Republicans in Congress have obeyed Donald Trump and passed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping reconciliation package that pairs massive tax breaks for the wealthy with massive cuts to Medicaid and other social services.
The bill’s journey through Capitol Hill has been fraught. Democrats were universally opposed to the legislation, and Republicans weren’t exactly in lock-step over it, either. Republicans in both chambers of Congress voted against the bill, despite Trump attacking them by name and threatening retribution. The bill passed through the House in June, and then barely made it through the Senate on Tuesday. Vice President J.D. Vance broke a 50-50 tie after three Republican senators broke with the party and voted against the bill. “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding isn’t there anymore?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who announced his retirement amid attacks from Trump, wondered this week.
The House passed the final version of the legislation on Wednesday, sending it to Trump’s desk before the Fourth of July, as the president demanded. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sounded off on the bill’s Medicaid cuts during a marathon speech before its passage on Thursday. “People will die … as a result of the Republican assault on the health care of the American people,” he said. “I never thought I would be on the House floor saying that this is a crime scene.”
The “Big Beautiful Bill” contains a bounty of disastrous policies. Here are eight of the worst measures Trump will sign into law:
It enshrines tax cuts for the rich, while soaking the poor
One of the bill’s biggest achievements, as far as Trump and his friends are concerned, is the enshrinement of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, originally created in Trump’s 2017 tax bill. The tax breaks — which saw the rich save an average tens of thousands on their annual taxes compared to a couple hundred bucks for middle-income Americans — were set to expire on New Year’s Day 2026, and will now be extended permanently.
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According to the Tax Foundation, an international policy think tank, the bill will reduce federal tax revenue by over $5 trillion over the next 10 years.
In order to pay for the extension of the tax cuts, Republicans are taking a hacksaw to programs that benefit low-income Americans, including massive reductions to spending on Medicaid and food assistance programs. In the end, corporations and the wealthy will get to keep paying low taxes, while low-income Americans are expected to lose over $1,600 a year in take-home pay.
Its Medicaid cuts will force millions off their health insurance
Trump and Republicans have insisted that the Big Beautiful Bill does not cut Medicaid. This is a lie. The legislation will cut over $1.1 trillion from Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, resulting in nearly 12 million people losing their health coverage.
The cuts are a middle finger to the less fortunate, particularly those who rely on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans. Republicans have made it vastly more difficult to qualify for the program, imposing strict work requirements and setting up a series of bureaucratic hurdles for recipients to navigate before they can get coverage.
Republicans have claimed the Medicaid work requirements are about eliminating “fraud” and “waste.” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), one of the Republicans leading the charge to crack down on Medicaid, previously ran a business that allegedly scammed the program. One of Scott’s counterparts in the Senate, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), made a show of opposing the cuts, even writing an op-ed for The New York Times in which he argued that the Medicaid cuts are “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” He voted for them anyway.
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The bill additionally limits funding that states send to health care providers that treat patients on Medicaid. And the legislation is so expensive that it’s expected to trigger mandatory spending cuts, including a $500 billion cut to Medicare, the government insurance program for seniors.
It sends a boatload of money to ICE
Trump’s big bill sets aside roughly $30 billion to fund recruitment, retention, and bonuses for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. That’s enough money to deploy as many as 10,000 new federal police as part of what administration officials imagine as an Amazon-style logistics machine for arresting, detaining, and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants.
The bill puts over $45 billion into the construction and expansion of detention facilities and transportation, enough money to open up about 116,000 detention beds. The moves would create a migrant holding system that rivals the size of the entire federal prison system. Immigration advocates point not only to the harms that this militaristic mass-deportation program will inflict on minority communities, but also on the U.S. economy. “The immigration pieces of this bill are cruel and harmful for immigrants and their communities, but it is equally harmful for America overall,” Nayna Gupta, policy director of the American Immigration Council, an immigrant advocacy organization, tells Rolling Stone.
She also points out that once such federal funding levels are established, the special interests who benefit — including from the contracts to house detained migrants — will fight tooth and nail to keep that money flowing from Congress. “Once we have an apparatus set up in this manner,” says Gupta, “our experience is that it’s incredibly challenging to dismantle it — even if the American public no longer supports such sweeping enforcement and detention.”
Stephen Miller, the president’s chief immigration hawk, understands what’s at stake. “This is our one chance to reverse decades of illicit mass migration,” he wrote as the House prepared to pass the final version of the bill.
