Early Wednesday, when most Americans were snuggled in their beds, Republicans in the House of Representatives were working hard to take away the health care of millions of Americans, blow a $3 trillion hole in the budget deficit and make the wealthiest people in America richer and the poorest Americans poorer.
If this sounds like hyperbole, it’s not. The GOP-controlled House Rules Committee convened at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning to discuss a bill that hasn’t been fully drafted and the provisions of which were still part of intense negotiations. Indeed, the real work on the legislation was happening behind closed doors as House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., tried to cobble together enough votes to pass something, anything, so he could meet his self-imposed deadline for a floor vote by Memorial Day. Late Wednesday, GOP leaders released yet more significant changes to the bill, and on Thursday morning the full House passed the bill by a single vote.
What we do know about the legislation the GOP is calling the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is genuinely terrifying.
All this is being done to extend the Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans.
According to an analysis published Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, the numbers in the GOP’s draft legislation are brutal. The bill would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion — a rise that is spooking bond markets already worried about the president’s tariff increases. The bill would slash $267 billion in federal spending for SNAP, which more than 42 million low-income people rely on to put food on the table for their families. And it would cut nearly $700 billion from federal funding for Medicaid.
The CBO estimated Tuesday that the Medicaid cuts could cause roughly 8 million people to lose their health insurance coverage, and that number could rise to 15 million thanks to other provisions in the legislation. The amendments revealed Wednesday, writes Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, surely “would lead to more people losing health insurance.” But Republicans scrambled to vote Thursday before the CBO could update its totals.
All this is being done to extend the Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit wealthy people. The impact of the GOP’s bill is extraordinary in both its cruelty and its extreme inequality. According to the CBO’s estimate, household resources for the poorest people would decrease by 4% over the next eight years, while the richest people’s household resources would increase by 4%.
New from CBO: the Republican budget reconciliation plan would hurt the poorest Americans while helping the richest Americans
— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T01:10:53.306Z
If enacted, the bill would constitute the largest transfer of wealth from the needy to the wealthy in American history.
It’s no wonder, then, that Republicans were rushing this bill through while most Americans slept. If you were robbing the poor on behalf of the rich, you, too, would do it in the dead of night.
This obfuscation has become par for the course as this legislation has wound its way through Congress. As Bulwark’s Jonathon Cohn pointed out last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is responsible for overseeing Medicaid, hasn’t held a single hearing to examine the implications of these changes to the American health care system. Instead, it merely held a markup hearing to move the legislation closer to a vote on the House floor.
What makes this situation even worse is that Republicans, from the president on down, are consistently lying about what the bill would do.
Earlier this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that this bill, which would blow a $3 trillion hole in the federal budget, wouldn’t increase the deficit. Leavitt even claimed that there are “$1.6 trillion worth of savings in this bill” and that this number represents “the largest savings for any legislation that has ever passed Capitol Hill in our nation’s history.” (Leavitt provided no source for this figure, and it appears she simply referred to the spending cuts in the bill while ignoring the trillions in lost revenue that will come from the tax cuts.) What is happening on Capitol Hill can hardly be described as legislating. It is as stunning a lie as perhaps any other uttered by members of the Trump administration (and that is saying something). Even one House Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, is publicly calling the White House and his colleagues liars for promoting this fiction. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump traveled to Capitol Hill to lobby Republicans and told reporters that Republicans are “not doing any cutting of anything meaningful. The only thing we’re cutting is waste, fraud and abuse.” This, too, is a bald-faced lie. House Republicans have consistently claimed that the bill’s work requirements for Medicaid recipients are meant to get the “able-bodied” into the workplace. Such people, according to the No. 2 Republican in the House, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, are “living in their mom’s basement playing video games.” In fact, nearly two-thirds of those on Medicaid are already working. Almost all other recipients aren’t working because of caregiving, school, illness or disability. In states where work requirements have been imposed on Medicaid recipients, the result is a drop in coverage, which almost certainly is the reason Republicans are including them in their big, beautiful bill. The fewer people on Medicaid, the greater the cost savings, and the more money there is for tax breaks. Indeed, what is happening on Capitol Hill can hardly be described as legislating. Making laws means hearing from experts, considering data and weighing pros and cons. The GOP’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” is none of those things. It’s highway robbery, and Republicans desperately don’t want the American people to know that they are the ones holding them up.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
