The fine print: 5 things that even some Republicans didn't realize were buried in Trump's 'big, beautiful' budget bill

Yahoo

a day ago

Late last month, House Republicans passed President Trump's 'one big, beautiful bill' — a package of tax cuts, social safety net reductions and increased border and military spending meant to deliver the bulk of Trump's legislative agenda.
Now, as their Senate counterparts strategize about how to maneuver the sprawling measure through Congress's upper chamber, some key Trump allies are making a surprising admission: that they regret ever supporting the president's signature legislation in the first place.
'I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there,' Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confessed Tuesday on X.
'I am not going to hide the truth: This provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill,' Nebraska Rep. Mike Flood told voters in his district last week. 'I do not agree with that section that was added to that bill.'
'I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore,' Elon Musk, the former head of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), posted Tuesday on X. 'This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.'
Why the sudden second thoughts?
In part, it's because of how the 1,037-page bill was passed. The final version — filled with last-minute changes meant to placate various factions — didn't materialize until 10:40 p.m. the evening before the House's self-imposed Memorial Day deadline, leaving lawmakers just eight overnight hours to digest it.
And in part it's because experts — including, on Wednesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — keep releasing in-depth analyses detailing how much Trump's bill will actually cost, and who it will actually affect.
Here are five things buried in the bill that even some Republicans didn't realize were there — or at least aren't admitting they know about.
To make their orders stick, federal judges really only have one tool at their disposal: holding anyone who defies them in contempt, then enforcing these contempt citations with fines or jail time.
But House Republicans quietly inserted language into the bill stating that federal courts may not 'enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order' unless the plaintiff pays what's known as a security bond at the beginning of the case.
The problem? Federal judges often waive such bonds when plaintiffs claim the government did something unconstitutional.
The second Trump administration, it turns out, has been embroiled in dozens of cases concerning the constitutionality of its actions. In several — mainly involving deportations — judges are considering holding administration officials in contempt for refusing to comply with their orders.
And so, if the bill passes as written, it would 'effectively shiel[d] President Trump and members of his administration from the consequences of violating court orders,' as the New York Times recently explained — in part by 'making it prohibitively expensive to sue.'
Rep. Flood, for one, is not a fan.
'When I found out that provision was in the bill, I immediately reached out to my Senate counterparts and told them of my concern,' Flood told his (booing) constituents last week. 'And when I return to Washington, I am going to very clearly tell the people in my conference that we cannot support undermining our court system, and we must allow our federal courts to operate and issue injunctions.'
In lieu of any sort of federal oversight, dozens of U.S. states have passed — or are actively considering — new laws regulating how artificial intelligence is used or developed.
But in a concession to tech companies who claim that patchwork regulations stifle innovation, the House bill would block states from enforcing these laws — or passing new ones — for the next decade.
'No state or political subdivision may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,' the bill reads.
Apparently, Rep. Greene missed that part.
'Full transparency, I did not know about this section,' she wrote on X. 'We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states' hands is potentially dangerous. This needs to be stripped out in the Senate.'
Asked why she didn't 'know about' the AI provision, Greene told the New York Times that 'it's hard to read over 1,000 pages when things keep changing up to the last minute before we voted on it.'
One of the biggest cost-cutting measures in the bill is the new work requirement for low-income Americans who receive SNAP benefits (a.k.a. food stamps). This includes parents with children age 7 or older; to qualify, they would have to work 80 hours a month.
But late in the process, House Republicans created a loophole specifically for married parents. According to the final bill, if a parent is 'responsible for a dependent child 7 years of age or older and is married to, and resides with, an individual who is in compliance,' then they don't have to complete the work requirement.
No such exemption applies, however, to single parents. Since there's no other parent around to work those 80 hours, they would have to do it themselves (on top of parenting alone).
"If you're married, then you could have one person in the couple as a stay-at-home parent, and only one person has to work," Carolyn Vega, associate director of policy at Share Our Strength, told Axios. "But if you're in any other kind of household arrangement, then everyone needs to be meeting the work requirements."
