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NYT Obscured Worst Harms of Trump's Budget Conor Smyth ([link removed])

President Donald Trump has just signed into law what will go down as perhaps the most significant legislative achievement of his second term in office. Dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act ([link removed]) , the legislation is set to extend most of the tax cuts ([link removed]) passed in Trump’s first term, while making deep cuts to social programs and gutting Biden-era climate provisions, among other sweeping changes (FAIR.org, 7/9/25 ([link removed]) ).

The bill will have a remarkably regressive distributional impact. While top incomes will balloon by thousands of dollars, lower-income Americans will actually see their incomes decline. One analysis from before the bill’s final passage found ([link removed]) that its major provisions would reduce incomes for the bottom 20% by about 2%.

Tax cuts, after all, are only one part of the bill. More relevant to lower-income Americans is that this bill will deliver the largest cuts to Medicaid ([link removed]) and food stamps ([link removed]) in US history.

Such a historic weakening of the safety net—the programs that support the finances of lower-income Americans—should warrant not only major attention, but significant scrutiny from national media outlets. And yet, at the New York Times, the approach has been to distract and obscure above all else.


** 'Defined by staggering debt'
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NYT: The National Debt Is Already Causing Bigger Problems Than People Realize

As Trump slashed $1 trillion from healthcare, the New York Times (6/27/25 ([link removed]) ) stressed the importance of reducing the deficit.

One manifestation of this approach has been the Times’ insistence on elevating the bill’s effect on the debt as a foremost concern. In the week or so leading up to the bill’s passage, in fact, both an editorial (6/27/25 ([link removed]) ) and an episode of the Times’ flagship podcast the Daily (7/2/25 ([link removed]) ) were dedicated entirely to a discussion of the national debt.

The Daily episode went as far as claiming, “The legislation is defined by the staggering amount of debt that it’s creating.” It then warned of the potential for a debt “doom loop,” whereby rising debt raises borrowing costs and forces the government to issue more debt in order to pay for its existing debt load.

Meanwhile, the Times editorial board opted to focus more heavily on the costs already being imposed by high federal debt. In a piece titled “The National Debt Is Already Causing Bigger Problems Than People Realize,” the board highlighted the “staggering amount of money” the government puts towards interest payments each year. The board’s solution:

The government needs to raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, and it needs to make long-term changes in Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of spending growth.

In other words, at a time when the Republican Party is gutting the safety net in epic fashion, the New York Times is coyly hinting that Social Security and Medicare will need to be cut.


** 'Enough to repair every bridge'
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NYT: The Cost of High Debt

The New York Times' own chart (6/27/25 ([link removed]) ) indicates that Trump's budget bill will have only a modest impact on US interest payments. What did cause interest costs to soar was the political decision to fight inflation through higher interest rates, a decision the Times applauded (FAIR.org, 1/25/23 ([link removed]) , 6/27/23 ([link removed]) ).

Across both the editorial and the podcast episode, the primary reason put forward by the Times for concern over the national debt was the borrowing costs associated with it. But is the bill’s effect on borrowing costs—the amount of money the federal government will have to spend to pay off the interest on its debts—genuinely that significant of a concern?

The Times editorial board seems to think so. Warning of the ill effects of increasing borrowing costs, the board observed:

The House version of Mr. Trump’s bill, already approved by that chamber, would increase interest payments on the debt by an average of $55 billion a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The increase alone is enough money to fully repair every bridge in the United States.

This comparison is useful to a degree. It exposes the priorities of the Trump administration, which seems to value tax cuts for the wealthy above delivering basic public goods.

But the comparison ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. The reality is that $55 billion is a relatively small sum for the US government. It represents only about 0.8% of the 2024 federal budget, and 0.2% of US GDP.


** High cost of high interest rates
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CNBC: Latest on 10-Year US Treasury

The interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bills has risen from 0.6% in 2020 to 4.5% today (chart: CNBC ([link removed]) ).

The total amount the federal government pays in interest—the amount it pays in excess of what it borrowed when it pays back loans—is of course much larger: The Times relays that interest payments are on pace to surpass $1 trillion this year, representing around 15% of last year’s federal budget. As the editorial board notes, this level of spending on interest payments crowds out other, more useful spending by the government. In other words, it does impose a not-insignificant cost.

What the board de-emphasizes or ignores, however, is that high interest payments are really just a symptom of other more fundamental policy choices.

On the one hand, they reflect ([link removed]) the political decision to rely on the blunt instrument of interest rates to combat the pandemic-era spike in inflation. The result has been a rise ([link removed]) in interest rates on ten-year government bonds, from under 1% in 2020 to above 4% today.

