Republicans pass Trump’s budget, workers respond: ‘Your vote is killing us’
Activists with the Poor People's Campaign protest against Trump's budget bill, which cuts Medicaid, food stamps, and other federal aid in order to fund tax cuts for the super-rich. | J. Scott Applewhite / AP

WASHINGTON—In the final hours before July 4, labor unions pulled out all the stops in a last-ditch effort to block President Donald Trump’s Project 2025-inspired billionaire budget from becoming law, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., staged a marathon 8hr. 44 min. floor speech to delay the vote on the measure. 

But in the end, Republicans rammed the class warfare bill through the House and sent it to Trump’s desk for a signature ahead of the holiday weekend. Tax cuts for the super-rich and Medicaid and benefit cuts to Medicaid for everyone else are the central focus of the $4.5 trillion law, which is a win for Trump and his billionaire backers. 

Only two Republicans broke ranks, joining all House Democrats to oppose the measure and bringing the tally to 218-214.

Labor had hit the road as the clock ticked down toward the final vote, notably in Michigan and Wisconsin, arguing hard against the “big bad bill.” Unions trashed it’s the bill’s theft of public wealth to enrich the already wealthy, adding environmental and health care complaints to their opposition as well.

Inside the Capitol, meanwhile, Jeffries, starting at 4:53 am Eastern Time on July 3, took the privilege given to party leaders of unlimited speaking time and launched into an address laced with letters from people nationwide whom the bill will hurt. He promised to make the Trump budget the centerpiece of the campaign to take back Congress during the midterm elections. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., staged a nearly nine-hour marathon protest speech the billionaire budget bill, delaying its passage in Congress. | Mariam Zuhaib / AP

He called it “an all-out assault” on American workers, labor unions, and immigrant families. Jeffries also reminded voters of how Republicans and Trump had tried to distance themselves from the far-right’s unpopular Project 2025 policy book during the 2024 election, but now put all their priorities into the billionaire budget bill.

Protecting the powerful, not the people

“After Project 2025 comes Project 2026,” he said, referring to the midterms next year. Democrats need to win just three seats to reclaim control of the chamber and put a legislative roadblock in front of Trump for the second half of his term.

Other Democrats used the time to tweet and call constituents to contact Congress against the bill.

“We urge you to continue,” Jeffries said, appealing for e-mails to him on “how we can best represent your interest…Your stories are powerful” and “give us the resolve to fight for an America of good housing, good jobs, good health care and a good education for your children.”

Back in Michigan, “The big bad bill puts workers out and billionaires in,” said Michigan AFL-CIO Communications Director Chad Cyrowski during the BlueGreen Alliance’s stop there on Wednesday. “It’ll kill 39,000 clean energy shovel-ready jobs and $522 million in clean energy investments in Michigan alone.

“This bill protects the powerful, not the people.”

“It’s a shameless screw-over of working people and a disgrace,” added Frank Houston, the Michigan senior policy manager for the BlueGreen Alliance, a joint union-green coalition that the Steelworkers union founded and leads.

“We’ve been telling our GOP colleagues how their constituents’ energy bills are going to go up,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., taking a break from the long, desultory House debate on Trump’s bill.

“And there are auto plants in Republican districts” that will get hurt, too, Dingell warned. They’re the ones switching over to electric vehicle manufacturing.

“Wisconsin’s clean energy boom isn’t an accident,” said Emily Pritzkow, executive director of the Wisconsin Building Trades. If Trump’s bill passes, she warned, that boom ends. Referring to the clean energy laws that the bill throws overboard, Pritzkow said: “Repeal those policies, and you repeal those 7,000 Wisconsin jobs.”

Trump’s key arguments for the bill are its $4.5 trillion 10-year tax cut for corporations and the 1%. That cut will be partially paid for by more than $1 trillion cut from Medicaid, millions more from education spending, elimination of more than a million “green jobs” belonging to union workers, and a wide range of other slashes in domestic spending.

The bill gives piles of cash “to greedy billionaires, and we cannot stand for it,” declared Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the most prominent member of “The Squad” of progressive lawmakers.

There was little mention in either the House debate—such as it was—or at the White House of the measure’s increased funding for the military. But Democrats, and some unionists, aimed at Trump’s $135 billion increase for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to round up more people.

