Whatever else can be said against the One Big, Beautiful Bill, the 1,037-page legislation carrying President Trump’s domestic agenda, at least the grandiosity of its name reflects the grandiosity of its ambition. Far more expensive than the pandemic stimulus package Mr. Trump signed in his first term, the bill would provide some $3.8 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy, paid for by cutting over a trillion dollars from government programs and borrowing most of the rest.
As the Senate takes up the legislation after its passage in the House last month, Mr. Trump and his allies have worked hard to conceal the true impact it would have on the country, falsely casting it as a golden deal with no downside for the American people. Times Opinion asked seven writers with a wide range of policy expertise to reveal its potential repercussions.
A presidential power grab
An under-the-radar provision of the House’s bill would brazenly undermine the power of federal courts.
Typically, if parties refuse to comply with court orders such as temporary restraining orders, judges can threaten to hold them in contempt. It’s one of the main ways that the courts enforce their rulings. If this bill passes, courts would be able to make such interventions only if plaintiffs first provided security, or a bond.
Courts have long been understood to have discretion over whether to order bonds and often do not do so, particularly when the plaintiffs have few resources. But this bill would pressure any people suing the government to put up a bond — and if they can’t afford to, the court couldn’t later use its contempt power to force the government to comply with its orders.
The goal of the provision seems clear: to prevent courts from enforcing their judgments in cases in which there has already been some sort of ruling against the Trump administration.
Because the terms of the provision apply retroactively, it would render the judicial power essentially toothless in many of these cases, including multiple lawsuits challenging the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. It would dangerously curtail judicial authority at a moment when courts are acting as the only meaningful check on the executive branch. If this provision is enacted, courts might be able to work around it by reissuing injunctions with nominal bonds, set as low as $1. Or they might find it altogether unenforceable — an impermissible effort to drastically limit the judicial power.
— Kate Shaw, a contributing Opinion writer and a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania
A sicker America
The current draft of the Republican tax bill would reduce the federal Medicaid budget by at least $600 billion over a decade. That would be the largest cut the program has faced since its inception.
Administration officials have insisted that the cuts are not cuts but just a reduction in the rate of growth. But at least $600 billion less would leave a big hole in the nation’s health care budget, however you frame it. And no matter who you are or how you get your health care, that hole would certainly include things that you would notice — and miss.
For starters: The bill would result in some 11 million people losing their health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office. An additional 24 million or so (people covered by marketplace plans) could see substantial changes to their health insurance, according to the Commonwealth Fund — including higher premiums and more out-of-pocket costs.
That’s not all. More than 40 percent of the funding for community health centers across the country comes from Medicaid. So does much of the money for inpatient psychiatric care and addiction treatment. So does a substantial portion of the money for hospitals in low-income and rural communities. As states are forced to assume a larger share of those expenses, budgets will have to shrink, forcing many of those facilities to shrink in tandem or close.
People with good, employer-based health insurance will feel these losses: When clinics close, emergency rooms fill up; when hospitals shutter, whole communities lose access to the care — not to mention the jobs — that those institutions provide.
— Jeneen Interlandi, a health and science writer for Opinion
A little less public spending, a lot fewer public benefits
According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would nominally cut federal spending by $1.3 trillion over a decade. The largest component of that would be the cuts to Medicaid, followed by the curtailment or elimination of other programs such as the clean energy subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act.
What makes these cuts especially galling is that the bill would actually do very little to reduce federal spending once you consider the debt it would create. The tax cuts would force the federal government to borrow trillions of additional dollars, incurring hundreds of billions in added interest payments that would go a long way to offset that $1.3 trillion in reduced spending.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation as written would add $551 billion to the government’s interest bill over the next decade. But the bill contains gimmicky expirations: Republicans intend to make permanent many of the tax cuts they wrote into the bill as temporary. If all the bill’s provisions would eventually be made permanent, that added interest bill would rise to $736 billion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. And that calculation uses the Congressional Budget Office’s base line economic projections, which anticipate that interest rates will fall modestly over the next few years.
But this irresponsible deficit expansion would be likely to push interest rates upward — by 0.14 percentage point, according to one relatively conservative estimate based on a Congressional Budget Office working paper. That may not sound like very much, but it translates to a further increase of several hundred billion dollars to the government’s interest bill over a decade and would also mean higher interest rates on consumer debt.
As the bill stands, the Congressional Budget Office expects the federal government would spend $89.3 trillion over the next decade. Because a majority of the bill’s spending cuts would be offset by higher government borrowing costs, it would shave, at most, a few hundred billion dollars off that base line — while throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. Not great!
— Josh Barro, a contributing Opinion writer, the author of the newsletter Very Serious and the host of the podcast “Serious Trouble”
On immigration, a blueprint for nationwide fear
This bill would pave the way for the largest investment in federal immigration enforcement since the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 — one that would turns that department into a Trojan horse for an assault on the civil rights of all Americans.
