One Big Beautiful Lie: The Brutal Truth Behind Trump’s Budget

Introduction

I am sick and tired of people getting hurt in America with all the actions Trump takes with tariffs, eliminating funding for aids program, and many other things that I think we ignore, since we are overwhelmed with his insane actions every day. Let me give you some current examples:

Musk and Trump and their constant cuts result in “Losing NOAA’s Natural Disaster Data Will Make Storms More Devastating for the Poor,” Time, by Jeremy Ney, on May 21, 2025, 6:00 AM CT, expands on the article I talked about in my previous podcast 133 (The Washington Post, “Staff cuts forced this forecast office to shut overnight. Then, a tornado Hit, 5-17-25, by Scott Dance). The current article in Time gave us graphs, figures and descriptions of the disastrous effect of these cuts. I think the most horrifying thing is Trump actions are based on his hatred of climate change programs and his desire to destroy all records that provide us great information. Here are two important paragraphs from this article:

• “On May 8, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that its well-known ‘billion-dollar weather and climate disasters’ database ‘will be retired.’ As part of the Trump Administration’s focus on killing programs associated with ‘climate,’ this irreproducible source of information for taxpayers, media, and researchers will soon no longer be ablet to track the devastating cost of natural disasters. But low-income communities—who are at the greatest risk of these disasters—are about to feel the biggest blowback.” They go into detail about the dangers of summer, since the summer “is the deadliest and most costly time for natural disasters such as drought, severe storm, wildfire, flooding, Tropical Cyclone, winter storm, freeze.”
• “The number of natural disasters that cost over a billion dollars has increase more than sixfold since 1980. The chart above uses available NOAA data to show a meteoric rise in catastrophic events, largely due to severe storms like the ones currently hitting the South and Midwest. From 1980 to 2000, 96 disasters caused more than $546.3 billion in damages. In the next 20 years from 2000 to 2020, these figures rose to 244 events and more than $1.95 trillion in damages—marking a 154% increase in the number of billion-dollar disasters and a 257% surge in costs.”

Here is the reality: “Bouncing back from a billion-dollar loss is nearly impossible Jobs wash away, savings disappear, home values plummet, school days tick by without attendance and communities fall further and further behind. In one global study of natural disasters over a 30 year period, researchers found that annual household incomes fell by 21.5% and took almost a decade to recover. After a natural disaster, low-income families in particular take two to three times longer to financially recover compared to their wealthier counterparts.”

Trump has a fixation on specific organization and wants to destroy them. He is making every effort to withdraw funds from Planned Parenthood through his One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1). This is from the newsletter of Planned Parenthood Federation of America pponline@ppfa.org, Wednesday, May 28, 2025, 4:50 PM. Due to the Republican controlled U.S House of Representatives “last week, by a razor-thin majority, they voted to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood,” which is included in H.R. 1 bill.  I am well aware that ‘defunding Planned Parenthood is dangerous and reckless. The impact it will have on people in this country is catastrophic. Most people I talk with that have health care plans do not know the tremendous value that Planned Parenthood has for many Americans. Here are some facts: “ 1 in 3 Planned Parenthood Health Centers could close. Planned Parenthood health centers are vital to America’s health care-system, with over 2 million patients relying on services for high-quality, affordable, trusted heath care every year. Forcing nearly 200 health centers to close their doors would cause massive harm. Entire regions will suffer. More than 1.1 million patients could lose access to care. No other provider could immediately step in and fill that gap. Many patients will lose access to birth control, wellness exams, STL testing, abortion, cancer screenings, and more. More than 90% of health centers at risk of closure are in states where abortion is still legal.”

Realize that the house passed this bill, but it’s not law yet. The House of course has already passed Trump bill that will cut millions out of Medicaid with a real focus on punishing the low-income, disabled and many other Americans that cannot afford another health care plan. It is yours and my responsibility to write our senators and say stop this insanity and do not approve Trump’s budget bill or the one that would “defund” Planned Parenthood. We also need to start paying attention to any elections that are coming up to replace someone in the House or Senate. We need to take back the House and Senate so we will have a Congress that will stand up to the American people against Trump’s actions that punish so many Americans. I will talk more about the Trump budget bill in a moment since you need to know some of the details about it.

