‘It’s harsh. It’s mean, brutal’: Trump bill to cause most harm to America’s poorest
By Steven Greenhouse
July 3, 2025
Last November, Donald Trump made a solemn vow to all Americans: “Every citizen, I will fight for you, your family and your future every single day.” Eight months later, Trump is vigorously backing many policies that will mean pain for millions.
Trump has pushed to enact the Republican budget bill, which would make significant cuts to Medicaid, Obamacare, and food assistance, and would do the greatest damage to those Americans struggling hardest to make ends meet – the 30% of the US population that lives in households earning under $50,000 a year.
Even as Trump and Republican lawmakers are rushing to cut over $1.4tn in health and food assistance for non-affluent Americans, Trump continues to pressure Congress to extend over $3tn in tax cuts that disproportionately help the wealthy and corporations.
Trump has embraced these Robin-Hood-in-reverse policies, even though it was voters earning less than $50,000 a year who delivered victory to him last November. They favored him over Kamala Harris by 50% to 48%, according to exit polls, while Trump and Harris tied among voters earning $50,000 or more a year.
Several social policy experts said Trump has engaged in hypocrisy at best and betrayal at worst when it comes to the working-class and blue-collar Americans he promised to fight for. Speaking about the Republicans’ “big, beautiful” budget bill, Sharon Parrott, president of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said: “Who’s getting hit, who’s bearing the cost? It’s people with low and middle incomes, people that the president and many Republican policymakers promised to serve and support in the last election.”
The budget bill would mean a net financial loss for the bottom 30% of American households by income – after factoring in its tax provisions and cuts in benefits. The House bill would hit the lowest-earning 10% of Americans hardest: for them, it would mean a painful $1,600 cut in income on average (a 3.9% drop), according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). At the same time, the Trump-backed bill would be a boon to wealthy households – it would mean a $12,000 increase in net income, on average, for households in the top 10%, those earning above $692,000 a year. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the top 0.1% – those with income over $3.3m – would receive tax cuts of $103,500 on average.
The CBO says the income of the bottom 10% tops off at $22,868 (before factoring in government transfers). The second lowest decile earns from $22,868 to $43,137; the third decile earns up to $55,628; and the fourth up to $68,601.
The Yale Budget Lab found that the bottom 20% of US households would see their incomes drop by 2.9% on average over the next decade, and the second lowest quintile – moderate-income households – would suffer a 0.4% loss of income on average. But the richest 20% would see their incomes rise by 2.3%. Those in the top 1% would see their incomes climb by $29,585 on average.
Trump is demanding these big tax cuts for the rich even though the CBO says the budget bill will increase the federal debt by $3.3tn – a move that will push up interest rates and make mortgages and home-buying more expensive.
According to the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning thinktank, the $121bn tax cuts that would go just to the richest 1% next year are significantly more than all the tax cuts that would go to the bottom 60% of Americans in terms of income.
The poorest 20% of Americans would receive just 1% of the bill’s tax cuts next year, while the highest earning 5% would receive 44% of the cuts.
Last week, Trump urged lawmakers to enact the bill, saying: “There are hundreds of things in there. It is so good.” At a news conference, the president said the more than $1tn in Medicaid and food assistance cuts wouldn’t hurt anyone.
“It won’t affect anybody,” he said. “It is just fraud, waste and abuse.”
But Parrott took a sharply different view: “The bill stands alone historically for its unique upside-down mix of large tax cuts for the top, deep cuts that affect low- and middle-income people, and massive increases in deficits and debt.”
John Ricco, the Yale Budget Lab’s associate director of policy analysis, said: “It’s unambiguous that low- and moderate-income Americans will be worse off on average under the budget bill, and that’s principally because the cuts in Medicaid and Snap [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] would by definition fall most heavily on these groups,” Ricco said.
Jeanne Lambrew, the Century Foundation’s director of health policy reform, estimates that at least 16 million Americans will lose health coverage because of the budget bill – refuting White House claims that “no one will lose coverage”. Lambrew said the bill would cause a more than 50% increase in the number of uninsured nationwide, to nearly 45 million people.
What’s more, the Trump-backed plan sharply reduces Affordable Care Act subsidies, and that will force millions of Americans to either drop coverage or pay far more for coverage. Millions of Americans will find it harder to obtain healthcare, with many forced to take on far more medical debt.
While Trump and many Republicans say the Medicaid cuts are all about reducing “waste, fraud and abuse”, Lambrew calculates that a mere 3.5% of the $1tn in healthcare cuts come from cutting waste and abuse. “What Trump has been saying is, ‘We’re not cutting Medicaid. We’re just cutting fraud.’ That’s gaslighting.” Lambrew said.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, sent the Senate a letter that harshly criticized the budget bill. “As Pope Leo XIV recently stated, it is the responsibility of politicians to promote and protect the common good, including by working to overcome great wealth inequality,” he wrote. “This bill does not answer this call. It takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.”
According to a Quinnipiac University poll, only 27% of registered voters support the GOP budget bill, while 53% oppose it. A Fox News poll found that 38% support the bill, while 59% oppose it.
The House bill’s deep cuts in food benefits will cause 7 million people, including over 2 million children, to…
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