The bill also includes funds to finish Trump’s racist Mexican Wall, and more money to build private prisons with 100,000 beds for migrants whom ICE kidnaps, manhandles, and arrests without warrants or due process, and sends them to jail or out of the country.

In Michigan, unions talked about how the new law will destroy green jobs and throw thousands of auto workers out of EV plant jobs they look forward to. In Wisconsin, they discussed retrofitting houses, schools, and factories with “green job” federal dollars the Trump bill will eliminate

Among the projects the Trump bill would dump are tax credits worth $2.5 billion in private and public money to Ford to erect a battery plant for electric vehicles, $5 billion for a liquid natural gas plant in Holland, Mich., and $881 million in private and public investment to convert GM’s Lansing-Grand River auto assembly plant to making electric vehicles. It employs 1485 UAW members.

Speakers also discussed how Trump cuts to the National Institutes of Health, incorporated in the big bill, would slam health research now targeted to preventing or curbing future pandemics. The Government Employees (AFGE) represent current NIH workers, and the Auto Workers are trying to organize post-doctoral researchers at the institute.

“The most devastating cuts” could hurt eight million people, said Dr. Elizabeth Del Buono, founder of Michigan Practitioners for Climate Action. “People with low incomes, seniors, and disabilities would be hurt” by resulting “delays in diagnosis of strokes, or cancer.

“And for rural hospitals, the Medicaid cuts mean the difference between closure and keeping the doors open.”

In New Orleans, Service Employees and their allies linked the Trump bill to the ICE raids and for-profit prisons, like the newly-constructed “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida swamp. A busload of SEIU members, traveling from Los Angeles to New Orleans for that July 1 march, stopped at two of the four ICE-hired private prisons in Texas to protest.

And another SEIU bus, from New York to New Orleans, stopped in D.C., to lobby lawmakers to vote against Trump’s mega-bill.

“The same cruel bill designed to gut healthcare for working families also funds expanded ICE raids and gives massive tax breaks to billionaires,” the union said. “The fight” in the Capitol “and the journey to Louisiana are two fronts in the same battle for the dignity and security of all communities.

“At its core, this bill represents the largest transfer of wealth from working people to the very affluent in our nation’s history,” SEIU Executive Vice President Leslie Frane told the crowd gathered in D.C. The unionists’ message to lawmakers: “Your vote is killing us!”

Speakers in Wisconsin concentrated on clean energy tax credits and how they can both spur investment to create union jobs while lowering utility costs jolts to consumers. 

“The investments and tax credits under threat right now are saving families money across the country and right here in Wisconsin,” said Garrik Harwick, Assistant Business Manager of Electrical Workers Local 890, of Janesville. “Repealing the tax credits would strain our existing energy supply and raise the cost of expanding it–unequivocally increasing energy costs to both households and businesses.”

“This funding is creating real jobs and boosting local economies,” said Matt Gahs, president of the Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons Local 599 of Milwaukee. “Republicans are willing to throw it all away, putting our communities and livelihoods at risk.”

“It is clear the GOP prioritizes tax cuts to billionaires over investments for hard-working” people, said Carly Ebben Eaton, Wisconsin Policy Manager for the BlueGreen Alliance. “Instead of protecting progress…Republicans chose to sacrifice our clean energy future along with the well-being of the people they were elected to serve.” 

Call to resurrect democracy

Back in Washington, speaking immediately after the House passed the budget bill, Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign condemned it as “one of the most morally bankrupt pieces of legislation in our nation’s history.”

Rev. William Barber leads a demonstration against the billionaire budget bill in Washington, D.C., June 2, 2025. | J. Scott Applewhite / AP

He called it “policy murder in plain sight,” saying that by passing sweeping cuts to Medicaid, food assistance for children, and other public welfare programs, lawmakers “have codified the deaths of thousands of people.”

Barber encouraged people not to despair, however.

“The passage of this bill is deadly, but it is not a defeat,” he said. “We must meet it with a resurrection,” in the form of organizing voters in every impacted community “to push legislators who voted for this bill out of office.” 

Barber said the Trump billionaire budget serves as a moral wake-up call that should prompt Americans to “build a movement together that can reconstruct our democracy.” 

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg
Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.

C.J. Atkins
C.J. Atkins

C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People's World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left.