I will later provide a podcast on the disturbing reality that Trump hates science that he keeps taking actions to stop support of our scientist who keep us healthy and are the ones that provided us vaccines during COVID. We see how many people died before we got Trump out of office and Biden came in to help support science to fight the disease and encouraged the work with world health organizations. Kennedy is a ridiculous person to be head HHS. He has no medical training or a degree, and is a conspiracy theorist rather than having the knowledge and experience with scientific studies and scientific data. His resources he talks about are not scientifically based and any study he produces will support his ridiculous view of vaccines and other theories he has formulated. Thank goodness the CDC has taken a stand and will provide the new variant vaccine to fight the newest strain of COVID. It is tragic that Trump and Kennedy supported the withdrawing of funds from a study by Moderna to develop vaccines to combat bird flu. Its very apparent that birds and people do not matter to them.

Trump’s Budget Bill Passed by the House

I am going to start the discussion of this bill with Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher, representing Texas’ Seventh Congressional District newsletter replizziefletcherTX07@mail.house.gov on Friday, May 23, 2025, 11:14 PM called the “Washington Week Wrap Up.”

”Following several weeks of working on the House Republicans’ Fiscal Year 2026 budget reconciliation bill, which House Republicans called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1), the House Budget Committee met late Sunday evening and passed the bill out of committee, allowing the bill to move forward for consideration in the full House.  The bill was more than 1,000 pages. The last stop before heading to the House floor for consideration by the full chamber, is the Rules Committee.

The House Rules Committee met at 1 a.m. on Wednesday to begin consideration of more than 500 proposed amendments to the bill from House Democrats. Debate and consideration of the amendments continued all through the day Wednesday while various factions within the House Republican Conference argued behind closed doors (not in the Rules Committee) for changes to the bill. Late Wednesday evening, around 9:00 p.m., House Republicans substituted the bill with a “manager’s amendment” with 42 pages of changes. The Rules Committee then ended the markup passing the amended bill (without any of the Democratic amendments). The full House convened around 11 p.m. on Wednesday for a series of procedural votes and further debate on the bill.

The House debated the bill all night, and I was there for debate and procedural votes throughout the night. We cast our final votes on the bill around 7:00 a.m. The bill passed by a vote of 215 (yes) – 214 (no) -1 (present). Representative Fletcher says, ‘I voted no.’  As I discuss in more detail below, the bottom line is this: This bill takes from the poor to give tax cuts to the rich. And in the process, it increases our national debt and deficit spending, decreases essential services, and betrays our values.

You may have seen a lot of arguments about what the bill does and doesn’t do. The descriptions are so different, and the bill is so complicated, that it is confusing. So, I am sharing here the information that the independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) prepared when asked to estimate the costs for different provisions. These analyses, however, were conducted before Republicans added the manager’s amendment to the bill (and experts expect the numbers to increase after that amendment). I should emphasize that the CBO takes many steps to ensure that its work is objective and impartial.

CBO found that, if enacted, H.R. 1 would:

• Increase deficit spending by $3.8 trillion for the period from 2026-2034.
• Take health care away from nearly 14 million Americans, including children, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities by cutting more than $700 billion from Medicaid and as much as $300 billion from the Health Insurance Marketplace (Affordable Care Act [aca] exchange) for a total of nearly $1 trillion.In TX-07 it is estimated that 5,113 people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage and 38,400 people are at risk of losing their ACA health care coverage; and
• Make the largest cut to food assistance in history, cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps, by more than 25 percent and placing 11 million people, including more than 4 million children and 2 million seniors and adults with disabilities, at risk of going hungry.

In addition to the devastating cuts to health care programs in this bill, CBO has warned that this bill could lead to nearly $500 billion in cuts to the Medicare program. And that is because the bill will raise deficits so significantly it would trigger mandatory spending cuts, also known as “sequestration,” under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 (PAYGO). The idea behind PAYGO is somewhat simple–if Congress adds to the deficit without offsetting it with cuts to other programs, across-the-board cuts to certain mandatory federal spending are implemented. Triggering PAYGO in this case would mean an automatic 4% reduction to most Medicare spending, which will impact payments to doctors, hospitals, and prescription drug plans. To view a longer analysis of the bill from CBO, click here.

