On July 1, under pressure from the White House, the US Senate narrowly passed the Trump-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, dubbed by some as the “Reverse Robin Hood Act” for effectively transferring wealth from social programs and the public sector to the rich with tax cuts. The bill is now headed back to the House of Representatives to review the Senate version of the bill. The Republican Party and the White House are pushing to have the bill on President Donald Trump’s desk by July 4 – Independence Day in the US.
According to analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) of data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Senate version of the bill would add over USD 3.9 trillion to the national debt, borrowing one trillion dollars more than the version of the bill that passed in the House of Representatives. According to the CRFB’s analysis, the costs of the Senate bill includes USD 4.45 trillion of net tax cuts.
A core component of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is an extension and expansion of Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) from his first term as president, a piece of legislation which provided the largest tax cuts to the top 0.1% of earners. Extending these tax cuts are the primary driver of the high cost of the bill, by reducing the amount of tax revenue that the US government is able to collect from the nation’s wealthiest.
Analysis by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) suggests that the bill’s extension of the TCJA would include an enormous tax cut for the richest 1% – calling it a “total $114 billion benefit to the wealthiest people in the country in 2026 alone.” At the same time, a Yale Budget Lab analysis suggests that the Senate bill’s tax changes combined with its proposed cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits would result in a 2.9% decrease in income for the bottom quintile of income earners, and an increase of 1.9% for the top 1% of income earners.
The effects of the bill on some of the largest social programs in the US would be devastating, according to expert analysis. According to CBO analysis from June 27, the Senate bill’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act would cause 17 million people to lose their public insurance benefits. According to the Democratic members of the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress, up to 29 million could lose health care coverage due to an amendment in the Senate bill that would end Medicaid Expansion in nine states that have “trigger laws” to end this program if federal funding drops.
The bill would also allocate billions to Trump’s mass deportation efforts, including USD 45 billion to expand immigrant detention centers, USD 14 billion for deportations, and billions more to hire 10,000 new ICE agents by 2029.
“This sham of a bill says our nation’s highest priority is to extract cash from the bottom 99% and transfer it to the top 1% — and to incarcerate and deport as many as possible along the way,” wrote the Debt Collective in a post on X, an organization which participated in a civil disobedience action in the Russell Senate Office building in protest of Medicaid cuts within the bill.
