
WASHINGTON—As debate and seemingly constant Senate Republican rewriting dragged on over GOP President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill’ dealing with taxes and spending, organized labor, Democratic senators and their allies kept finding more and more negative impacts.
High on the list of disasters Republican senators have thrown into harm the nation’s workers are $800 billion in Medicaid cuts, $330 billion in SNAP (food stamp) cuts, and $3.8 trillion in transfer of wealth from workers to the billionaires via tax cuts for the very rich. The nation’s labor movement is responding with a stepped-up last-minute campaign against the immoral plans being laid in the Senate.
And given all the resistance over the bill, including a “vote-a-rama” of amendments dealing with Medicaid and other issues, a final vote on the measure is expected to slip beyond Trump’s demand for it by July 4. That slippage gives foes more time to mobilize popular opposition—and pressure—on wavering senators to oppose it.
The problem provisions in the so-called “reconciliation” bill will drive National Nurses United (NNU) members onto picket lines in front of key GOP lawmakers’ offices on July 1. It led North America’s Building Trades Unions to predict the bill would cost construction workers $148 billion in pay, 1.75 million construction jobs, and three billion work hours in the next decade.
AFL-CIO Legislative Director Jody Calemine called the measure “Robin Hood in reverse,” and said “the more the American people learn what is in this bill, the less they support it.”
And the United Mine Workers, one of the few unions whose leaders sat out the 2024 presidential election, said reconciliation’s health care provisions would take away money and workers who treat retirees who suffer from black lung disease.
That cut is on top of Trump’s slashes in workers in the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, especially in its Pittsburgh regional office, which investigates mine disasters and monitors the now-rising incidence of black lung. That office has been cut from 222 people to two, NIOSH workers reported weeks ago.
Whether those huge flaws in “reconciliation” will be enough to sway at least four Republicans to join all 45 Democrats, and both independents, and vote the measure down, is still very much up in the air.
Two Republicans appear to be dead set against the measure in its present form: Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Rand Paul of Kentucky. That’s not quite enough; the foes need four GOPers to buck Trump and the party line and vote “no.” The GOP holds 53 Senate seats and needs 51 votes.
Two other Republicans, Alaskan Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins, provided key votes to let debate even get started on the measure, whose top feature is a huge tax cut for corporations and the superrich, worth between $3.8 trillion and $4.5 trillion over a decade, depending on which version is current—and the economic assumptions behind it.
But both said their votes to bring the bill to Senate debate did not mean they would vote for it in the end. Both were concerned about the future of Medicaid, especially for sprawling rural areas of their states. That’s because the bill would defund Planned Parenthood—a longtime goal of the anti-abortionists—and its clinics are often the sole sources of rural health care.
The bill would “have to be substantially changed” by amendments to satisfy her, Collins said. She did not specify how or how much, especially on Medicaid. Non-partisan sources said a total of 70 million people, cumulatively, would lose health care coverage between now and 2034.
A lot of the tax cut would be paid for by 10 years’ worth of cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, and other social programs. The figures for Medicaid and other health care cuts alone now range up to $1.18 trillion over the decade, with 11-14 million people losing their health care coverage and having to seek care in the most expensive environments: Hospital emergency rooms. Hospitals, in turn, would pass those costs on to insurers, who in turn would pass them on to everyone else, via higher yearly premiums.
Food stamps would be cut by $330 billion, mostly through more onerous work requirements, especially for single people without disabilities. A group of right-wing senators, led by Rick Scott, R-Fla., wants to cut Medicaid even more, by another $300 billion on top of the $500 billion most of the rest of the Republicans are willing to go along with.
National Nurses United said its members plan informational picketing on July 1 against the bill in front of the home state offices of Collins and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, plus eight U.S. representatives. Cassidy is an M.D. and also a down-the-line Trumpite who pushed through student loan and Pell Grant cuts as his panel’s contribution to “reconciliation.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who also said he was concerned about the Medicaid cuts affecting rural hospitals, was mollified by a provision increasing a separate fund to states to deal with that impact. The fund is now set at $25 billion, not $15 billion, so Hawley will vote “yes.”
More attacks on ACA
Another $300 billion would be chopped out of eligibility for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. It’s now hugely popular with the people, but ever since it passed on party-line votes in late 2010, Republicans tried to kill it. They lost 60 times.
Senate Democrats opposed the bill in speeches almost around the clock the entire weekend of June 28-29, and that was before loads of amendments began on June 30 at 9 a.m. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., forced Senate clerks to read the whole 940-page monster aloud. That took 16 hours, over a day and a half.
Other targets may include $46 billion to finish Trump’s racist Mexican Wall along the southern U.S. border and $45 billion to build more “detention centers” for 100,000 more people whom Trump’s ICE agents are grabbing off the streets, out of their cars, outside courtrooms, and inside schools and hospitals.
Teachers’ unions added yet another argument to their opposition: Cuts in both amounts and eligibility for Pell Grants for kids from poor families to get higher education, along with mandates that past student loan borrowers whose “diploma mills” went defunct—like the Trump University—would still be forced to repay the loans.
