Reverse Robin Hood

Understanding what the Big Ugly Bill slashes, hands to the rich, and undoes for all of us

Images courtesy of CNN

Last week, the Senate Parliamentarian was able to knock out some of the more egregious provisions that had been tacked on to the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Despite these victories, the underlying objective of the bill remains intact: to transfer nearly a trillion dollars from the poor to the wealthy in a move Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) aptly dubbed “Robinhood in reverse”—that is, “stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich, this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top….”

Last night the Senate narrowly voted 51-49 to advance the legislation through to a vote. Democratic senators sought to delay a vote on the bill by insisting that its entire text be read into the record, but that only put things off for a brief time.

The Senate will soon begin its “vote-a-rama” session to consider amendments to the bill and to put Republicans on record for some of the more unpopular aspects of it. Per his office’s communications, for example, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will kick things off by forcing Republicans to vote “no” on an amendment that would mandate “no increase in costs for working families and small business to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.”

But is there a chance the bill could still go down in defeat? It doesn’t seem very likely. While the GOP is walking a thin line with its majority, it’s playing with the numbers and the rules to push it to the finish line. And senators are being bribed and threatened, with varying degrees of success, to get on board. It’s always been a bad bet to assume there will be enough GOP senators with spines or principles to stop a bill or a nomination, even when they know it will be disastrous.

Assuming the bill squeaks through, what will that mean for those impacted by it, and for the GOP’s prospects in the midterms in 2026, given the bill’s unpopularity?

What the bill slashes

Now that the foam from the “Byrd Bath” has more or less died down, the bill—once laden with all manner of improper and frankly distracting provisions that had little or even nothing to do with the budget—is now stripped down and more easily understandable.

Here’s what to know about the coming cuts if it passes:

Health care. The Senate version of the bill actually makes deeper cuts to Medicaid than the House version did. That’s because in addition to imposing work requirement reporting that many poorer recipients will not be able to satisfy, it puts pressure on “provider taxes” that many states currently use to beef up Medicaid reimbursements from the federal government.

I wrote a piece on the provider tax question in The Big Picture. Long story short, many of the poorer states charge medical providers, such as nursing homes and rural hospitals, higher taxes which they then reimburse so they can seek greater Medicaid assistance from Washington, D.C. Without that extra money from the feds, these states will experience major shortfalls in Medicaid funding, meaning poorer recipients will receive less care. The bill will also raise costs for those on Obamacare, making this a double whammy on the poorest Americans.

The bottom line? Should the bill pass, there will be some $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid, up some $50 billion from the House version of the bill. According to the Associated Press, citing the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO),

The analysis also found that 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law, an increase over the scoring for the House-passed version of the bill, which predicts 10.9 million more people would be without health coverage.

Food assistance. The bill increases work requirements and shifts food assistance costs to the states, which often don’t have the funds to support such programs. This means fewer people will qualify for benefits such as SNAP—especially those working seasonally, part-time, or recovering from job loss.

As Gov. Josh Shapiro warned, citing the CBO study,

The bill Donald Trump and Republicans in DC are trying to ram through Congress right now… [t]akes food assistance away from more than 7 million people—2 million children—including 140,000 Pennsylvanians. These people are working and just need a bit of extra help to feed their families. This is cruel to them and to our farmers who do the noble work of growing crops to feed their neighbors.

Green energy. The bill accelerates rollbacks of green energy tax credits—things like getting rebates on rooftop solar power installations. As Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) noted,

It also imposes a new tax penalty on clean energy projects that don’t meet supply chain requirements that are virtually impossible under current market conditions.

And Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) warned,

Your electric bill is about to be higher.

Republicans are pushing a bill that kills clean energy projects—driving up the cost to build wind & solar, and jacking up utility prices nationwide.

You’ll pay more and fossil fuel CEOs will profit.

Elon Musk even came out against the bill for this reason, risking another spat with Trump by posting,

The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!

Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.

Musk should have realized this danger long before backing the GOP with hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy

The bill uses those Medicaid “savings” to pay for an extension of the Trump Tax Cuts of 2017, which blew a hole in the deficit back then and has been adding to our national debt ever since.

