Tracking Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

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Trump's Beautiful Bill Will Kick 11 Million People Off Their Health Insurance

It will also increase the national debt by $2.4 trillion.

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Lev Radin/Sipa USA via AP
Images

By Ryan Cooper

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 [link removed] 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 [link removed] 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
[link removed] 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 [link removed] 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
[link removed] to 46,000 [link removed] deaths annually.

It's worth pointing out that four Republican senators, namely, Josh Hawley [link removed] and Eric Schmitt [link removed] of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski [link removed] of Alaska, and Susan Collins [link removed] of Maine, have all promised not to cut Medicaid. And others, like West
Virginia's Shelley Moore Capito [link removed] and Jim Justice [link removed], 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.

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 [link removed], 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 [link removed]. First, Trump's wildly erratic behavior has clearly dented confidence in the U.S. political system, and interest rates [link removed] 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
[link removed] in existing debt at a much higher interest rate. Interest payments on the debt are already more expensive than the entire military [link removed]; 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.

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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 [link removed] 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 [link removed] 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 [link removed] 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 [link removed] Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA).

Lazy, elderly
[link removed], or alcoholic [link removed] 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 [link removed] to start forest fires with space lasers-are.

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What Is Elon Musk Up To?

Since "stepping back" from DOGE (not really, it seems [link removed]), and its mission of destroying American state capacity and causing millions of deaths
[link removed] 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 [link removed]. It would [link removed] "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 [link removed] 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 [link removed] 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 [link removed], 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.

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