WASHINGTON—For workers and their allies, the more you look at GOP President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful” money bill—also known as “reconciliation”—the worse and worse it gets. Trying to quell the firestorm of opposition that has even some loyal MAGA lawmakers worried about their futures, he is adding all kinds of tidbits to make people forget that it will destroy healthcare, among many other things, for millions.
In the massive “reconciliation” bill being considered in the MAGA-controlled House there are items like a $500 hike in the child tax credit, a $1,000 check to be placed in a MAGA account for babies born during the Trump term, but not after it ends, an end to taxes on tips and overtime pay and a variety of other measures that the president claims will shower hundreds of dollars in benefits on working people.
The tasty morsels have no effect on the basic nature of the bill which involves a devastating almost $800 billion cut in Medicaid, the removal of health entirely from 13,000,000 or more people who now have it, the virtual destruction of the Affordable Care Act, and other attacks on the living standards of the people in order to pay for massive tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.
Most of the tax cuts and all of the special tidbits designed to lure people into backing the poisonous budget bill will end just before Trump leaves office, dumping the historic deficits it will blow into the nation’s budget on the next president and his or her administration.
Another poison pill in the budget bill is a measure that would allow the government to remove tax exempt status from any organization that espouses or supports policies not backed by the administration.
All of the so-called “benefits,” small checks that some would receive, will be completely undone as people find themselves without health care and having to pay emergency room co-pays for the inadequate care they would get there if they get any care at all. The elderly and disabled will be thrown out of nursing homes with families having to pay those costs too. And for those who still have health insurance, their premiums will skyrocket.
The tax cut for the rich and the corporations amounts to $4.5 trillion over 10 years, paid for with an initial $715 billion hole blown into Medicaid that Gov. Maura Healey, D-Mass., among many others, says “will kill people.”
“I think it’s terrible—my God,” Healey told a Massachusetts radio station. Another $135 billion gets cut from other health care programs. The Medicaid cut would deprive at least 10.3 million people of insurance by 2034 and ban another 7.6 million from ever getting Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is known, a nonpartisan estimate says.
There’s no money in the budget at all for reproductive health clinics. That’s an attack on women in general and Planned Parenthood, in particular, the organization that’s a favorite target of the right wing. Who gets hurt by no cash and/or no clinics? Pregnant people, even those who seek just regular health care, not just abortions.
“We now know how much cruelty costs: $300 million to block people from going to Planned Parenthood health centers,” says its CEO, Alexis McGill Johnson. “It was never about rooting out waste or cutting costs for the American people. Plain and simple, this reconciliation bill is about attacking Planned Parenthood and taking away people’s access to essential health care.”
All this and more, but especially the tax cut for the rich, is a favorite cause of the radical right and its backers in the criminal corporate class. They’re also looking the other way as Trump uses federal police powers to crack down on dissent—a concept the reconciliation bill would codify through the tax code, using it to remove tax exempt status from almost anyone it pleases.
And, of course, cutting government spending and programs also means eliminating federal oversight from corporate crooks, freeing them to exploit workers and ruin protections.
Wants to jam it through
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., wants to jam the reconciliation bill through by Memorial Day.
Johnson can lose only four Republicans, as he has only a 220-213 edge, with two Democratic vacancies. At least five Republicans, all from swing districts outside “blue” cities—say they are dubious.
Those are the lawmakers, along with all others, that the AFL-CIO, which is leading the charge against the reconciliation bill, wants people to call. The toll-free number: 231-400-0602.
“Congress is considering a budget that would kick at least 8.6 MILLION people off Medicaid, America’s largest health care coverage service. Working people should not have their essential services cut to pay for even more tax breaks for billionaires,” the AFL-CIO said in the first critical tweet.
“This would gut health care for kids and nursing home care. Call Congress and tell them no cuts to Medicaid!” the AFL-CIO declared.
The bill allows use of tax exempt status to pressure groups to back official administration policy with a provision to let the IRS unilaterally yank federal tax exemptions for any non-profit group that “funneled material support or resources” to any “terrorist” organization.