The United States already spends more on immigration enforcement than on all other federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined. This bill seeks an additional $175 billion for Mr. Trump’s restrictionist agenda, including deportations in the interior of the country, as well as border barrier construction and surveillance technology. The bill has $45 billion earmarked for detention infrastructure alone. It would also give billions of dollars to border states for assisting in border security operations.
This expansion of national policing authority would make everyone in the United States more vulnerable to government overreach. For the two-thirds of Americans who live in the 100-mile border enforcement zone, including entire states like Florida and Maine, it would mean living under constant threat of warrantless searches, surveillance and racial profiling. More citizens could get caught in the dragnet of detentions and deportations.
When I recently talked to Chris Newman, the legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, he said, “The federalization of local policing envisioned in this proposal is something that would have exceeded the wildest imaginations of J. Edgar Hoover.” He represents the family of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador, and added, “You can’t reduce the undocumented population to zero unless everyone in this country is documented by the federal government at all times.”
— Jean Guerrero, a contributing Opinion writer and a senior journalism fellow at the U.C.L.A. Latina Futures 2050 Lab
More economic turmoil and isolation
Mr. Trump has made clear that foreigners are not welcome here. He has sought to prevent them from selling their goods and services here. And now Republicans have a plan to discourage them even from investing in the United States.
The bill would create a barrier to foreign investments from countries — including Australia, Britain and Germany — that, according to the bill, impose “unfair” taxes on American investors. The provision, Section 899, would impose a 5 percent tax in the first year, which could rise to 20 percent by the fourth year, on a wide range of investments: the interest on loans to American borrowers, the dividends from owning shares in American companies, the profits from manufacturing products in the United States.
The measure reflects Mr. Trump’s view of foreign policy. He thinks that other nations are hurting the United States and that we can improve our fortunes by hurting them. As with tariffs, his favorite economic weapon, the new tax is described both as a punishment and as a tool to extract concessions.
But the tax makes even less sense than the tariffs.
Foreign investment in the United States is all upside. It doesn’t compete with American workers; it creates jobs. If Republicans were serious about expanding the nation’s manufacturing base, they would be wooing foreign investors. Instead, they are gambling that investing in the United States is so attractive that investors can be squeezed without being scared away. It’s an odd strategy for a nation that already struggles to match the low cost of manufacturing in other places.
Also, the federal government depends on borrowed money, much of it from foreign investors — and if Republicans pass their bill, which would significantly expand the federal debt, the United States will need a lot more money from the rest of the world.
— Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board
Dirtier, more dangerous air
The bill would prevent America from innovating in the energy sector and make the country poorer — but Americans, by and large, wouldn’t feel that.
What they would feel is what this bill would do to their air. By slowing the rollout of renewable energy and by removing incentives for Americans to buy electric vehicles, the bill would increase the amount of coal, natural gas and oil burned nationwide, making pollution far worse. (Power prices may also rise.)
That means more microscopic scraps of soot could enter Americans’ lungs and bloodstream, endangering their health.
Somewhere from 50,000 to 350,000 premature deaths in the United States are attributed to fossil fuel pollution each year. The Inflation Reduction Act was set to help bring that number down. This bill would keep it high.
— Robinson Meyer, a contributing Opinion writer and the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on clean energy and climate change
A weaker military
The bill seems as though it would fulfill Mr. Trump’s promise to make the U.S. military “bigger, better, stronger and more powerful than ever” — until you look closer.
The bill would add $150 billion to the Pentagon’s top line, and the administration claims this would be the first $1 trillion defense budget.
But the $150 billion in the measure is a one-time increase rather than a permanent change and one that the submitted budget wouldn’t sustain: My colleague Todd Harrison calculates that when you strip away the financial gimmicks, Mr. Trump’s claimed trillion-dollar defense budget would actually be a $31.5 billion reduction from the last one under President Joe Biden. That’s roughly the annual cost of 10 Army brigades.
“Weaker than Biden” is a charge that neither Republicans in Congress nor the American people should countenance. The Defense Department is severely underfunded, having lost $50 billion to $70 billion in buying power in just the past two years because of Congress’s failure to pass budgets on time, as my colleague Elaine McCusker has shown. To repair that damage and to confront the convergence of challenges that China, Russia, North Korea and Iran now pose, the U.S. military needs lasting investment. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has called for a military spending standard of 5 percent of G.D.P., which, by my calculations, would work out to an additional $353 billion per year.
Mr. Trump has demanded NATO allies meet the 5 percent military spending standard to merit continued U.S. support. His administration should meet that standard itself.
— Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute
Source photographs by Douglas Sacha and Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
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