As of 2022, the bulk of SNAP recipients (53%) were children in single-parent families — and 80% of single-parent households are headed by mothers, according to census data.
It's unclear whether House Republicans realize their bill will effectively penalize single parents who rely on SNAP — or whether they're simply more focused on encouraging married couples to embrace stay-at-home motherhood than anything else.
In recent days, Trump and his allies have claimed that the bill wouldn't cut Medicaid, the program that provides health insurance to more than 70 million low-income Americans.
'We're not doing any cutting of anything meaningful,' the president told reporters on May 20. 'The only thing we're cutting is waste, fraud and abuse. With Medicaid, waste, fraud and abuse. There's tremendous waste, fraud and abuse.'
'We are not cutting Medicaid in this package,' House Speaker Mike Johnson added on CNN. 'There's a lot of misinformation out there about this, Jake. The numbers of Americans who are affected are those that are entwined in our work to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse. So, what do I mean by that? You got more than 1.4 million illegal aliens on Medicaid.'
'No one' — presumably meaning no U.S. citizens — 'will lose coverage as a result of this bill,' agreed Russell Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget.
But Trump & Co. either don't know, or aren't admitting, that their claims aren't accurate. According to the latest nonpartisan CBO estimate, released Wednesday, the bill would actually slash federal Medicaid spending by $793 billion over the next decade, causing the number of people enrolled in the program to fall by 7.8 million.
How would it do that? By forcing childless adults without disabilities to work in order to receive Medicaid benefits; by requiring states to impose new co-payments on medical services for Medicaid beneficiaries who live above the poverty line; and by making it easier for a state to cancel its residents' Medicaid coverage if they don't complete additional paperwork.
As for 'illegal aliens,' 14 states currently use their own tax revenues to provide health coverage to undocumented immigrants; the bill would penalize those states by reducing their share of federal Medicaid funding. As a result, the CBO estimates that about 1.4 million more people without 'verified citizenship, nationality, or satisfactory immigration status' would be uninsured in 2034.
But the CBO also projects that, overall, Trump's bill would cause the total number of uninsured U.S. residents to grow by 10.9 million over the same period — meaning the other 9.5 million would presumably be U.S. citizens.
Noting this, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has argued that the bill's Medicaid changes would harm 'working people and their children.'
'Over 20 percent of Missourians, including hundreds of thousands of children, are on Medicaid,' Hawley said on CNN last month. 'They're not on Medicaid because they want to be. They're on Medicaid because they cannot afford health insurance in the private market.'
Multiple members of the Trump Administration have claimed that the bill would not add to the federal debt.
'The One Big, Beautiful Bill … helps get our fiscal house in order by carrying out the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings,' White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a news conference last month.
'The bill REDUCES deficits by $1.4 trillion over ten years,' Vought insisted Wednesday on X. 'If you care about deficits and debt, this bill dramatically improves the fiscal picture.'
It can be tricky to project forward when it comes to fiscal matters, but it's worth noting that pretty much every expert disagrees with Vought and Leavitt. By extending and expanding the 2017 tax cuts, Trump's bill would add $3.8 trillion in spending over the next decade; new investments in the border and the military would pile another $400 million on top of that sum.
On the other side of the ledger are spending cuts totaling $1.8 trillion, according to the CBO.
That leaves a $2.4 trillion gap — otherwise known as debt.
Trump's allies argue that the CBO isn't making the right 'baseline' assumptions about policy and revenue; some claim Trump's tariffs will raise trillions of dollars to offset deficits, or that tax cuts will pay for themselves by spurring economic growth.
But the CBO isn't alone in its approach. According to the New York Times, 'the Budget Lab at Yale… found the Republican proposal could add $2.4 trillion to the debt by 2034. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated it would raise deficits by $2.8 trillion over a 10-year period. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit public policy organization that supports deficit reduction, pegged the uncovered cost at $3.3 trillion over the next nine years.'
'Not sure what shoddy assumptions someone is seeing, but advocates who claim this bill will improve the fiscal situation are completely at odds with all serious outside experts who conclude it would increase borrowing by trillions,' CRFB President Maya MacGuineas told the Times.
Musk, for one, seems to agree with the scorekeepers.
The bill 'will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!) and burden America[n] citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt,' he wrote earlier this week on X. 'This immense level of overspending will drive America into debt slavery!'
The bill would also raise America's debt ceiling from $36 trillion to $40 trillion. On Wednesday, Trump called for scrapping the debt ceiling altogether.