The GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed by the narrowest of margins in Congress and signed into law by President Trump, represents the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since chattel slavery. The slashing of vital services will cause a surge of economic insecurity and preventable deaths while massive hikes in military and deportation funding will serve to perpetuate endless wars and the senseless destruction of immigrant families and their communities.
1. Death by denial of healthcare
Cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, combined with new administrative hurdles to accessing benefits, could result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths per year. Overall, the new law and other policy changes from the Trump administration will likely strip health insurance from about 17 million people. Research shows that the rigid, red tape-laden work requirements in the bill are unlikely to actually increase employment. Most Medicaid enrollees already work, and even those who do work can end up without healthcare if red tape trips up their ability to prove it. Those who do not work are often caring for family members or attending school or have a disability. Formerly incarcerated people also face particularly high barriers to employment.
2. Hospital apocalypse
The budget reduces the allowable Medicaid provider taxes that many states use to fund this vital program. The threat is particularly severe for rural hospitals because they rely more heavily on Medicaid revenue than urban facilities. More than 700 rural hospitals are already at risk of closure, and at least 338 rural hospitals, including hospitals in nearly every state, are at increased risk due to changes in this budget. To buy off critics, Republicans included a rural health fund that is expected to cover less than a third of projected rural Medicaid losses.
3. Taking food from the mouths of hungry people
New work requirements for SNAP benefits will take food assistance from millions of people, including children and veterans. As with Medicaid, new work requirements for SNAP would have little effect on employment but would cause more children to go hungry.
4. Squeezing states on SNAP
This vital food program has always been fully federally funded, but the newly passed budget will require states to take on a significant share of the costs. This unprecedented burden shift will likely lead many states to cut enrollees or even terminate food aid programs for the first time since their inception, causing even more people to go hungry.
5. Barring lawfully present immigrants from aid
Hundreds of thousands of lawfully present immigrants, including children, who’ve fled persecution and violence in their home countries in search of safety in the United States (refugees, asylum seekers, some victims of sex or labor trafficking, some victims of domestic violence, and people with temporary protected status) will lose access to Medicaid, the Childrens’ Health Insurance Program, Medicare, ACA tax credits, and SNAP benefits. And 2.6 million U.S. citizen children who live with only an undocumented adult are expected to lose their Child Tax Credit.
6. Terrorizing immigrant families
The GOP budget provides roughly another $170 billion to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants, and for a border wall and militarization in the next few years. That includes $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers, including family detention facilities — a 265% increase on an annual basis that would primarily benefit private companies contracted to build and run detention facilities. It includes an additional $29.9 billion for deportation operations and $46.6 billion for border wall construction.
7. Takes from the poor to give to the rich
New tax policies would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest households. Cuts to health care, student loans, and other vital services would wipe out the minor tax benefits for working families. A Yale analysis of the bill’s combined tax and spending policies finds that the poorest 20% of households would suffer a net income loss of $700 per year on average while the top 1% would receive a $30,000 increase.Other tax changes benefit the wealthiest while leaving the poorest without help. Despite modest increases in the maximum Child Tax Credit, the budget will still deny benefits to an estimated 17 million children whose parents earn too little to receive the full credit. For the wealthy, changes to the estate tax mean that wealthy heirs will enjoy a one-time tax savings of $6.4 million while 99.8% of American families would not get a single penny from this tax cut.
8. Leaving corporations to enjoy their spoils
The budget keeps the corporate tax rate at 21%, a drastic reduction from the 35% pre-2018 rate – despite the fact that ordinary workers have not benefited from this rate reduction. The budget also includes more than $1 billion in new tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry – on top of existing subsidies for the industry that accelerate climate change while costing taxpayers an estimated $17 billion per year.
9. Rewarding polluters while raising energy costs
The budget allows oil and gas companies to avoid paying fees for polluting methane leaks that are a major cause of climate change, while cuts to clean energy subsidies could mean that household energy bills could spike by $415 a year over the next decade.
10. Funding war and enriching war profiteers
President Trump is requesting a record-high $1.011 trillion for the Pentagon and war for FY 2026. Because regular appropriations bills require a 60-vote Senate majority, the GOP included a $150 billion boost for the Pentagon through the reconciliation bill, which requires only a straight majority. They included $25 billion to begin building the “Golden Dome,” a missile defense system that is economically and physically impossible and would only drain more money from social programs to enrich wealthy Pentagon contractors, including Elon Musk; as well as $14 billion for new artificial-intelligence-driven weapons that will further enrich tech companies while making wars more deadly.
A Moral Budget Versus Policy Violence
Instead of inflicting policy violence on the most vulnerable, Congress should harness America’s abundant wealth to create a moral economy that works for all of us. By fairly taxing the wealthy and big corporations, reducing our bloated military budget, and de-militarizing immigration policy, we could free up more than enough public funds to ensure we can all survive and thrive. As our country approaches its 250th anniversary, we have no excuse for not investing our national resources in ways that reflect our Constitutional values: to establish justice, domestic tranquility, real security, and the general welfare for all.
This analysis was produced by the Institute for Policy Studies for Repairers of the Breach.
