Alligator Alcatraz & the Big Beautiful Bill

Back in May, I warned that Republicans were gutting Medicaid and Social Security by a thousand paper cuts. If you’ve watched any coverage, you’re likely overwhelmed by what's taking place on Capitol Hill as “voter-a-rama” became the longest in Senate history.

The Senate’s 940-page “Big Beautiful Bill” jams that slow kill into overdrive:

• $350 billion for Trump’s mass-deportation engine including $46B for the border wall, $45B for 100,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention beds, 10K new agents with $10k signing bonuses, and a $10 billion slush fund for states that help with round-ups and ICE raids.

• $930 billion ripped out of Medicaid, pushing approximately 11.8 million people off coverage. Experts warn the bill will unleash a tidal wave of pain, over-crowded emergency rooms, a spike in chronic illness, soaring medical debt, and more families going hungry.

• 3–5 million fewer Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients as work rules climb to age 64. 

The reality is that this bill and these cuts are going to significantly impact a lot of Trump voters, whether they realize it or not. Furthermore, the bill will add $3.3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next ten years. So much for Republican fiscal responsibility; hence why tensions are running high.

Where the axe falls first—deep-red America

The bill’s provider-tax squeeze and five-state block-grant “experiment” put rural hospitals on the chopping block—precisely what the American Hospital Association warns will trigger dozens of closures across the South and Plains. Look at Bourbon County, Kansas. Trump won over 70 percent of the vote there in 2024. Since Mercy Hospital Fort Scott shut its doors, expectant mothers and trauma patients now travel approximately 90 miles to reach a full-service facility in Kansas City or Joplin. That 90-mile ambulance ride will soon be the norm if this legislation becomes law. 

Meanwhile, older blue-collar workers, such as warehouse pickers in Ohio and coal-country caregivers in West Virginia, face a double-gut punch as SNAP work rules extend to age 64 and Medicaid demands 80 hours of monthly, paperwork-verified labor, squeezing people who are too broken to clock full-time shifts yet too young for Medicare. For the record, Border-state farm towns aren't spared either: a new $35 Medicaid copay and six-month eligibility "purges" will spike uncompensated emergency room bills and push more county hospitals to the brink of collapse. In short, the bill trades your local clinic, your parents' food aid, and your community's ER for a bigger wall and a talking-point headline.

U. S. Senator Thom Tillis’s lonely stand

The two-term senator from North Carolina, one of the few who still bothers to reach across the aisle, did his own homework, calling state lawmakers, Democratic governor Josh Stein, and every hospital group he could find to gauge how the new cap on provider taxes and the squeeze on “state-directed payments” would gut care back home. However, every effort to soften the Medicaid, SNAP, or rural hospital hits failed, although Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska crossed the aisle on several.

If you need more data, check out this fresh Yale Budget Lab analysis, which shows just how lopsided the pain is:

• The bottom 20% of earners lose 2.9% of their income, approximately $700 per year.

• The top 1% gain $30,000. 

Riddle me that…

Musk’s “Porky-Pig Party” moment

Even Elon Musk, usually happy to surf Trump’s waves and flip flop along the way continues to torch the package as “utterly insane,” saying it “kneecaps the future while subsidizing the past,” blasting the 15% wind and solar surtax and the scrapped EV-battery credits, and “will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!”

Where the bill kisses Project 2025

Gutting the safety net is the hill that Russell Vought and the Project 2025 crew have been itching to die on.

• Everything Project 2025 sketched out in pencil, the Big Beautiful Bill now tries to ink into law. The blueprint's call to cap, or better yet, block-grant Medicaid, appears as a five-state pilot project, inserted after the provider-tax cap ran afoul of Senate rules.

• Its demand for strict work requirements on every safety-net program becomes an 80-hour monthly reporting mandate that threatens to trip up millions on Medicaid and SNAP. 

• The plan’s dream of a turbo-charged deportation apparatus materializes as a $350 billion enforcement surge, including detention beds, agents, wall segments, the works. 

• And the Heritage Foundation authors’ idea for a “fiscal-sustainability commission” to take another swing at entitlements? The bill creates exactly that, a task force empowered to recommend Social Security age hikes as early as 2026. In short, the legislation is Project 2025 with a congressional stamp and a much sharper knife.

If the bill passes with all of these cuts, here are six things you can do:

1. Re-verify Medicaid now. Paperwork errors will likely be the #1 reason people lose coverage.

2. Price out an Affordable Care Act fallback. Subsidies shrink in 2027; comparison-shop early.

3. Locate sliding-scale clinics. Federally Qualified Health Centers expand hours when rolls shrink.

4. Organize locally. Governors can work to backfill rural hospitals and SNAP gaps, but only if voters demand it. 

5. Keep every pay stub. Miss one 80-hour report, lose benefits for a year.

6. Vote like your coverage depends on it. Because it does!

This story is still moving. Trump, rattled by warning flares from Elon Musk, Sen. Thom Tillis, and the rural-hospital lobby, still shows no sign of backing off the Medicaid cuts. Furthermore, his headline-grabbing visit to the Florida Everglades’ new “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention facility is pure red meat for the base, a swamp-ringed spectacle meant to distract you, while your healthcare and food aid are carved up. Let’s not forget: this is the same man who, back in 2019, seriously floated a border moat stocked with snakes and alligators. True story. I was in the White House for that whole episode.

After a marathon all-nighter, the Senate deadlocked at 50-50, and Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote, the fight now shifts to the House, where lawmakers can either rubber-stamp this ransom note to working America or slam on the brakes before the cuts hit home.

More soon,

Olivia