For the words ”any non-profit group,” read “unions,” warns News Guild President Jon Schleuss. They’re non-profits, too. “Terrorist organizations” aren’t defined, either.
Trump could use that “reconciliation” section as an instrument of repression, Schleuss warned when a GOP rep floated the idea late last year. The House OKd it, party-line, but it went nowhere afterwards.
“This legislation threatens nonprofit workers at ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Spotlight PA, American Civil Liberties Union affiliates, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Southern Poverty Law Center and more who are members of The News Guild/CWA,” Schleuss wrote.
“Such unilateral power could easily be abused by any administration to target political opponents, shut down newsrooms, and silence freedom of speech and affiliation in the United States.”
Non-profits could appeal rulings in court, says the National Council of Non-Profits. That could take years to solve. Meanwhile, the endangered organizations would have to fork over millions of dollars. Needless to say, smaller ones would go broke. Larger ones, unions included, would have less money available for their real purposes. In labor’s case, it’s to protect and defend worker safety and rights.
“Congress is considering a budget that would kick at least 8.6 MILLION people off Medicaid, America’s largest health care coverage service,” the AFL-CIO declares. “Working people should not have their essential services cut to pay for even more tax breaks for billionaires,” it said at the start of a series of crucial tweets. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office puts the number at 10.3 million.
“Working people don’t need another billionaire bailout. We should expand our essential services like Medicaid, not gut it,” the federation added.
Protests tax cut for rich
Protesting the tax cut for the billionaires, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, declared “That’s not a tax plan. It’s a wealth grab.”
The ruling Republicans ignored him and approved the Medicaid and SNAP cuts on a party-line vote.
The reconciliation bill “would be a disaster for working people. Huge cuts to essential services like Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, and more–all to give billionaires and corporations even more tax breaks,” the AFL-CIO explained. SNAP is the program that gives additional nutrition assistance to low-income pregnant mothers, infants and young children.
“SNAP is our nation’s first line of defense against hunger and strengthens communities by reducing poverty, improving health and learning outcomes, supporting a productive workforce, and more. We urge elected officials to stand with workers and strengthen–not cut–SNAP benefits,” the fed said. It also submitted a letter it initiated against the SNAP cuts, signed by dozens of unions.
AFT (Teachers) President Randi Weingarten says another favorite Trump-GOP target, public school funding, will be cut by 80%—and the cut will actually fall more on Trump voters in red states and rural areas than it will on big cities and blue states. That’s because the latter group can partially fill in the gap, but the rural areas are too poor to do so. Gov. Andy Beshear, D-Ky., the sole Democratic bulwark in deep-red Kentucky, has made the same point about his commonwealth’s rural schools.
“President Trump’s budget cuts much of what helps poor, working-class and middle-class Americans, seemingly to pay for tax cuts for the rich. You can’t make this up,” Weingarten says. “Draconian cuts to public education and lifesaving medical research and health agencies demonstrate a lack of care for Americans’ future and well-being.
“Our concern when the president started dismantling the Department of Education was not the bureaucracy but the funding. And now we know he’s actually shortchanging kids. He would gut K-12 programs by $5.4 billion. Support for student aid would be slashed.
“Healthcare programs would be cut by more than a quarter and labor [programs] by more than one-third. And what he isn’t gutting he’s using to create a slush fund”—block grants—“for states to do whatever they want with Title I money” that now goes to schools which educate poor kids.
“Voters didn’t expect to lose their reading or after-school programs for a tax cut for the ultra-wealthy. Meanwhile, Trump’s allies in Congress are trying to take an even bigger hatchet to critical supports for Americans—like healthcare, food assistance and education.”
The Communications Workers also oppose the reconciliation bill’s cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and threatened slashes in Social Security. But if you’re going to change the tax code, CWA said earlier this year, lawmakers could make some pro-worker moves—starting with restoring the tax deduction for union dues and work expenses, while banning corporate tax deductions for union-busting.
