The Biggest Boondoggles in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill

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The House reconciliation bill — officially known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is extraordinary in how much it robs from the poor to boost the rich. Its tax cuts for the wealthy are financed by cuts to health care coverage (both in Medicaid and Obamacare) that will help Republicans swell the ranks of the uninsured by 16 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But the Big Beautiful Bill is not just an ugly tax bill where society's less fortunate are made to sacrifice for the benefit of the wealthiest. It's also a spending bill that steers hundreds of billions of dollars into new pet projects. This is financed with debt. All in, the BBB will spike deficits by $2.4 trillion over 10 years, according to CBO, likely increasing the national debt by $3 billion when interest payments are included.
The bill's spending has angered budget hawks in the Senate like Rand Paul (R.-Ky.). It has been part of the public split between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who calls the bill a 'disgusting abomination' that will squander any supposed savings imposed by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Conservative budget analysts are sounding the alarm: 'This inability to set priorities is going to bring a debt crisis,' Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute tells Rolling Stone. In fact, the bill would create so much new debt that it risks triggering a mechanism called 'sequestration,' which would impose deep, mandatory cuts to Medicare. These cuts to the health care of America's seniors would start next year, and rise to half-a-trillion dollars over ten years.
The BBB's spending provisions have received far less scrutiny than the tax cuts and safety-net slashes. But the bill lards new funds on a range of already-fat-cats — from the military-industrial complex and Big Tech to private prisons and construction concerns.
Below we survey the biggest boondoggles of the Big Beautiful Bill:
The BBB proposes spending nearly $50 billion for construction of Trump's border wall with Mexico. Sen. Paul, in an appearance on Face the Nation last week, accused the administration of waste. He cited an existing Customs and Border Patrol estimate that wall construction should cost only about $6.5 billion over 1,000 miles: 'They have inflated the cost of the wall eightfold,' said Paul. (After his TV hit, CPB appears to have scrubbed the construction cost estimate Paul quoted from its website.) Paul even questioned the need for more wall, at all, given his view that Trump has 'essentially stopped the border flow without new money and without new legislation.'
Offering just a small taste of the anticipated building bonanza, the Trump administration awarded a $70 million, 7-mile wall-construction contract to California-based Granite Construction in March.
The bill includes $45 billion for 'Adult Alien Detention Capacity' and 'Family Residential Centers.' This funding would enable the administration to ramp up its mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants. As the nation has seen from recent high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at restaurants, this involves ripping productive members out of society and making them wards of the state, at great public cost, until they can be deported.
The money would be a boon to private prison contractors and construction firms. For a taste of where this is headed, consider that the administration has already inked a 15-year, $1 billion deal with GEO Group to house ICE detainees at Delaney Hall, a 1,000 bed facility in Newark, New Jersey. The mayor of the city was arrested by ICE amid a recent protest at the facility.
The private prison company is well connected to the Trump administration. As Rolling Stone has reported, Attorney General Pam Bondi is a former lobbyist for GEO Group, which also made a $500,000 donation to the Trump inaugural committee. A GEO subsidiary donated $1.3 million to a Super PAC that backed Trump's 2024 election.
The BBB puts up nearly $25 billion for the Golden Dome. The satellite-based missile defense project builds off the branding of Israel's 'Iron Dome,' a ground-based defensive system that can intercept rockets and missiles launched from local militants or state actors like Iran. 'To the extent we match Iron Dome technology, we will be well protected from a missile attack from Canada or Mexico,' says Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, sarcastically. 'But not necessarily from Russia, North Korea or China.'
In reality the Golden Dome appears to be Trump's revival of the Ronald Reagan era Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI — a hugely expensive, largely ineffective space-based missile-defense system derided in the 1980s as 'Star Wars.'
'Ultimately this is $25 billion more for SDI' says Rieidl. 'This is a noble idea — but a lot of spending up until now hasn't brought a lot of success.'
Trump envisions the BBB as a downpayment on a total investment of $175 million. The Golden Dome promises to be a golden goose for defense contractors. SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Trump's billionaire benefactor Elon Musk, who's currently feuding with Trump, is reportedly vying for a contract. So are the Peter Thiel-linked tech firm Palantir and longtime military-industrial heavyweights like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
Including the Golden Dome, the Big Beautiful Bill increases America's Pentagon spending by a colossal $150 billion. 'This is a bill from the military-industrial complex advocates who are padding the military budget,' according to Paul, who has long criticized the Defense Department for failing to pass every audit to which it's been subjected.
Budgets are moral documents. And metaphorically people often speak of the tradeoff between 'guns and butter' — or programs that defend the public and those that keep the public out of misery.
The guns side of the Big Beautiful Bill is financed entirely by cuts to butter. The bill strips $128 billion in funding to the states for the SNAP food assistance program that keeps American families from going hungry. It also aims to avoid another $92 billion in spending by knocking people out of the program with red tape and work requirements, including for parents of 8-year-olds.Riedl argues that the Pentagon should be forced to achieve cost efficiencies before it receives any new federal dollars. 'One of DOGE's great failures was essentially ignoring the enormous waste and cost overruns inside the Pentagon. There is a reason the Defense Department cannot pass an audit. There is so much waste. It has significant cost overruns — particularly in government contracts and procurement — that absolutely must be addressed before we further increase defense spending,' says the Manhattan institute fellow.
The House bill steers new money to more than a dozen weapons systems, including many dogged by cost overruns, construction delays, performance issues, and questions of combat capability.
On the airplane side, this list includes:
$4.5 billion for the B-21 Raider, the Air Force's newest long-range stealth bomber, which cost nearly $700 million per aircraft to produce. The two-person Northrup Gruman-built plane may be poorly suited to modern warfighting, where swarms of unmanned drones are becoming the dominant air threat.
$3.2 billion for the Boeing-built F-15EX. The planes cost $90 million a pop, making them more expensive than the notoriously costly F-35A. Unlike that fighter, the F-15EX is not a stealth aircraft. And production has been snarled by manufacturing problems. A recent federal assessment put it bluntly: 'Boeing has experienced increased quality deficiencies.'
Ships include:
$4.6 billion for Virginia Class submarines. The nuclear submarine program has a reported cost overrun of $17 billion and has delivered boats massively behind schedule. The contractors are General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries. The Pentagon already has 23 of these submarines.
$2.1 billion for San Antonio Class 'amphibious transport docks.' This ship was put on production pause in 2023 because of massive cost overruns. The boats are supposed to land Marines into onshore combat, but have been found by DOD testers to only be suitable 'in a benign environment' because the ship is 'not effective, suitable and not survivable in a combat situation.' Huntington Ingalls Industries is the contractor. The Pentagon already has 13 of these boats.
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