US Republicans pass the most damaging laws in generations

Donald Trump ruined everyone’s Fourth of July holiday by signing what he so fatuously called the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. It may be the single most damaging piece of legislation signed into law since: who knows?

Ronald Reagan’s first budget in 1981, which marked a major conservative turn in US social and economic policy, seems moderate by comparison. Comparisons to other historically racist, repressive and anti-immigrant laws of the past—the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, the 1924 Immigration Act or even the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—are not out of the question.

For such a radical change in social and economic policy, it barely squeaked by. Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate to pass it. And it received 218 votes in the House of Representatives, a four-vote majority in the 435-member chamber.

Many horrible things have been shoehorned into its nearly 1,000 pages, as Republicans who voted for it without reading it will discover. And while the GOP members might be pleasantly surprised by what they find, everyone else will be horrified. Three major impacts of this big, ugly mess are clearly discernible from the details.

The rich are made richer. The bill permanently extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that were tilted toward the rich. According to an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, the richest 0.1 percent of households will, on average, be more than $300,000 better off in 2027.

While the tax part of this bill preserves the status quo, it also exempts larger fortunes from estate taxes and increases the deductability from federal taxation of the amount of money taxpayers pay in state and local taxes. The “pro-working class” tax reforms that Trump and the Republicans will tout—no taxes on tips, added tax deductions for seniors 65 and over, and no taxes on overtime earnings—are heavily circumscribed and temporary. All of them will disappear by 2028.

Even if one accepted the standard “trickle-down” argument that cutting taxes on the rich leads to a boom in investment and growth, it’s hard to see how largely preserving the status quo will provide “rocket fuel” for the economy, as Illinois Republican Representative Darren LaHood put it. Even more fanciful is the notion that the unleashed economic growth will lower the government’s budget deficit and allow the tax cut to “pay for itself”. This has become an article of Republican faith approaching almost religious status, despite 50 years of empirical evidence to the contrary. But Republicans have sustained their strategic goal of starving the government of funds and putting the onus on a future Democratic administration to raise taxes to cover government spending.

The poor are made poorer. To get the funds to make the 2017 tax rates permanent, to increase the military budget to more than $1 trillion for the first time and to establish a vast deportation machine, Trump and the Republicans are stealing from the poor. The University of Pennsylvania analysis suggests that the poorest 20 percent of households will endure a 7.4 percent decline in income by 2033.

Over the next decade, the bill cuts almost $1 trillion from Medicaid (medical insurance for low-income people) and about $500 billion each from Medicare (medical insurance for the elderly) and food assistance. This is the single largest cut ever to the already thin social safety net. As Sasha Abramsky, writing in the Nation, put it:

“If you thought the safety net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, were a mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now a generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.”

Cuts to Medicaid will cost 12-17 million people their health insurance, depending on which estimate is more accurate. About 3 million will lose access to food assistance. But the effects go far beyond those cuts. Safety net hospitals, especially those in rural areas, will cut services and jobs, if not close altogether. Cuts to subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance will drive up out-of-pocket expenses. Soon, everyone’s health insurance will cost more and cover less.

This has nothing to do with rooting out “waste and fraud” or securing these programs for the future, as Republicans claim. Many of them have lied through their teeth, saying that the act doesn’t cut Medicaid, even though the black-and-white of the bill said so. The key point is that this represents, in crystallised view, the political right’s full agenda: tax cuts for the rich, entitlement cuts for the poor and the showering of money on the military and other repressive apparatuses of the state.

“They pushed right up to the limit of what their budget could do and still hold enough votes to win a majority”, the liberal writer Paul Waldman explains. “And with every immigrant parent torn from their children’s arms, every family that loses their health coverage, every young person who decides to forego college, every rural health clinic that shuts down, every research grant that gets revoked, every solar energy project that gets dismantled, they can sit back, smile, and say, ‘This is why we came to Washington. No matter what happens tomorrow, it was worth it’.”

Anti-immigrant repression will be turbocharged. One of this package’s biggest “winners” is the immigration enforcement apparatus, which will receive more than $170 billion over the next four years. To put it in perspective, the current budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency—whose masked agents are kidnapping people off street corners and from workplaces—is just under $10 billion.

The amount of money devoted to this arrest/detention/deportation operation will be more than is allocated to other federal agencies like the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons—even the US Marine Corps. The sort of operation that ICE conducted in Los Angeles earlier this year will be expanded in every major city in the country simultaneously. And with an unaccountable, militarised police force operating nationwide, no-one—including US citizens—will be safe.

The federal government has been authorised to spend more than $45 billion to build a network of detention facilities like Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz, which will mostly house people who are not charged with a crime, but who are slated for deportation. The assault on the social fabric and civil liberties that is coming will be unprecedented since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

Because most of these facilities will be privately operated and crash-built, the opportunities for corruption will be limitless. Talk about “waste, fraud and abuse”! They could even be a source of forced labour for industries such as farming and construction that depend on immigrant workers.

With states and localities losing Medicaid, one of the largest federal sources of local and state budgets, they will be hard pressed to resist the one source of federal money where the spigot is fully open—that is, the billions that will be available to sign up local law enforcement as a “force multiplier” for ICE. And if rural hospitals close down, the GOP is hoping that ICE prisons will provide substitute jobs that will entrench them in local political economies for the foreseeable future.

For now, the “big beautiful bill” is, by most reliable measures of public opinion, extremely unpopular. In fact, it is the second most unpopular bill considered in Congress since the 1990s (second to Trump’s 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act), according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris. The party-line vote, in which no Democrats in either the House of Representatives or the Senate voted for it, means that the GOP owns it and its consequences.

The Democrats expect its unpopularity and adverse effects will help them win one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. But November 2026 is a long way off.

Moreover, Democrats don’t have clean hands. Their messaging on the bill focused on how it would slash Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Fair enough. But in 2023 and 2024, in an effort to restore “normalcy” after the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration ended the expansion of Medicaid, tossing 16 million people from the program. This was one of the contributing factors to Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 election.

Democrats were also reluctant to condemn the expansion of ICE and its gulag. Again, that’s to be expected from a party that has spent the last few years running away from any pro-immigration stance. Forty-eight House Democrats and 12 Democratic senators voted with the Republicans for the Laken Riley Act, which is helping ICE to round people up, and 75 of them supported a resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE.

All of this means that the Democrats, the courts, and other institutions are not coming to save us. In fact, many of them are being coerced or corrupted into accepting Trump’s austere authoritarianism as the new normal. The labour and social movements can only depend on ourselves to prevent the US’s further slide into the abyss.

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Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.