() President Trump’s “big, beautiful budget bill” faces three major tests on Capitol Hill as a number of House committees will try to iron out the details of a package that includes massive tax cuts and sweeping changes to programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
Should it become law, every American would be fundamentally affected. The bill would alter how you do your taxes and what you pay, what you don’t pay and how the government interacts with the military.
On Tuesday, specifics of this bill are to be written and edited in real time in three House committees: the Energy and Commerce Committee, which deals with Medicaid; the Ways and Means Committee, which is the tax committee; and the Agriculture Committee, which is going to be working on specifics relating to food assistance programs.
The bill would involve $4.5 to $5 trillion in tax cuts, $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years and increased spending on border security and national defense.
Many of the proposed changes were discussed by President Trump while on the campaign trail: no taxes on tips or overtime, extensions of the 2017 tax bill that President Trump put forward and increases in the Child Tax Credit.
While tax cuts are very popular, how they are paid for is yet to be finalized. It is estimated that around $4 trillion in government revenue will be lost when you cut those taxes. How it is paid for is where the disagreements start to come in and where it could get tricky for House Republicans.
More than $880 billion in cuts for energy and commerce are a possibility, most of which may have to come in the form of Medicaid cuts. There could also be $290 billion in food assistance cuts, allowing for changes to how the SNAP program, or food assistance, is done in the United States.
Several climate initiatives that the Biden administration put in place, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, are proposed to be cut by the Trump administration.
Discussions could go through the night and even carry into tomorrow.
Various Democrats have critiqued the bill, suggesting the cuts will do serious damage.
“The overwhelming majority of the benefits will go to the wealthiest 1% in the United States of America, and they want to pay for it by sticking us with additional debt, trillions of dollars of additional debt, and by enacting the largest health care cut in American history, along with the largest cut to food assistance in American history,” Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries said Tuesday.
“Literally taking food out of the mouths of children, veterans and seniors in this country; it’s shameful,” he added.
Republican leaders have contradicted Jeffries, contending they aren’t cutting Medicaid or SNAP benefits and instead are reforming them. Several Republicans argue that, due to the $36 trillion national deficit, it is urgent that spending be cut significantly.