This was not an inevitable development. Other methods exist ([link removed]) for combating inflation. But these methods were sidelined in favor of a regressive, debt-inflating approach. Would you know this by reading the Times editorial? Absolutely not.


** The incredibly low tax rate
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TPC: Total Tax Revenue as a Share of GDP

The United States has one of the lowest effective tax rates among wealthy countries (chart: Tax Policy Center ([link removed]) ).

On the other hand, high interest payments also reflect the political decision to run up the US debt load through tax cuts ([link removed]) for the wealthy. This history of tax cuts is discussed by the editorial board, but it is framed as more of a secondary issue. Little would readers know that the crowding-out effect imposed by high interest payments, which the Times depicts climbing above the cost of Social Security in coming years, is dwarfed by the crowding-out effect of low tax revenue.

For such a rich country, the US collects incredibly little in taxes. Its tax revenue ([link removed]) registers a meager 29% of GDP, compared to 42% in Canada, 52% in France and 62% in Norway.

Meanwhile, interest payments as a percentage of GDP are set to double ([link removed]) over the next 30 years, reaching about 6% of GDP in the 2050s. That’s not even half the revenue deficit the US faces versus Canada—and Canada’s a low-tax country compared to France and Norway!

The Times nonetheless has run no editorial in recent months decrying the US for being such a low-tax country. Even in its editorial about interest payments, a breakdown of the pitiful state of US tax collection by international standards is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a muddled denunciation of the bill’s irresponsible contribution to burdensome borrowing costs.

But, again, the bill’s contribution is tiny. Yes, interest payments are projected ([link removed]) to reach 6% of GDP by the 2050s, but they will hit 5% even in the absence of this bill. With this single percentage of GDP boost in borrowing costs, the bill imposes a cost in 30 years that is a fraction of the cost of our tax deficit versus Canada today.


** 'People benefit from working'
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NYT: Republicans Can’t Hide Medicaid Cuts in a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill

In its one editorial (5/23/25 ([link removed]) ) on the reconciliation bill's cuts to the safety net, the New York Times endorsed the idea "that some government benefits should be tied to employment."

This is not to say that the Big Beautiful Bill will not impose Major Gratuitous Pain. But it is to say that such pain will not be found in an analysis of its impact on borrowing costs.

Rather, where we should look to see clear evidence of negative effects is the savings side of the bill, where Republicans have enacted brutal cuts to the social safety net, cuts that the economist James Galbraith calls ([link removed]) “the direct result of bipartisan scaremongering over deficits and debt.”

The Times editorial board has run one editorial (5/23/25 ([link removed]) ) on the bill’s cuts to the safety net. Published over a month before the bill’s passage, the piece was headlined “Republicans Can’t Hide Medicaid Cuts in a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill.” As it pointed out, the Republican bill would reverse the progress that has been made over the past decade or so in expanding health insurance access to more Americans.

Oddly, however, the editorial extended an olive branch to the GOP, conceding:

We are sympathetic to the idea that some government benefits should be tied to employment. People benefit from working, and society benefits when more people are working.

Explaining the decision to insert this concession into the piece, editorial director David Leonhardt (New York Times, 7/1/25 ([link removed]) ) has since elaborated:

I actually understand why, at a top-line way, people would want to put work requirements on a federal program, and actually I do think there are federal programs that should have work requirements. I’m a pretty big skeptic of universal basic income, of the idea that we’re just going to have the federal government give people lots of money outright. I don’t think it’s worked very well. I think it’s hugely expensive.

This is a baffling explanation. As worded in the editorial, it appears that the board is expressing sympathy for work requirements for some existing government benefits, and justifying them with reference to the value of work, despite work requirements’ long history of doing nothing ([link removed]) to increase employment. Yet Leonhardt gives no example of a current government program that should be saddled with a work requirement. Instead, he merely expresses his opposition to universal basic income, using conservative arguments against the policy in doing so. This level of clarity, however, may be all we can expect from the Times.


** Unnoted cutbacks
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At least as notable as the contents of the editorials published by the Times on the Big Beautiful Bill is what the Times has failed to highlight about the legislation. After all, the paper has run just two editorials on what is probably the most regressive major piece of legislation in at least a generation. What have these missed? A lot.

For one, the largest cuts to food stamps in history are entirely absent from the Times editorial board’s critiques of the bill. That millions ([link removed]) would lose access to food stamps and tens of millions would see their benefits cut is apparently an afterthought for the board. It evidently does not warrant the denunciation that somewhat higher borrowing costs require.