It is a disaster for renewable energy — and the economy
Trump’s bill will have a devastating impact on renewable energy, revoking scores of clean energy subsidies, credits, and grants given to green energy projects — many in Republican areas — under former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The measures drew objections even from Republican lawmakers. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) warned that the predicted increase in energy prices would have widespread impacts on consumers. “Maintaining a reliable energy tax environment is essential to attracting long-term investment, particularly in states that offer business-friendly climates,” she wrote in an April letter to members of her party. “Repealing incentives that support energy development would undermine these objectives, slowing economic progress and job creation in key industries.”
“For energy credits that provide a direct passthrough benefit to ratepayers, repeals would translate into immediate utility bill increases, placing additional strain on hardworking Americans,” Murkowski added.
Murkowski voted to pass the bill, despite her criticisms.
It gives tax breaks for gun silencers
Should it be easier to shoot someone in the United States? Republicans think yes. Trump’s bill throws several favors to gun retailers and lobbyists, most notably the repeal of a $200 tax on firearm suppressors, more commonly known as “silencers.” This was a key priority for Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), a conservative lawmaker who owns a gun store. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) criticized the provision last month as an effort to remove “the controls that we have today to make sure that only the right people get their hands on this technology so that the wrong people can get their hands on this technology.”
The Senate expanded the bill’s tax repeal on silencers even further, removing federal taxes on short-barrel (also known as “sawed off”) rifles and shotguns. Clyde complained about the final bill because it no longer eliminates a registration tax on silencers and shot-barrel firearms, as he hoped, but people who want to buy those products at his gun shop will still see their costs go down.
To summarize: tax cuts for gun aficionados, health care cuts for the poor.
It increases military spending
Health care and access to the basic resources needed to survive are not a guarantee in this country, but you can bet your life’s savings that where there’s a spending bill, there’s a massive infusion of cash into the already bloated defense budget.
Trump’s bill authorizes a $150 billion surge in the Pentagon’s 2026 budget. This includes billions to advance the creation of a so-called “Golden Dome,” an air and space missile defense system inspired by Israel’s “Iron Dome” defense system.
The United States already has extremely robust missile defense systems, and the proposal has been criticized as a potentially ineffective use of military resources given the size and sprawl of the United States compared to a nation like Israel, which is about the size of New Jersey.
It cuts food assistance
In 2023, the most recent year provided by the Department of Agriculture, an average of 42 million Americans received government help paying for monthly groceries through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Millions of children in low income families benefit from the program.
Trump’s bill slashes spending on SNAP by $287 billion over 10 years. In order to do this, Republicans are making eligibility requirements more exclusionary, instituting new restrictions on federal SNAP funding for states, while also expanding work and reporting requirements for recipients. In other words, they are imposing cumbersome red tape and bureaucratic hurdles to discourage, confuse, or strain recipients out of the program.
The cuts are the steepest to SNAP since the program was created. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, they will result in roughly 3.2 million adults, as well as their dependents, losing food assistance.
It jacks up the deficit
For decades now, the Republican Party has made it their business to kick up dirt about the national debt and its many repercussions. But as is the norm with the GOP, this rhetoric is not necessarily correlated to legislative action.
After months of controversy over the mass firing of government employees and gutting critical federal agencies in the name of spending austerity, Trump and the GOP’s bill is expected to add $4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Republicans are using accounting gimmicks to try to change the narrative about the cost of the legislation, adopting something called “current policy baseline” that allows them to essentially write off the bill’s $3.8 trillion in tax cuts and insist it doesn’t really add to the deficit. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) described the maneuver as “budget math as fake as Donald Trump’s tan.”
The massive deficit bump has driven divisions inside and outside of Congress, complicating the bill’s passage. Tesla billionaire and former Trump right-hand man Elon Musk threatened to create a new political party and primary Republicans who supported the legislation. Musk of course led the disastrous and largely ineffective Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and left the president’s inner circle on less-than-great terms. Republicans like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have also raised hell about what the bill would do to the national debt, drawing the wrath of Trump, who has vowed to ensure he is primaried.
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The president hasn’t only said he’ll do what he can to kick noncompliant Republicans out of Congress, he’s teased kicking Musk out of the country. “We’ll have to take a look,” he recently told reporters when asked about deporting the world’s richest man.
Musk certainly isn’t sweating as hard as the million expected to lose their health insurance as a result of the bill. In fact, the legislation includes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts for SpaceX, one of Musk’s companies.