With more than 1,000 pages, there are so many provisions in this bill that I can’t cover them all here. The New York Times has a helpful, easy to read chart of the CBO’s assessment of almost all of the provisions.  But I will highlight here a few other things. If enacted, the bill will:

• Extend the tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. These provisions cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Estimates show that, in 2027, the average benefit for the top 0.1% will be $255,000 per year (or $700 a day), while the average benefit for people making less than $50,000 is $265 (or less than $1 a day).
• Authorize a $4 trillion increase to the debt limit to pay for these tax cuts.
• Implement monthly reporting requirements for people on Medicaid, creating unnecessary red tape that studies have shown will result in eligible people losing health coverage. These requirements were to go into effect in 2029, but with the manager’s amendment, they will now begin in December 2026.
• Increase deficit spending by $300 million by enacting a provision prohibiting federal funding for any Planned Parenthood clinic from receiving federal funding for any services at all (like birth control, cancer screenings, and annual well-woman exams).
• Block federal payments for Health Insurance Marketplace (ACA exchange) insurance plans that cover abortion care—essentially, a marketplace-wide ban on abortion coverage impacting every state.
• Reduce or eliminate Pell Grants for about two thirds of current Pell Grant recipients, increasing higher education costs for more than 4 million students from low-income and middle-class families.
• Tax certain university endowments up to 21 percent on their endowment returns; in our district increased taxes will affect Rice University and neighboring Baylor College of Medicine.
• Eliminate or substantially limit several tax credits designed to encourage investment and production of clean energy.

There are also several provisions that are not clearly tied to spending—which should be an issue in the Senate. Among other things, the bill prohibits the enforcement of any laws that states have enacted regulating artificial intelligence for a period of 10 years. It also undermines the rule of law and the federal courts with a provision that strips funding from courts and says courts cannot enforce contempt orders for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order. This should alarm everyone. There is no legitimate basis for such a provision. (Trump wants to eliminate his administration of its contempt of court charges since he has no respect for the rule of law.)

At a time when families across our community and our country are struggling with rising costs, this budget bill makes devastating cuts to programs that they rely on every day while increasing deficit spending and the national debt. It is going to make life harder, not better. It is going to make things more expensive, not less. The American people deserve better than what is in this bill—and we can do better.

The fight over this budget bill, H.R. 1, is far from over. The bill now moves to the Senate, and we expect Senators to make lots of changes. Then, the House will need to pass this amended version, and then the President has to sign it into law. Speaker Johnson said he intends to have the President sign this bill into law by the Fourth of July. (There are significant objections in the Senate to this bill so it will take a lot longer than Johnson wants.)  And we will continue to fight this bill, as House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on behalf of our caucus during the debate.”

Cracks in the GOP: Republican Senators Push Back on Trump’s Budget

What is most important is there are Republicans that are split over the bill. The Washington Post has an article written by Theodoric Meyer entitled “7 ways Republicans are split over Trump’s ‘Big bill’” which was published on May 27, 2025, at 5:00 AM EDT. Here are some statements from the article that describe 7 ways Republican senators are pressing to change the bill:

Medicaid

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. Lisa Mukowski (R-Alaska and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) oppose aspects of the bill related to Medicaid. Collins does not want to kick Medicaid recipients who are unable to work off the program as well as the bill’s effect on rural hospitals. Murkowski is worried her state will not be able to place new work requirements since its Medicaid payment system is outdated. Haley is clear he would oppose the bill due to the “new Medicaid co-pays, which he dubbed a ‘sick tax.”

Making tax breaks permanent

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who is chairperson of the Finance Committee, said his top priority is making permanent several business tax breaks that the House bill would allow to expire after a few years.

“We believe that permanence is the way to create economy certainty, and thereby attract and incentivize capital investment in this country that creates those good-paying jobs and gets our economy growing and generates more government revenue,” Thune told reporters last week.

State and local tax deduction

“A handful of House Republicans from high-tax states refused to vote for the bill unless it allowed their constituents to deduct more in state and local taxes on their federal returns.” The truth is Senate Republicans don’t care about beefing up the state and local tax deductions.

‘I don’t know why we’d give a huge tax cut to rich people who live in California, New Jersey and New York, Hawley said.

Clean energy tax breaks

The House bill would scrap tax credits for wind, solar and geothermal energy that Democrats passed in 2022 unless companies start construction within 60 days of the bill becoming law. Murkowski and Sens. John Curtis (R-Utah), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) and Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) warned in a letter to Thune last month that they had concerns. Tillis suggested that he would push for a more gradual phaseout to avoid blinding businesses.

Deeper spending cuts

While some Republican senators are worried about the spending cuts in the House bill, Republicans such as Sens. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Roger Marshall (Kansas) and Ted Cruz (Texas) are pushing for more.

“In the House, President Trump can threaten a primary,” Johnson — who’s not up for reelection until 2028 — told reporters. “Those guys want to keep their seats. I understand the pressure. You can’t pressure me that way.” There are three other Republican senators that are committed to standing with Ron Johnson — enough to block the bill from passing. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) is one of them.