Decimation of clean energy provisions and heavy new restrictions on student loans likewise appear a grand total of zero times in the Times’ editorials on the bill. This is the sort of resistance that the most prominent establishment newspaper in the country has to offer.


** 'Big ugly battle'
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The situation at the Daily has been better, though it had only a rather low bar to clear. Through the day the bill was signed into law, the show published three episodes on the legislation. The first (6/5/25 ([link removed]) ), titled “The Big Ugly Battle Over the Big Beautiful Bill,” touched on the bill’s attacks on climate provisions in its first half, and devoted its second half to a conversation about cuts to Medicaid.

Food stamps, by contrast, were mentioned in just two sentences. And student loans didn’t make a single appearance.

The following episode (7/2/25 ([link removed]) ), discussed above, centered on the debt, but the third episode (7/4/25 ([link removed]) ) dedicated additional airtime to cuts to the safety net, again including a discussion of Medicaid cuts in the second half of the episode. Its first half also centered the serious negative impacts of the legislation, mostly focusing on the array of tax cuts in the bill, but framing the overall impact as wildly regressive:

The most important thing to know about this package is that it delivers its greatest benefits to the wealthy, and it extracts its greatest cuts on the poor.

The largest cuts to food stamps in American history, however, garnered no airtime. Same goes for the massive pullback in student loans.


** A ripple in a tsunami
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NYT: Millions Would Lose Their Obamacare Coverage Under Trump’s Bill

We found only two New York Times headlines like this one (6/5/25 ([link removed]) )—out of nearly 800 in its US politics section—that straightforwardly conveyed the impact of the budget bill's cuts.

Unfortunately, this poor coverage is not limited to Times editorials and the Daily. As it turns out, the news section of the Times has been similarly lacking in serious coverage.

The paper’s US Politics ([link removed]) section is case in point. From the start of June through July 4, when Trump signed his bill into law, this section of the Times featured a total of seven articles that mentioned “food stamp(s),” “SNAP” or “food aid” in either their headline or subhead. For “Medicaid,” “health cuts” and “Obamacare,” the number was ten.

But few of these articles bore headlines straightforwardly reporting the facts of what’s projected to happen to millions of Americans as a result of cuts to food stamps and healthcare spending. In total, only two headlines, both about healthcare, really fit this description:
* "GOP Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, CBO Says" (6/29/25 ([link removed]) )
* "Millions Would Lose Their Obamacare Coverage Under Trump’s Bill" (6/5/25 ([link removed]) )

Other headlines mentioned cuts, but some didn’t even reference that information. For instance, one headline (6/3/25 ([link removed]) ) read, “Trump Administration Backs Off Effort to Collect Data on Food Stamp Recipients.”

Amazingly, at least in the US Politics section of the paper, zero headlines included the phrase “student loans,” despite substantial retrenchment in student loan policy. The term “safety net” appeared in the headline or subhead of only six articles.

With around 800 articles appearing in the Times’ US Politics section during this timeframe, coverage of historic cuts to crucial safety net programs resembled a ripple in a tsunami.


** 'Fair to criticize Democrats'
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NYT: Trump May Get His ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ but the G.O.P. Will Pay a Price

The type sizes conveys the relative importance the New York Times (7/1/25 ([link removed]) ) places on prices paid by politicians vs. those paid by the public.

Nonetheless, when Times editorial director David Leonhardt was asked whether he thinks “Americans who will be impacted by these cuts understand what’s happening,” given the lack of public outcry so far, he gave credit to Republicans for succeeding in minimizing public opposition, and blamed Democrats for failing to make a bigger deal out of the bill:

I also think it’s fair to criticize the Democratic Party and activists who are aligned with the Democratic Party for not figuring out ways to make a bigger deal out of these cuts. To some extent, they’ve allowed the Republican cynical strategy of staying away from town halls to work better than it might have.

The role of corporate media, and more particularly of the New York Times, may never have even crossed Leonhardt’s mind. But, of course, the Times is a critical player in US politics. With around 12 million ([link removed]) subscribers and millions ([link removed]) of daily listeners to the Daily, the outlet has incredible reach. If it wanted to, the Times could play a significant role in raising public awareness of this bill. The problem is that it seems completely uninterested in adopting this role.

I would argue, therefore, that the paltry public outcry is fundamentally a result of editorial decisions, not least those made at the Times. By refusing to cover cuts to the social safety net with more than minimal urgency, the Times has done a good deal to deprive the Democratic Party and other opponents of the legislation of the sort of informational environment in which public opposition to harmful policies can be effectively mobilized.

Through inaction, through poor coverage, the Times is making a political choice to undermine opposition to some of the Trump administration’s most damaging policies.
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