A simple chart put out by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) demonstrates this perfectly and simply, putting side-by-side the cuts in Medicaid to the tax breaks for corporations:

But weren’t the tax cuts of 2017 of benefit to everyone? Yes, technically, but the breaks went primarily to the wealthy. In fact, as Brendan Duke of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, the “cost of extending the tax cuts is far smaller if you just do it for families making under $400k. Tax cuts for the rich are why we’re here.” Here is a visual of that:

In other words, if we extended the tax cuts only for families making under $400,000, the cost of that extension would be $1.6 trillion. Including the super rich balloons the cost by nearly $3 trillion dollars to a whopping $4.5 trillion.

The rich are going to make out like bandits.

The impact of the bill on different income classes is also readily apparent when put in chart form, once you take into account cuts to social services and health care. As Prof. Robert Reich noted, citing the CBO’s own numbers,

Under Trump's Big Ugly Bill, America's poorest families lose about $1600 per year.

The richest households gain about $12,000 per year.

$3.9 trillion more in national debt, and an end-run around the Parliamentarian

An upfront warning: this section contains budgetary line item math and arcane parliamentary procedure disputes! I’ll try to make it as accessible as possible, but it will require a bit of additional attention from readers!

You can see exactly where the bill blows up the national debt in the line items calculated by the CBO. Below is a chart created by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) using the CBO’s own numbers. Look for the line for “Finance Committee”—where taxation happens—and you’ll see a huge negative number in red. That’s $3.466 trillion, plus $690 billion in interest (second line from the bottom) if extended, piling a huge new $3.94 trillion onto our national debt:

On top of blowing up the debt, the way Republicans are ramming this bill through breaks the rules around reconciliation. According to the CRFB, the Senate bill violates the House Budget instructions, which “require either $2 trillion of gross savings or dollar-for-dollar reductions in tax cuts.” Those instructions are binding on the Senate.

Republicans are getting around this by arguing that the mere extension of the tax cuts should not count as new spending—something Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is calling the “current policy” accounting method, as distinguished from the “current law” baseline Congress has always used until now.

This sounds very wonky, but at heart, it is a scam. To understand why requires a bit of processing, but NBC News did a good job of laying it out in February:

Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in 2017, would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the official nonpartisan scorekeeper.

That’s under the “current law” metric that has traditionally been used, as the tax cuts are slated to expire at the end of this year. But Senate Republicans want to use a different scoring method called the “current policy” baseline, which would assume that extending tax cuts costs $0 because they’re already law.

The chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, endorsed the “current policy” approach, telling reporters that it “recognizes that extending current law does not change the tax policy, does not reduce tax revenue.”

Okay, some plain talk here. The Republican “plan” is like finally finishing your car payments but then trading in that old car for a new one with the same payments going forward… and pretending it doesn’t cost you any money! But all the while, you could have kept the car you just paid off and saved on those new monthly payments.

NBC News further noted,

Congressional GOP aides say the idea could have a huge impact on what they’re able to pass in the budget bill. If they use the current accounting process, they have no chance of making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, because that would require paying for it. And this process would also be key to unlocking Trump’s other tax proposals, like slashing taxes on tips and overtime pay.

It’s a tacit admission that Republican leaders have no expectation of paying for the cost of their tax agenda.

“Assuming this is allowed under budget rules, this would represent a massive budget gimmick that would justify and allow trillions of dollars of new borrowing,” warned the nonpartisan [CRFB]….

The CBO recently agreed that, under the budget baseline, the GOP bill breaks the rules both by exceeding their budget resolution’s instructions by trillions of dollars and by adding to the deficit beyond the maximum 10-year window. Here were its answers to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR):

The Senate Parliamentarian could axe this trick entirely, so what’s a desperate GOP to do? Go around her by not even seeking her sign-off on the accounting gimmick! According to a Senate Budget GOP spokesperson, addressing whether the Parliamentarian should rule on using current policy baseline,

“There is no need to have a parliamentarian meeting with respect to the current policy baseline because Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act gives Senator Graham—as Chairman of the Budget Committee—the authority to set the baseline.

There is nothing to debate and we consider this matter settled.”

Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden say that would be akin to blowing up the Senate filibuster. “This is the nuclear option,” he told NBC News in February, saying it would cut both ways when the body flips.