The Teachers/AFT and the National Education Association were already upset by an 80% cut in federal funds to K-12 schools, which have high shares of kids from poor families. A one-third cut in yearly Pell Grant amounts and forcing part-time students out of Pell Grants, or taking more college credits to stay eligible, further burdens that same group. So, there would even more limits on student loans.

North America’s Building Trades Unions joined the widespread labor opposition to the reconciliation bill.
“The revised Senate draft is a massive insult to the working men and women of North America’s Building Trades Unions and all construction workers,” said Sean McGarvey, NABTU president. “This is not what they voted for,” he added about construction workers, most of them white men, who voted for Trump.
“If enacted, this stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country,” he explained.
The House-passed “reconciliation” bill, which squeaked through 215-214—with five Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting “no”—was bad, he elaborated. The Senate version is even worse.
It’s “threatening an estimated 1.75 million construction jobs and over three billion work hours, which translates to $148 billion in lost annual wages and benefits. These, by any reasonable estimates, are staggering and unfathomable job loss numbers.
“Our three million members are ready, willing, and able to build this country into the world’s undisputed energy superpower. But this bill takes their jobs away and undermines that mission.
“Slashing energy tax credits and layering on harmful restrictions is no way to power America’s future, economically or in terms of national energy security. Critical infrastructure projects essential to that future are being sacrificed at the altar of ideology.
Job losses for hard-working people
“We are especially outraged because…all of these job losses for hardworking Americans are done for one reason only: To make room for more tax breaks for the wealthiest corporations and individuals in America. Among other troubling provisions, this proposal will also raise healthcare premiums through the inevitable cost-shifting onto our members caused by the cuts to Medicaid.” There’s “a better path forward for construction workers, because this one is certainly not it.”
The Medicaid cuts are so bad that National Nurses United scheduled demonstrations on July 1 in front of two senators’ and seven representatives’ home-state offices to protest the measure and put pressure on wavering Republicans. The senators are Maine’s Collins and David Cassidy, R-La., chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee—and author of the bill’s Pell Grant cuts of up to a third, a cutoff of more college students from grants at all, plus student loan clawbacks.
“We challenge elected representatives to have the courage to speak with the nurses in their communities and answer us directly: ‘Whose side are you on: billionaire donors or your constituents?’” said union President Nancy Hagans, an RN at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. “If Congress passes these Medicaid cuts, more than 51,000 people could die.”
Other cuts in “reconciliation” will yank a Biden administration rule forcing nursing homes nationwide to institute specific staff-patient ratios as a condition for staying eligible for Medicaid. Hospital and nursing home CEOs, more interested in profits than people, routinely kowtow to health insurer demands for short-staffing, NNU points out. Medicaid payments provide approximately half of all nursing home revenue.
“We challenge elected representatives to have the courage to speak with the nurses in their communities and answer us directly: ‘Whose side are you on: billionaire donors or your constituents?’” said Nancy Hagans, RN at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, and the president of NNU. “If Congress passes these Medicaid cuts, more than 51,000 people could die.”
“This bill demands that millions of working Americans give up health care, food, income, and jobs so that the wealthiest households and large corporations can reap the greatest tax benefits,” said the AFL-CIO’s Calemine. “It fails to address concerns working people have been raising repeatedly over the past several months…The more people learn about this bill, the less they support it.
“Recent analysis of tax provisions in the Senate bill from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy finds 69% of the net tax cuts would go to the richest fifth of Americans in 2026, only 11% would go to the middle fifth of Americans, and less than 1% would go to the poorest fifth.”
“According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this month, nearly twice as many Americans oppose the budget reconciliation package as favor it, and those numbers promise to only worsen as more of the public becomes aware of what this bill does and what it fails to do.”
Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts wrote to senators that miners, retired miners, and their families would suffer multiple hits under “reconciliation”: Benefit cuts if they’re also veterans—as he is, from the Vietnam War—and less access to health care for their black lung disease.
“This legislation isn’t just a bad idea, it’s a dangerous one,” Roberts wrote. “It strips resources from the very people who keep our country running: Miners, veterans, public servants, and their families, just to give billionaires a bigger tax break. Cutting off health care access, closing Black Lung clinics, and turning our backs on working-class communities is not how we move forward as a nation.”
Roberts explained Medicaid cuts will hit rural America hardest, leading to hospital closures and reduced access to care—the same point Planned Parenthood makes about being zeroed out.
“Black Lung clinics, which provide vital care for miners suffering from this deadly disease, would be among the hardest hit,” said Roberts. Veterans’ benefits and government retirees’ benefits would be cut, too, he said. And, agreeing with Building Trades President McGarvey, Roberts said cuts in clean coal technology and programs to replace coalfield jobs with jobs in other forms of energy—and retrain miners for them—”threaten future job creation in energy and manufacturing across the coalfields.”
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