Trump's big beautiful bill is ugly for the working people

[Frank]

These are some initial notes on what's in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law on July 4. But since important things may be missing, please point them out (or otherwise comment) here.

Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill” is now the law of the land, and by taking from poor and giving to the rich it amounts to highway robbery. For example, the top 1% of people by income will receive tax cuts totaling $1.02 trillion over the next decade, while just the cuts to Medicaid over the same period will be $930 billion—which is almost the same. Along with this, the new law takes money from things it doesn't like, such as protecting the environment, and gives money to things the Trumpists like, such as funding for immigration and border enforcement related activities.

Immigration

The law gives $170.7 billion in additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as well as for the Department of Defense (DOD) for activities related to the military’s presence along parts of the southern border. It breaks down this way:

-Construction and maintenance of border wall, CBP checkpoints, and CBP facilities: $51.6 billion
-Detention capacity expansion: $45 billion
-Enforcement and removal, including hiring ICE agents, transportation costs, and detaining families: $29.9 billion
-State immigration and border enforcement cost-reimbursement funds: $13.5 billion
-DHS cost-reimbursement fund for border enforcement: $10.0 billion
-Border Patrol agents and vehicles, and Federal Law Enforcement Training Center improvements: $7.8 billion
-Border technology and vetting: $6.2 billion
-Prosecutions of noncitizens, compensating local governments for incarcerating noncitizens, combatting drug trafficking, immigration judges: $3.3 billion
-Border processing, including for unaccompanied children, Remain in Mexico, and expedited removal: $2.1 billion
--Department of Defense support for immigration and border enforcement: $1.0 billion
-Operation Stonegarden (funding to state and local law enforcement agencies to support border enforcement): $450 million

Total $170.7 billion

Now the $29.9 billion for ICE is a single lump sum that is supposed to go to hiring an additional 10,000 ICE officers in five years, modernizing its fleet and other deportation-related transportation costs, and hiring new ICE attorneys to represent the government in immigration court. But it also has significant flexibility in how it uses and allocates this money.

Overall, the new law mandates DHS hiring 20,000 new people: 10,000 ICE; 5,000 customs officers and 3,000 border patrol agents over the next four years; 2,000 I don't know where.

Some other things the new law does is, beginning in 2026, strip health coverage under the Affordable Care Act marketplaces for legal immigrants, including refugees, asylees, and those with other humanitarian protections, as well as restrict eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps). The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 1.3 million legal immigrants will become uninsured due to these reforms, and this number may increase as states further limit access to immigrants amongst budget constraints and fiscal pressure from less federal dollars.

Moreover, the law increases over 20 fees that someone seeking to legally immigrate or gain asylum must pay. For example: the initial work permit fee for asylum applicants jumps from $0 to $500; the application fee for children who are abandoned, abused, or neglected by one or both parents jumps from $0 to $250; the fee for registering for Temporary Protected Status increases from $50 to $500; the fee for filing an appeal of a decision by an immigration judge increases from $110 to $900. Such fees are exorbitant for people who come to this country with little or nothing.

Robbing from the poor -

Medicaid

The initial estimates by the Congressional Budget Office were that the law's changes to Medicaid could result in as many as 7.6 million people losing health insurance over the next 10 years, while later estimates are that nearly 12 million will, and if the changes made in Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) are included, 17 million.

The law requires states to impose cost sharing of up to $35 per service for adults with incomes between 100% to 138% of the federal poverty line. It eliminates the American Rescue Plan’s (passed by Biden in 2021) temporary financial incentive for states opting to expand Medicaid. Indeed, forty-one states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid, and this expansion has increased access to health coverage and essential care for millions of people.

Rural hospitals have long been closing, and more than 300 (estimated) are at risk of closure due to the new law. This means rural people lose the ER and clinics and nursing homes tied to the hospital, as suffer the cost of traveling to a city hospital.

Nursing homes will also be hit. About 1.3 million people currently live in nursing homes, with over 62% of them relying on Medicaid to cover the cost of their care. Moreover, the new law will delay nursing homes from enforcing the minimum nursing home staffing mandate passed under Biden for ten years. One of its requirements was that a registered nurse be onsite 24/7

Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage reforms. These include a shorter (by one month) annual open enrollment period, an elimination of the low-income special enrollment period and automatic enrollment (requiring re-enrollment manually), and other technical changes. These changes and administrative hurdles may result in a loss of coverage for over 3 million more beneficiaries. ht://www.narhc.org/News/31439/What-Trumps-On ... th-Clinics

Lastly, to be eligible for Medicaid the new law requires that people between the ages of 19 and 64 work at least 80 hours per month and undertake onerous reporting requirements. Parents of children under the age of 13 are exempted. (The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 64% of adults on Medicaid already work full time or part time—which is required in some states, and that the rest are simply unable to.)

