Trump’s One Big Beautiful Betrayal
On July 4, President Trump signed the law he calls the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which partly finances tax breaks for the richest of the rich by slashing health care, nutrition assistance, and clean energy for everyone else.
The Administration doesn’t want you to know what’s in this bill; that’s why they jammed it through Congress so fast that many Republicans didn’t even get the chance to read it.
Here are the facts, as Senator Van Hollen recently explained on the Senate Floor:
- To help pay for over a trillion dollars of tax giveaways for people making over $500,000 a year, this bill cuts over a trillion dollars from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
- The health care cuts are the biggest harm of the bill, but they’re far from the only ones. Repeatedly, when Trump and the Republicans had the chance to choose between greedy, big-money interests and working people, they chose greed.
- This bill cuts $218 billion from SNAP, which will raise grocery costs for more than 40 million people and take away food assistance entirely from about 3 million Americans. Nearly 684,000 Marylanders rely on SNAP to put food on the table.
- Their bill gives a giant tax giveaway to Big Oil and sabotages clean energy; their plan risks scuttling countless new solar and wind projects, driving up energy bills further for American families instead of lowering costs. These spikes may cause Maryland families to pay an estimated extra $260 a year in energy costs by 2030.
And even after shaking down working families to pay for their tax cuts for the rich, the Republican billionaire giveaway is so big that it STILL adds a whopping $4 trillion to our national debt over the next ten years.?
- By creating upward pressure on interest rates, their bill will likely make borrowing more expensive for anyone taking out a home mortgage, getting a car loan, or opening a small business.??And, adding insult to injury, the Republicans are using an accounting gimmick so they can lie to the American people and pretend that their debt explosion doesn’t exist.?Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director, Russell Vought, claimed with a straight face that their bill decreases the debt. That’s ridiculous.
Click here to watch Senator Van Hollen exposing the Republicans’ accounting fraud on the Senate Floor. Even a Republican Congressman, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, says, “this is fairy dust, and they are full of crap.”?Senator Van Hollen and Senate Democrats repeatedly took on Republicans to fight back against this bill and successfully removed a few of its worst provisions, including a sweetheart provision for Big Tech that would have banned state governments from regulating artificial intelligence and a provision that would have made it even more difficult for judges to stop the Trump administration from breaking the law.
But, at the end of the day, not enough Republicans had the guts to stand up to Donald Trump. Republicans jammed the bill through Congress. As different parts of the legislation come into effect, Americans will suffer the consequences.
We need tax relief for ordinary people, not the ultra-rich. This bill gives the lion’s share of help to the people who need it least. Republicans claim that their bill helps working families with “no tax on tips,” an idea which Senator Van Hollen supports, but “no tax on tips” will expire after only four years—meanwhile, the giveaways for the rich are permanent.
Going forward, Senator Van Hollen will work to repeal the Big Beautiful Bill and replace it with something better: a tax relief plan that will provide broad, lasting tax relief for working and middle-income Americans instead of billionaires and Fortune 500 companies.
Senator Van Hollen will fight to protect Americans from this betrayal. If you are worried about how the Republicans’ bill will affect your family, you can share your story here.