid. This bill constitutes the single biggest upward transfer of wealth in our nation’s entire history.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen: Trump and Congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class. There are 800 billionaires in the United States and 12 100-billionaires. They don’t need any financial help.
Large corporations are going to get a $918 billion tax break.
The Pentagon, which has never passed an audit and is the greatest source of waste, fraud, and abuse in the entire federal government will get an additional $150 billion. The military contractor corporations will reap those rewards while they build more weapons to threaten people around the world.
The petroleum industry gets $18 billion in new handouts while wind and solar programs get gutted by additional taxes, leading to more devastating droughts and hurricanes caused by worsening climate change. Manish Bapna, president Natural Resources Defense Council: Oil executives, industrial loggers and coal CEOs can all celebrate today as they gain unprecedented access to drill, log and mine on our public lands. The rest of us will soon find no trespassing signs on lands that have belonged to all of us for more than a century. Beth Lowell, Oceana Vice President for the United States: This big, terrible bill is the worst environmental legislation in American history… require the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas lease sales by area ever in the United States…increasing the risk of dangerous oil spills.
Drug corporations get a new loophole that prevents Medicare from negotiating lower prices for some high cost prescription drugs.
ICE AND DETENTION FACILITIES:
The bill will inject roughly $150 billion into Trump’s mass deportation agenda over the next four years, amounting to nearly 20 years’ worth of detention funding to be spent only in a four-year period. ICE is getting an increase of more than $100 billion, beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. There’s funding to hire an additional 10,000 ICE officers in five years, and a lump sum of $3.3 billion to the Department of Justice which oversees ICE. Rep. Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.): I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion—making ICE bigger than the FBI, U.S. Bureau of Prisons, DEA, and others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing. American Immigration Council: It does nothing to address the systemic failures of our immigration system while inflicting harm, sowing chaos, and tearing families apart.
The overwhelming majority of the funding for ICE detention, $45 billon, goes to Private prison and detention corporations like Geo Group and CoreCivic, with their stock prices up more than 50% since Trump’s election. After contributing to Trump’s re-election, they will reap the rewards. Their facilities, which include family detention, could be granted contracts even if they fail to meet current standards. The core legal protection for children found in the Flores litigation are being gutted.
A new generation of women environmental leaders fought to halt the immigrant detention center built in the Everglades. $3.5 billion will be available to hand out to state and local governments in GOP states that will be building more detention camps like this one, with significant discretion as to how to spend it over the next 51 months. These funds will likely reimburse Texas for the $11 billion it spent on its state-run immigration enforcement program known as Operation Lone Star.
THE BORDER
There’s $46.6 billion for border wall construction. Corporations such as the Trump-allied Fisher Sand & Gravel, as well as producers of concrete, cement and aggregates will be receiving those billions. There’s funding for the Department of Defense to support the military’s border operations, such as deployment of military personnel for immigration enforcement, and the detention and deportation of migrants. There’s $10 billion to reimburse DHS for costs related to safeguarding the borders, but it’s basically a slush fund for CBP to largely use however it determined.
ENERGY
With the aggressive phase out of renewable energy tax credits and its impact on grid stability and power prices, there will be more dependence on energy like gas and nuclear, and there’s a new tax credit for coal used in steel making. These industries will get a boost at a time when they should be getting phased out. The bill discourages purchases of electric cars over gas fueled by ending federal EV tax credits.
EDUCATION
Student loan aid programs are being cut and the funds moved toward private school aid. The corporations that run private schools and develop curricula for them will be the beneficiaries.
CONCLUSION:
This bill is a betrayal of working Americans….so that billionaires can buy bigger yachts. Washington Republicans have done what they always do: take from the working class to give to the rich. As Democrats, we must make sure they never live that down, said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas).
Yet, the leaders of the Democratic Party mounted the feeblest of opposition to this bill, not urging people to contact the Congress members, just speechifying and grandstanding with an 8 1/2 hour filibuster by Hakim Jeffries, with no clear analysis of who we are fighting, which accomplished nothing of substance. Nor was there a real fight made for universal health care in opposition to Medicaid cuts. Other organizations that are part of the Left wing of the party, however, were rallying their forces to barrage Congress with phone calls. This further exposed the Democratic Party ‘leaders’ as having little to offer the working class.
People are becoming more aware and realize ‘we the people are on our own’, feeding a growing resistance. Protests in various forms are taking place all over the country to the devastating cuts, the cruel immigration raids, the racism, every-increasing military budget and war, destruction of democracy as we have known it, and more.
As Bishop William Barber, co-founder Repairers of the Breach said: Today, Congress passed one of the most morally-bankrupt pieces of legislation in our nation’s history. It’s policy murder in plain sight. The passage of this bill is deadly, but it is not a defeat. We must meet it with a resurrection. We will organize voters in every impacted community to push legislators who voted for this bill out of office and build a movement together that can reconstruct our democracy.
