Obviously this is a pile of steaming garbage. Four trillion of tax cuts, paid for by cutting Medicaid (11.8 million people will lose health care according to the CBO) and perhaps 8 million people will lose food benefits under SNAP. Green energy subsidies are cut (no, shut up, there are tons of dirty energy subsidies) and there’s a huge budget increase for ICE (including more prison camps), America’s Gestapo.
And, of course, there’s all sorts of nasty in the details, like cuts to Planned Parenthood (which does far more than abortions).
A lot of Americans are going to be hurt by this. I’d go so far as to say it might be the worst American federal budget I’ve seen in my life, though Obama and the Fed’s giveaways to the rich were worse.
Oh, and politicians like Josh Hawley who pretend to care about ordinary people? Yeah, fake. He voted for the bill.
I reiterate that things in the US are going to get worse and worse for years, with only a small chance of a reversal (based on a Mamdani style left populism). Get out if you can, take steps to prepare and protect yourself if you can’t.
Update: worse than I realized. Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn in Republicans are wiped out in the mid-terms, and Republicans know that Democrats won’t reverse their cuts, so people will have no choice and the duopoly will continue:
Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year.
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NR
The ban on states regulating AI got removed at least. The bill is still awful though.
But, the working class is going to get what they voted for.
Ian Welsh
Thanks for the correction, article fixed.
KT Chong
I have a very strong feeling and intuition that: the dramatic expansion of ICE—to be funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill—is to get ready for what to come…
If the Supreme Court were to uphold the rationale of Trump’s executive order to restrict birthright citizenship—that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee citizenship to children born to parents who are neither U.S. citizens nor lawful permanent residents—that would set a legal precedent. After that ruling, the Trump administration could then issue another executive order to argue that the same rationale applies not only to births after February 19, 2025, but also to those before that date. There is no inherent legal barrier, once the constitutional interpretation is changed, to restricting or even revoking citizenship for people born under the same circumstances in earlier years, unless the Supreme Court or Congress specifically limits the ruling’s retroactive effect.
While legal tradition strongly disfavors retroactive removal of citizenship, the current Supreme Court has shown it is willing to break with precedent and tradition when it sees fit. There is no guarantee this Court would specifically limit the ruling’s retroactive effect if it upholds Trump’s executive order—the risk of broader or retroactive application is higher than with previous Courts.
Most importantly: Project 2025’s immigration agenda—driven by one of its main architects Stephen Miller—seeks to roll back birthright citizenship to the greatest extent possible, both prospectively and, if legally feasible, retroactively. The strategy relies on executive action and the hope that the current Supreme Court will uphold these moves, given its willingness to revisit or overturn longstanding constitutional interpretations. So far, everything is unfolding as Project 2025 has planned. Retroactively revoking birthright citizenship may seem drastic, shocking and believable now, but Americans are like a frog in a pot of water that’s being boiled slowly… Americans will come to accept it as Trump’s second term continues. The risk of retroactive revocation—once unthinkable—becomes more plausible as the legal and political groundwork is laid.
KT Chong
Another observation: overturning Roe vs. Wade was once considered to be impossible to happen, unimaginable, i.e., “it’ll never happen.” Well, it did, and it has been completely normalized. It was not even an election issue in 2024. Democrats are not even fighting it anymore. That’s how fast it has been normalized and accepted. So, don’t have too much hope for Americans are gonna resist or push back against a retroactive revocation of birthright citizenship. Ending Roe v Wade impacted about 50% of the population, and people are now okay with it. Retroactive revocation of birthright citizenship will impact far less people.
KT Chong
I’ve just realized where I got that foreboding. I intuitively connected these two recent developments:
1. Trump’s executive order to restrict birthright citizen.
2. The Department of Justice’s recent announcement to prioritize the denaturalization American citizens:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalization-trump-immigration-enforcement
It is now a PRIORITY for the DOJ to look for reasons to denaturalize US citizens and deport them.
So, I connected the two dots. It seems to me that a logical next step and a likely outcome of combining the two: the Trump administration will move towards stripping the citizenships of people who had been born to illegal immigrants prior to February 19, 2025, if the Supreme Court ultimately allows it.
And given that this Supreme Court was willing to make a ruling that negatively and severely impact half of the country’s population, (i.e., Roe v Wade,) it is quite possible that they will also make a ruling that will negatively and severely impact a US population that is smaller than half.