The GOP doesn’t care. If you’re counting, that’s twice now that the GOP Senate has either overruled the parliamentarian (on California’s electric vehicle mandate) or avoided a ruling by the parliamentarian (by claiming she has no authority over what accounting baseline the Chair of the Budget Committee sets).

The Senate under Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is apparently willing to torch long established precedent and skip past the Parliamentarian on a crucial rules determination, all so it can jam through tax cuts for the rich that adds trillions in new debt. This move makes a mockery of the Byrd Rule, its policing by the Parliamentarian, and any idea that Republicans are fiscally responsible and deficit conscious.

Wimping out by GOP fence sitters

In the end, only two Republican senators—Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—voted against advancing the bill. Paul was concerned about the impact on our deficit and national debt, while Tillis believed it betrayed a promise Trump made not to slash Medicaid.

Opponents of the bill were disappointed to see Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) put aside their concerns and allow the bill to move forward. The latter in particular drew heavy criticism after it appeared her vote was bought by concessions to Alaskans. Senate leadership specifically revised the bill to insulate her state’s residents from some of its worst effects. Per reporting by the New York Times,

A new provision allowing “individuals in a noncontiguous state” to be exempt from enforcing new work requirements imposed on SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, appeared aimed at mollifying [Murkowski]. Her state would be hit with billions of dollars in nutrition assistance costs as a result of the legislation, and she had cited the provision as one of her chief concerns. The bill also includes new health provisions designed to benefit Alaska, as well as new tax benefits for fishermen in the state’s waters.

After these carve outs and handouts bought Murkowski’s vote, in an ironic twist of justice, the Parliamentarian ruled them outside of what is allowed by the rules. In short, Murkowski got nothing for her state, while the GOP got her vote to move the bill forward. But will it cause her to change her vote to a no? That’s possible, but still unlikely.

Some concluding thoughts

The GOP budget is likely going to pass absent some about-face by detractors in the GOP. It’s hard to see senators like Ron Johnson (R-WI) or Josh Hawley (R-MO) stand in the way, despite their criticisms of the bill. They don’t have the spine for it.

Sen. Thom Tillis’s opposition to advancing the bill earned him a threat from Trump of a primary challenge. Tillis responded by announcing he would not seek reelection, and then went to the floor to torch the bill as a broken promise on Medicaid that will hurt poor constituents a few years down the road.

Tillis’s path to opposition to the bill underscores how afraid most of the GOP remains of Trump and his MAGA base. Senators and Representatives only seem to find the courage to oppose him when they’re not running for another term.

The bill remains extremely unpopular, but the GOP is sneaky. The big cuts to Medicaid, for example, won’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterms. They’re no doubt hoping that voters will blame the next Congress—which might be a Democratic controlled one—for all the pain the cuts will inflict, while giving the current Congress a pass.

But that’s not going to spare the GOP presidential candidate or the party in general in 2028, and they know it. The GOP is likely willing to pass such a hugely unpopular bill because 1) they are afraid to not vote for it, and 2) they know this may be the last chance they get to grab so much money for their donors. They know that the midterms could be a wipeout, so they are going full-out now.

One final note: on the question of the midterms, I am not someone who leads with, “But there won’t be elections in 2026.” For starters, the states run federal elections, not the feds. If the White House ever tries to cancel them, there will be a public backlash that will make the No Kings protests look small and cute by comparison. Second, while it’s tempting to voice dark fears, that kind of cynicism does the work of the fascists for them, and I won’t signal we’re defeated before we’ve begun to fight.

From where I sit, the bill is actually so bad that it will create a blue wave similar, if not bigger, than what we saw in 2018. States will begin preparing for the Medicaid and food assistance cuts, and poor constituents will feel the effects long before November 2026. Democrats will have a rallying point, the anger will be real, and there will be opportunities to reverse the GOP’s growing hold on working class voters. That would add to the incredible slide it has seen among Latino voters after ICE began indiscriminate raids, detentions and deportations within their communities.

Tragically, a nation must sometimes suffer the consequences of its own electoral choices before voters experience the pain and wake up to the danger. The Big Ugly Bill is one such “find out” moment. Our responsibility going forward is to turn the resulting disillusionment, opposition and anger into fuel for a true electoral bout. That historically has been what has happened when one party has overreached or the people have suffered broad economic pain.

We should all help ensure that, in this case, history does repeat: by taking back the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in a decisive way in 2026.