Republicans just passed “the worst bill in modern American history”

Just in time for the nation’s birthday, House Republicans have passed the most regressive legislation in recent memory, a bill that’s expected to cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and boot some 12 million Americans off their health insurance, even as it explodes the federal deficit—all to extend and expand tax cuts that favor the rich.

The vote was 218-214.

Republicans unilaterally shoved through their “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” awkwardly named with President Donald Trump’s phrase, just in time to meet his demand that they deliver it for his signature by Independence Day.

Their fealty to Trump helped House Speaker Mike Johnson overcome resistance among some GOP members, even though the measure flagrantly violates Trump’s many vows not to reduce Medicaid spending. Trump has addressed that contradiction by falsely claiming the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid or other benefits.

No Democrat in either chamber voted for the bill, and the party is expected to make the cuts to Medicaid and other safety net programs, including food stamps, the center of their efforts to retake control of the House and Senate in next year’s midterm elections.

Here are some of the aspects that have led critics to declare this “the worst bill in modern American history.”

It’s incredibly regressive: The bill cuts taxes for rich people while reducing benefits for the poor. Broadly, it extends the 2017 tax cuts Congress passed during Trump’s first term while partly offsetting the cost with deep cuts to health care spending, food assistance, and other programs. Although it includes some tax cuts that would benefit lower-income Americans, the gains, in aggregate, flow to the rich, with the top 1 percent of families getting a break (according to an estimate from an earlier version of the bill) of $79,000 a year while families in bottom fifth would get $160. But that’s before you consider the lost benefits.

When you factor in spending cuts to the aid programs, those wealthiest households end up with an average 4 percent increase in after-tax income, while the bottom 20 percent of earners are docked by nearly that same percentage, according to a Yale Budget Lab analysis. In a recent survey of 4,500 Americans by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker and post-doc Patrick Sullivan, Republican respondents, when informed of these numbers, opposed the bill by a ratio of 3-t0-1, and overall support for it plummeted to just 11 percent.

It blows up the deficit: The bill will increase the deficit by $4.1 trillion, including interest over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget , by extending the 2017 tax cuts and adding new ones aimed at fulfilling Trump promises. These include an extension of a home mortgage interest deduction and a “no tax on tips” provision, albeit with a $25,000 cap on the amount of tips workers can claim—which experts say means it will not help lower-income service workers.

It slashes Medicaid: The bill includes both direct and indirect cuts to Medicaid spending. It limits so-called Medicaid provider taxes that states use to collect more matching funds from the program. (Those states are taking advantage of a loophole in the law, but by cutting it off, the bill leaves them with less Medicaid funding, likely causing many to reduce services.) The legislation also imposes a requirement that Medicaid recipients provide proof of employment to get benefits. This imposes a complicated bureaucratic burden on beneficiaries that CBO says will cut $280 billion in Medicaid spending over six years—in many cases because even many people who work (most recipients do) won’t be able to navigate the red tape the bill imposes.

It ends health coverage for millions: Nearly 12 million Americans will lose coverage as a result of the bill, according to CBO, mainly due to the burdensome new requirements places on Medcaid recipients, and steps that make it harder to sign up, like limited enrollment periods and new paperwork requirements.

It‘s an impediment for women’s health care: Of the 24 million women currently enrolled in Medicaid, 56 percent are of reproductive age and the majority are women of color. The bill excludes Planned Parenthood and some other providers from Medicaid, reducing access to birth control and other reproductive care. The cuts could also force more than 140 rural hospitals to shut down obstetrics services or drastically curtail them.

It slashes food stamps: The bill will cut federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps poor people buy food, by an estimated $287 billion over a decade. It also includes a bizarre provision that rewards states with the highest error rates in awarding food stamps. That’s the result of legislative wrangling in the Senate where, in a bid to win over Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, GOP leaders—barred by procedural rules from simply exempting Alaska—instead exempted the 10 states with the highest error rates. (Alaska is the highest.) This actually gives states on the cusp of making the list an incentive to get worse.

As with Medicaid, most of the cuts to SNAP and other aid programs will be done backhandedly, via onerous bureaucratic burdens. As the New York Times reported: “By including dozens of changes to dates, deadlines, document requirements and rules, Republicans have turned paperwork into one of the bill’s crucial policy-making tools, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars in savings to help offset their signature tax cuts.”

Among the new requirements, “able-bodied” elders, ages 55 to 64, will have to submit documents verifying their citizenship. And rather than letting states use information already on hand to verify the citizenship of Obamacare subsidy applicants, the legislation requires people to track down and submit those documents. Republicans, who for years have railed against federal bureaucracy, claim these paperwork tasks would weed out only people who don’t qualify for benefits, but CBO and many experts say such hurdles will cause millions of people who qualify for Medicaid, food stamps, and health subsidies to lose them.

It undermines clean energy development: The bill slashes spending on clean energy approved under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, likely leading to job losses and a capitulation to China’s domination of the sector. It removes tax incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy projects, though it delays some of the cuts until after the midterms. It also ends subsidies of up to $7,500 for electronic vehicles purchased this year.

It greatly expands ICE detentions and enforcement: As masked ICE agents stir up neighborhoods around the country, the bill throws cash at the agency—more than $100 billion in new funding for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 2029. As my colleague Inae Oh reports, that would “fund the single largest increase in immigration enforcement in US history. It would ramp up mass deportations to an unprecedented scale; create hastily built, sordid detention centers across the country; and all but ensure that millions of people who haven’t been accused of crimes are disappeared.”