SHREVEPORT, La. – The Republican Party’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is taking effect in sharply different ways across U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s home district. At one steakhouse, servers are benefiting from a new tax break on tips. At a community center, residents are lining up for free hot meals as cuts to SNAP benefits begin to take hold.
In this hard-edged corner of northwest Louisiana, where the oil-rich economy has long swung between boom and bust, many voters remain unsure what the sweeping legislation means for them as they head toward the November election.
This is firmly Donald Trump country. Johnson, who first won office during the 2016 wave that returned Trump to the presidency, faces no apparent threat as he campaigns for a sixth term in Congress.
Yet conversations at a candidate forum, a data center open house and outside a grocery store reveal the uneasy mood surrounding the party in power. Voters are focused on soaring gas and grocery prices, the war in Iran and a persistent sense that the economy has entered an unfamiliar and uncomfortable era.
“I remember when Trump said, ‘This Christmas, you’ll have one doll’ — I didn’t get it,” said Katherine Ferguson, a Shreveport attorney and mother of a teenager, after a recent downtown community meeting. “Now I get it.”
Voters are trying to make sense of the numbers
Republicans are promoting the major legislation as a centerpiece of their campaign. Johnson has described it as the largest tax cut in American history, and he shepherded the package through Congress last summer despite the House GOP’s razor-thin majority.
“This is real money for real people,” Johnson said in Washington as lawmakers prepared to return home for the campaign season.
Louisiana residents received an estimated average tax deduction of $2,900 this year, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. Much of that benefit came from extending tax rates and brackets that otherwise would have expired. The average increase in actual tax refunds nationwide, however, was far smaller — roughly $350.
The legislation includes roughly $4 trillion in tax breaks, among them new deductions for tips and overtime pay, as well as expanded benefits for many seniors and families with children. At the same time, it cuts more than $1 trillion from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Medicaid through administrative changes and additional work requirements expected to reduce enrollment.
The bill is projected to accelerate economic growth, but it is also expected to add more than $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade.
Johnson says Republicans are “cutting wasteful government spending” while “enacting the policies to bring about economic growth.”
For many voters, though, the figures are difficult to reconcile — particularly as gasoline approaches $4 a gallon and Louisiana diesel prices have nearly doubled from a year ago, rising above $6.
“I don’t understand the high prices,” said Dodie Horton, a state representative from Johnson’s district who supports both Trump and the speaker but struggles to explain the sudden increases.
“I know it’s not the president,” she said. “My people want to know why. I don’t have an answer.”
Tax breaks meet the need for food assistance
Madison McDonald was working the bar at Silver Star Smokehouse & Tavern when she said the new deduction for tipped income helped her save about $3,000 in combined state and federal taxes this year.
The restaurant draws many oil and gas workers. McDonald said she once received an $1,100 tip from a busy table — a substantial addition to her $2.13 hourly wage, the federal minimum for tipped workers.
“It definitely helps,” she said. “People are generous.”
In neighboring Bossier Parish, where Johnson lives, Sheriff Julian C. Whittington asked his staff to calculate the impact of the overtime deduction. They found that more than 180 deputies had lowered their taxable income by an average of $1,100.
“That’s good for them, and it’s good for the department,” he said. “Our folks are getting more money, and it doesn’t cost us any more.”
Yet across the river that divides the city, with its riverfront casinos on one side and aging civic infrastructure on the other, the food aid cuts are also taking shape.
Al Moore keeps the door locked as the line begins to form hours before the daily hot lunch is served at the nonprofit Christian Service, where he is executive director.
Once the noon hour strikes, he begins to let people file in, about 10 or so at a time, as they take their seats.
Calvin Ray Marshall, 59, said he was receiving about $294 per month in SNAP benefits until May, when he said he was unable to meet the new 80-hours-a-month work requirements, which now apply to those through age 64 who are able-bodied and do not have young children.
“That’s why I’m here,” he said, finishing up a plate of chicken, rice and gravy, with mixed vegetables.
He said he used to stock shelves at a mini-market and recently sought work at a new gas station. Sometimes he picks up odd jobs, cutting a yard, and he lives out of a tire repair shop where he used to help out, but that closed as business dried up during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.
“For some reason, the government has always been trying to cut people off food stamps because they think people are abusing it,” said Marshall. “It seems like they think jobs are just falling out of the sky.”
Johnson’s district now encompasses this area, part of a majority-Black congressional district that was eliminated after the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark voting rights case this summer.
After lunch, Kenny “KeKe” Heads pulls out a resume listing past work experience — sandwich artist, janitor, housekeeper at a local hotel — on a tidy one-sheet document. For now, Heads receives about $100 a month in SNAP benefits but is worried that the three-month window available to jobseekers will lapse before he finds work.
“It’s rough,” Heads said, hopeful one day of opening a beauty salon and boutique. “Getting a chance is like one in a million.”
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Louisiana is behind only Arizona and on par with Nevada in the decline in SNAP recipients during the year since the bill passed, a 21% reduction. The Medicaid work requirements are set to begin in most states in January.
Other voices looking for alternatives
One of Johnson’s Democratic opponents, Conrad Cable, an English major turned vegetable farmer, said he decided to run for Congress because “enough is enough.”
“If you talk to people at the gas pumps — people are pissed,” he said.
He said he hears from voters about the war, affordability, the SNAP cuts — “there was never any conversation about cutting people’s food benefits,” he said.
Outside a Shreveport grocery store, Norman Summers, 70, a Marine and retired construction worker, supported Trump but is warily watching the war in Iran and the president’s rising wealth.
“Trump’s the one who’s bothering me,” he said.
As the afternoon sun glared, attorney Scott Bowie stopped his cart of bottled waters to assess the political mood.
A believer in small government, he wishes the big Republican bill had done more to reduce the federal deficit.
When he looks to Democrats, “They don’t seem to want what I want,” he said. “But I’m not saying I’m happy with the Republicans either.”