SNAP (food stamps)

The new law outrageously cuts $267 billion in federal spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—which provides food assistance to about 42 million people—through 2034.

Beginning in 2028, the federal government will continue to fully fund the benefits for states that have an error payment rate (under payments plus over payments) below 6%, but states with error rates above 6% will be on the hook for 5% to 15% of the costs, with states having an error rate above 10% (which many do) having to cover 15% of its benefit costs. This means that California will owe $1.8 billion for SNAP funding in 2028 if it maintains the same error rate it had in fiscal year 2024. Some states may not be able to come up with the money, and SNAP benefits may be cut. But presently

Persistent issues with error rates could result in a reduction of federal funding for SNAP programs, impacting the resources available for assistance.

In 2024, the average state error rate was 10.9%, according to a report from the Department of Agriculture. Any state with an error rate above 10% will have to cover 15% of its benefit costs under the “big beautiful” bill.

If California has to cover 15% of benefit costs, it will owe $1.8 billion for SNAP funding in 2028, according to estimated projections from Feeding America, a national network of food service programs.

The federal government would continue to fully fund the benefits for states that have an error payment rate below 6%, beginning in 2028. States with error rates above 6% would be on the hook for 5% to 15% of the costs. States are also given some flexibility in calculating their share.

The new law also extends SNAP work requirements to those between 55 and 64 years old, and based on this and other provisions, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that participation in SNAP will be reduced by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period.

Students and would be students

With outrageously high tuition, textbook and living costs, there are nearly 43 million student loan borrowers, and the total student loan debt in this country was $1.78 trillion at the end of last year. Trump's new law deals with this by capping how much a student can borrow from the federal government, as well as how much their parents can borrow. The cap is $20,500 per year for a grad student, with a lifetime graduate school loan limit of $100,000 (previously it was $138,500). For borrowers working toward a professional graduate degree (i.e. medical or law school) the cap is $50,000 a year, and a lifetime cap of $200,000. Parents will be capped at $20,000 a year and, in aggregate, at $65,000 per child.

As well, the new law extends the time in which a loan must be paid back, and eliminates economic hardship deferment and unemployment deferment beginning July 1, 2027.

Thus, people wanting to go to college, or to stay in college, are going to have to seek private loans that don't have such things as eligibility for forgiveness that the federal loans have, and are harder to qualify for, or they won't be able to go to college at all.

Overall, it's students from the working class and other poorer sections of the population who will be most negatively affected by Trump's new law.

The environment

The new law repeals Biden's Inflation Reduction Act’s increases on oil and gas royalty rates, lowering them from 16.6 percent to 12.5 percent, while lowering coal royalty rates from 12.5 percent to 7 percent—changes that make drilling and mining on federal land more profitable for the drillers and miners and their investors. Also, while Biden had restricted oil and gas leasing in Alaska, the new law reinstates fossil fuel lease sales in the fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Further, the law establishes mandatory timber sales; rescinds federal funding to protect old-growth forests and boost forest resiliency; and implements minimum leasing mandates for minerals in public lands and waters. (The latter includes 4 million acres of known coal reserves on federal lands.) And it provides millions of dollars of tax credits to U.S. companies producing metallurgical coal, often exported overseas for steel making.

As well, Trump's law cuts off all the funding that the Inflation Reduction Act gave to communities—especially the most vulnerable ones—to help increase energy efficiency and hasten their transition to cleaner energy. It cuts incentives and funding for renewable energy and clean energy technologies like heat pumps and electric vehicles. It eliminates the tax credit for electric vehicles, ends the advanced manufacturing tax credits for clean energy and batteries, including wind turbines, and slashes tax credits for solar and wind projects. The bill also repeals residential clean energy tax credits that help homeowners install renewable energy systems like rooftop solar, and it gets rid of incentives for home energy efficiency upgrades like weatherization.

One prominent climate think tank, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, found that U.S. emissions will be 8 percent higher than they would have been without Trump's big beautiful law.

Easier to read version:

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[pete]

This looks pretty exhaustive, Frank. One thing on immigrants: TSP stands for Temporary Protected Status. That's the status of, for example, Haitians who were allowed to enter the U.S. as an emergency case after the big earthquake there. The Haitians' status was renewed a number of times, and they were allowed to work. But now Trump is expelling them and suspending TSP for anyone.

[Frank]

Yesterday a federal judge in California ruled that Trump's attempt to end the Temporary Protected Status program for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan and Haitian migrants was unlawful, though.

[Frank]

I just discovered this good article: https://www.nilc.org/resources/the-anti ... explained/