“The ‘No Tax Breaks for Union Busting’ bill (HR2692/S1310) would classify corporations’ union-busting expenditures as political speech under the tax code. It would ban any money spent toward busting unions from being tax-deductible business expenses,” the union said. “And ‘Tax Fairness for Workers’ (HR2671/S1286), would restore the deduction for union dues and make it an above-the-line tax deduction, allowing workers to claim the tax credit without itemizing their taxes.”
“CWA, along with other labor unions and organizations, continues to fight for worker safety against unnecessary and destructive cuts that will inevitably lead to increased worker-related injuries, illnesses, and deaths,” it added in a separate tweet on BlueSky.
Tossed out by judge
The retaliation for dissenting viewpoints showed up—and was tossed out—by Judge Christopher Cooper in U.S. District Court in D.C. on May 14. Trump’s Justice Department illegally cut off a $3.2 million grant to the American Bar Association, the judge declared strictly because the nation’s premier lawyers’ group had criticized Trump’s wholesale firings of federal workers.
The grant was to fund training for lawyers to help them defend sexually abused women under the federal Violence Against Women Act. Judge Cooper issued a restraining order restoring the money. Trump had called the ABA “a snooty bunch of leftist lawyers.”
“The government has not identified any nonretaliatory DOJ priorities, much less explained why they were suddenly deemed inconsistent with the goals of the affected grants,” Judge Cooper wrote. Other VAWA grants, he noted, weren’t pulled.
Then there’s Trump’s current prime target and the congressional Republicans’ favorite political pinata: Federal workers.
Building on myths that federal workers live in D.C.—85% don’t—and that they’re overpaid and don’t want to work, Republicans are taking multibillionaire Elon Musk’s chain saw to the workers and their remaining benefits. Left unsaid: Slamming federal workers is also a racist dog-whistle. High shares of federal, state and local government workers are people of color, women or both.
Musk has already hacked at Labor Department funding, while Trump unilaterally eliminated union contracts covering a million federal workers. Their leading union, the Government Employees (AFGE) and allied unions challenged those plans in court. They won temporary restraining orders in lower courts, but Trump is expected to appeal those rulings to the GOP-named majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
But the reconciliation bill would pay for tax cuts for the rich by mandating at least $50 billion in cuts to federal workers’ pension payouts over the next decade. It would do so by reducing the average salary used to calculate each retiree’s pension and force all workers to contribute 4.4% of their weekly paychecks to the government-run pension fund, the Federal Employees Retirement System. They now contribute 0.8%-3.1%, depending on when they were hired.
The union “has been urging” lawmakers “to understand that cutting FERS benefits will not come close to offsetting the cost of Trump’s massive $4.5 trillion tax giveaway and will only succeed in making the prospect of working for the federal government so unattractive as to drive away experienced and dedicated employees,” said AFGE Acting Legislative Director Daniel Horowitz.
And the GOP majority on the House Oversight and Government Operations Committee wants “to coerce new federal hires into opting out of the merit-based civil service by requiring them to pay a much higher contribution to FERS if they choose to work with civil service protections.”
That brainstorm is in the reconciliation bil, too. It would force workers to pay extra fees if they challenge bosses’s discrimination, political retaliation or workplace abuse by taking cases to the Merit Systems Protection Board, the equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board for federal workers.
“If enacted, this proposal will make it easy for a president to summarily terminate a federal employee for any reason, or no reason at all. The proposal is intended to cause the eventual extinction of the merit-based, nonpartisan civil service as new federal hires choose to be at-will employees rather than devote almost 10% of their salaries to finance their pensions,” AFGE says.
“Given the projected miniscule revenue this proposal would generate, it is clear the primary purpose is not to help pay for the proposed multitrillion dollar tax package but to weaken a pillar of civil service law that for almost 50 years protected federal merit systems against partisan political and other prohibited personnel practices and provided robust and meaningful protection for federal employees against abuses” by bosses.
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