Byrd rule

Republican Senate staffers have been poring over the House bill to determine which parts might violate the Byrd rule. The rule, named for the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia), limits what can be included in Senate bills under reconciliation, the byzantine process that Republicans are using to avoid a Democratic filibuster. Senate Republicans will strip out provisions that might violate the Byrd rule — and Democrats can challenge anything they think runs afoul of it.

The House bill includes a moratorium on state regulations on artificial intelligence and a ban on courts enforcing contempt citations for ignoring injunctions or temporary restraining orders, which will need to be cut out of the bill. G. William Hoagland, a former Senate Republican budget aide, and Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Democratic budget aide, both said they believed those provisions violated the rule.

Childcare and other tax ideas

The House bill would increase the child tax credit temporarily to $2,500 — but Hawley is pressing to make it more generous. “I’d like it to be double that, but anything higher,” he said. Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Alabama) is pressing Republicans to expand two childcare tax breaks. Republican senators have made requests for other tax policy changes, including scrapping the estate tax, expanding “opportunity zones” championed by Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) and bolstering the low-income housing tax credit.

What a Decent Budget Looks Like: Paul Krugman’s Alternative to Cruelty

Paul Krugman from the NY Times is available on Substack. He has an article from Friday, May 23, 2025, 5:31 AM entitled “What a Decent Budget Would Look Like. Imaging a Congress that was neither cruel nor irresponsible.” He begins this article how the Republicans passed it in the dead of night since the debate began at 1 AM. Unfortunately, daylight didn’t stop the process.

“The House has now passed what must surely be the worst piece of legislation in modern U.S. history. Millions of Americans are about to see crucial government support snatched away. A significant number will die prematurely due to lack of adequate medical care or nutrition. Yet all this suffering won’t come close to offsetting the giant hole in the budget created by huge tax cuts for the rich. Long-term interest rates have already soared as America loses the last vestiges of its former reputation for fiscal responsibility. In the days to come we’ll see detailed analyses of just how much damage this Budget of Abominations will do.

What strikes me about where we are now, however, is that we could vastly improve our fiscal position with a series of easy choices — actions that would mainly spare the middle class and only hurt people most Americans probably believe deserve to feel a bit of pain. So here are four things we could and should be doing.

First, get Americans — mainly wealthy Americans — to pay the taxes they owe. The net tax gap — taxes Americans are legally obliged to pay but don’t — is simply huge, on the order of $600 billion a year. Republicans are, of course, doing the opposite: They’re starving the IRS of resources and trying to make tax evasion great again. Why, it’s almost as if cheaters and grifters are their sort of people.

Second, crack down on Medicare Advantage overpayments. Currently, much of Medicare is run through insurance companies whose payments from the government are based on the health status of their clients. Unfortunately, insurers game the system, finding ways to make their clients look less healthy than they really are, and thereby get overpaid. Medicare is at risk of overpaying [Medicare Advantage] plans between $1.3 trillion and $2 trillion over the next decade.

It’s astonishing that these overpayments never became a target of Elon Musk’s DOGE — or it would be astonishing if you believed anything Musk has said about DOGE’s real aims.

Third, go after corporate tax avoidance. Much of this involves multinational firms using strategies that are shady and dishonest but legal to make profits actually earned in the United States disappear and reappear in low-tax nations like Ireland. In 2017 Gabriel Zucman estimated that such maneuvers were costing the U.S. Treasury around $70 billion annually. The number is probably bigger now…

Finally, we should just get rid of Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut. That tax cut wasn’t a response to any economic needs, and there’s not a shred of evidence that it did the economy any good. All it did was transfer a lot of money to corporations and the wealthy. Let’s end those giveaways. Conclusion: We Must Fight This Cruelty with Courage and Truth What we’re witnessing is not governance — it’s calculated harm. Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” is a weapon aimed at the heart of American families. It strips away health care, starves children, punishes the poor, and protects only the ultra-wealthy and politically powerful. This isn’t just a budget. It’s a moral disgrace. We must speak out. We must act. Write your Senators. Flood their phones. Show up at every town hall. Demand that this bill be gutted in the Senate — or buried. Let them know that we see through the lies and the midnight votes. We will not let them destroy the safety net, silence science, and shame the very idea of justice. There’s still time to stop this. But only if we — you, me, and all of us — refuse to be silent. America is worth the fight.

Podcast 135 References: