Extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts is a centerpiece of what the president calls his “big, beautiful” spending bill that was passed late last month by House Republicans by a single vote.
Now it is the Senate’s turn to weigh in, but that chamber’s narrow Republican majority needs to take a hard look at the facts before pressing the yay button. Trump’s legislation may truly be enormous, but it is far from pretty — it stigmatizes the wrong people, slashes the wrong programs and will hurt far more Americans than it helps.
For starters, those tax cuts will disproportionately go to the wealthy while adding trillions to the deficit. Meanwhile, the punitive work requirements and layers of paperwork for Medicaid and SNAP (formerly food stamps) recipients are still visible beneath the flimsy camouflage of reducing welfare fraud.
Academic research, including my own, shows that the vast majority of Americans who are working, are disabled or are providing caregiving already meet these requirements for state and federal aid. Even the independent Congressional Budget Office reports that work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP do not accomplish their stated goal of increasing employment.
Millions of Americans rely on Medicaid and SNAP, essential programs that have lasting benefits beyond health care and healthy eating.
In 2023, nearly 83 million children and adults — 24 percent of Americans — relied on Medicaid. Medicaid supports care from the cradle to the grave: Medicaid pays for more than 4 in 10 births in the U.S., and is the largest funder of long-term care, supporting the long-term services and supports needed by almost 6 million Americans in 2021.
In 2023, SNAP provided food assistance to an average of 42 million Americans each month. SNAP is important across the age spectrum, too: Nearly half of all children in the U.S. participate in SNAP before their 20th birthday, and more than 4 million seniors 60 or older receive SNAP.
The CBO estimates that if the Senate passes the bill in its current form, nearly 15 million Americans will lose their health coverage by 2034 because of Medicaid work requirements and other cuts.
The reconciliation bill includes the largest SNAP cut in history. It will eliminate food benefits for more than 3 million adults (about 1 million adults over 55) and roughly 1 million children each month.
Still, that doesn’t keep Republicans from continually trying to portray recipients as lazy cheaters who need to lace up their boots and get back to the factory. They’ve been making the same mistake for years.
Arkansas in 2018 and Georgia in 2023 implemented Medicaid work requirements. Those moves merely caused thousands to lose insurance coverage, had no effect on employment and did not protect these states from fraud. In Arkansas, they were halted after one year.
The punitive requirements in the House Republicans’ bill will not only fail to force millions of people into low-paying jobs, but they will also increase Americans’ medical debt, creating a further, unnecessary strain on our economy and health care system.
If Republicans really think that work requirements and paperwork reduce fraud, they are wrong. Medicaid fraud, for example, is relatively rare and more often committed by health care providers, not beneficiaries.
Further, these work requirements will bury Americans in mounds of paperwork and cost millions to administer. Instead, they should try to limit the sophisticated tax evasion strategies used by the top 1 percent, which are rarely detected but very expensive for the country.
If Trump’s complaisant members of Congress really wanted to increase employment, expansions in public preschool and child care would be much more effective and economical.
It’s somewhat ironic that an administration that supposedly is taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy is moving to wrap ordinary Americans in red tape. But the reality is the Trump administration seeks to break down barriers for millionaires, while building them up around the rest of us.
Taryn Morrissey is a professor and chair of American University’s Department of Public Administration and Policy, and associate dean of research at the School of Public Affairs.
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