Welcome to “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster,” a pop-up newsletter about the Republican tax and spending bill, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in a generation. Sign up for the newsletter to get it in your in-box.
CBO Score: Medicaid and Food Aid Slashed, Debt Still Way Up
The Congressional Budget Office published its latest estimate of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Wednesday. The results are gruesome. From this year through 2034, food stamps get gored by almost $300 billion, and Medicaid by well over $700 billion. Affordable Care Act subsidies come in for another $125 billion in cuts, in addition to Republicans’ separate refusal to extend Biden-era marketplace subsidies that expire at the end of the year. The CBO concludes this bill will directly kick 10.9 million people off their health insurance, and if you add another five million from the refusal to extend ACA subsidies, that’s a total of about 16 million losing coverage.
The suffering from these cuts will be concentrated among the poor and working class, including perhaps 51,000 preventable deaths per year, according to researchers from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. That makes this bill considerably worse than Trump’s previous attempt to repeal the ACA during his first term, which would have caused “only” an estimated 24,000 to 46,000 deaths annually.
It’s worth pointing out that four Republican senators, namely, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine, have all promised not to cut Medicaid. And others, like West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito and Jim Justice, have expressed concern about the impact on rural hospitals, which operate on thin margins and would near collapse if many of their patients lost insurance coverage.
Read more “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster”
These cuts, immense as they are, do not come close to canceling out the effect of $3.7 trillion in tax cuts, so the net result is a $2.4 trillion increase in the national debt by 2034. On the benefits of these reduced taxes, per an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 68 percent will be collected by the top fifth of Americans, and the top one-hundredth will get 24 percent. The poorest fifth will get a measly 1 percent—and that small tax decrease will be canceled out many times over by the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps.
This debt increase is worth emphasizing. Ordinarily, scaremongering around the national debt is a cover for cutting welfare programs, and previous presidents have jacked up the debt tremendously with little negative effect. But this time might be different. First, Trump’s wildly erratic behavior has clearly dented confidence in the U.S. political system, and interest rates on our debt are unusually high as a result. Moreover, all this new borrowing would happen while the government is forced to refinance tens of trillions in existing debt at a much higher interest rate. Interest payments on the debt are already more expensive than the entire military; this bill would jack them way up.
Moreover, rich people are heavily overrepresented among the buyers of U.S. debt—effectively, those interest payments are a subsidy to the wealthy—which compounds the unfairness of the bill. With the one hand, Republicans would cut taxes on the rich; with the other, they would hand them a large source of very low-risk and zero-effort interest income.
Buyer’s Remorse Among House Republicans?
Since voting for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a number of GOP representatives have expressed some regret. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted on Twitter/X that she hadn’t noticed the fact that it bans state or local regulation of artificial-intelligence technology for a decade, and that she would vote against the final bill if that is not removed. Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) said the same thing about a provision that would limit judges’ ability to hold people in contempt for violating court orders.
On one level, this is reflective of how the legislative process has decayed because of the one-click Senate filibuster and the resulting reliance on jamming everything into monster reconciliation packages that can bypass it. With so much in one huge bill, power consolidates in the hands of congressional leadership, and rank-and-file representatives and senators end up having little power, input, or even awareness of the substance of legislation.
But on another level, it reflects the intellectual degeneracy of the Republican Party. It’s been common historically for representatives and senators to not read the bills they are voting on, but they almost always have had staff who did. Not only does Greene plainly lack that staff, but she also doesn’t even pay attention to the public discourse. The AI regulation ban was widely discussed in the press, and indeed on the floor of the House itself. “I even brought this provision up during the debate,” noted Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA).
Lazy, elderly, or alcoholic members of Congress who are essentially a voting button for their staffs are nothing new. Deranged lunatic members with no interest in or understanding of policy—who have believed in a secret Jewish conspiracy to start forest fires with space lasers—are.
What Is Elon Musk Up To?
Since “stepping back” from DOGE (not really, it seems), and its mission of destroying American state capacity and causing millions of deaths from disease and starvation in Africa, Musk has come out guns blazing against the Big Beautiful Bill. After some fairly tame critiques, he exploded in a habitual tweeting spree. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,” he wrote. It would “massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America [sic] citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt.”
Setting aside Musk’s misspellings, numerical errors, and mixing up the deficit and the debt, this is an odd argument. The bill does have a few small spending increases here and there—like a slight increase to Medicare physician payments—but the cuts are larger by orders of magnitude. If Musk were really upset about the budget deficit, the obvious solution is to reduce or eliminate the massive tax cuts for rich people like himself. That, of course, he did not suggest.
Axios reports that in reality, Musk’s turn against the BBB is revenge for four slights against him and his companies. First, Republicans ignored his pleas to preserve the electric-vehicle tax credit, which benefits Tesla; second, the administration would not let him stay on as a special government employee past the 130-day time limit; third, the FAA would not give Starlink a big fat contract for internet service, because it makes no sense whatsoever (a shocking intrusion of reality into Republican politics); and fourth, the administration pulled the nomination of Musk toady Jared Isaacman to run NASA.
As I have previously argued, right-wing authoritarian movements are, as a rule, chock-full of repulsive egomaniacs, and bitter feuding is common. Maybe Musk’s exit from government will turn out to be more real than it first appears.
We want to hear from you. If you’re a Hill staffer, policymaker, or subject-matter expert with something to say about the Big Beautiful Bill, or if there’s something in the legislation you want us to report about, write us at info(at)prospect.org.
