How Republicans Plan to Steal From the Poor to Give to the Rich

The Congressional Budget Office has reported that Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill will continue the longtime Republican tradition of giving tax cuts to the wealthy while spiting the poor. 

A CBO estimate Tuesday found that the GOP bill would decrease household resources for the poorest 10 percent in America, with households expected to lose 2 percent of their income by 2027 and 4 percent of their income by 2027 through the loss of programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. 

In contrast, the top 10 percent of Americans would see their income increase by  4 percent for households by 2027 and 2 percent by 2033, “mainly because of reductions in the taxes they owe.”

The CBO also noted that Trump’s bill would add $3.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. 

“The nonpartisan CBO’s unprecedented analysis has confirmed what Democrats have known to be true—the GOP Tax Scam will hurt working families the most while delivering massive tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk,” Democratic Senate Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement. “Any claims otherwise are intentionally deceptive regarding the Republican plans to rip health care away from nearly 14 million Americans and take food out of the mouths of millions of people, including children and seniors.… For a party that claims to be for the working class, this analysis indicates the opposite.”

The Republicans are dismissing the report entirely. 

“The CBO score is wrong, the CBO has been wrong repeatedly, it was wrong when it projected budget surpluses with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green New Deal,” GOP Representative Andy Barr claimed on CNN Wednesday morning. “It was wrong when they scored the first Trump tax cuts, they were wrong by over a trillion dollars. Why? Because the CBO doesn’t do this scoring dynamically, and what we know about this bill, it’s jet fuel for this economy.” 

“Congressman, you say the CBO is wrong, but you have—your fellow Republicans are concerned because the CBO is the only nonpartisan scorekeeper that Congress has,” CNN anchor Kate Bolduan replied.

It’s ironic that Barr brought up Trump’s 2017 bill, which also contained massive tax cuts for the rich that the GOP claimed would pay for themselves. They lied then too.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has attempted to expand its influence beyond agencies within the executive branch to distant corners of the federal government, and then some.

NPR reported Tuesday that it had identified nearly 40 organizations that DOGE had attempted to access—some of which were outside of the bounds of the federal government.

Employees at the Office of Government Accountability, or GAO, received a message from a DOGE staffer last week, asking to discuss having a team from Musk’s non-agency assigned to work with them. The offer was quickly rebuffed, as the GAO works for Congress, not the executive branch. It also happens to function as the investigative arm responsible for reporting on the president’s compliance with the Impoundment Control Act—which Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to violate.

GAO wasn’t the only organization to push back against DOGE’s overreach. Late last month, Trump attempted to fire three board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an independent nonprofit that disburses taxpayer funds to public stations for educational and cultural programming, but the president’s request was denied.

Shortly after, Trump signed an executive order directing the CPB to stop allocating funds to PBS and NPR. The CPB disburses $535 million in taxpayer funds, an amount that is apportioned by Congress, placing the funding outside of Trump’s realm of control. But the Trump administration wasn’t done: A message arrived with the other two board members from DOGE asking to discuss bringing in a team of cost-cutters.

Crucially, CPB is not part of the executive branch or even the federal government. And funnily enough, DOGE didn’t even send its request to the right email addresses.

Other nongovernmental organizations where DOGE attempted to assign teams include Legal Services Corporation, a nonprofit established by Congress in 1974 that funds 130 legal aid organizations, and NeighborWorks America, which provides grants, training, and assistance to community development groups and was created by Congress in 1978.

The laws creating those organizations state that “the corporation shall not be considered a department, agency, or instrumentality of the Federal Government.”

DOGE also reached out to the Vera Institute of Justice, a private nonprofit that was not created by Congress.

Republicans are forcing through the president’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill despite opposition from within their party, and despite opposition from the American public.

While debating the details of the Medicaid-slashing tax cuts late Tuesday, Massachusetts Democratic Representative Jim McGovern pointed out that the lawmakers in the room were not elected to strip away public services from their constituents.

“I wasn’t sent here to vote for trash like this,” he charged.

The bill proposes $880 billion in Medicaid cuts in order to afford an extension to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan, which would overwhelmingly benefit multimillionaires and corporations.

“If I am understanding the numbers correctly, the latest version of their tax scam, the top 0.1 percent stand to gain $255,000 on average in 2027 alone,” McGovern said before the committee. “That is $700 a day every day.

“The people who make over $1 million a year will also get their pockets lined. On average, these millionaires will have an additional $81,500 per year but pennies for everybody else,” the Massachusetts lawmaker continued. “For those earning less than $50,000 a year, the average benefit is $265, less than one dollar per day.

“And that’s laughable when you begin to look at the gaps that are going to be created by these cuts in other programs,” he added.

The Republican bill would kick 8.6 million Americans off of Medicaid over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, though that number could be much larger considering some of the stipulations the GOP hopes to add to the program to limit eligibility, such as adding work requirements to the public health insurance program.

That could eventually strip upward of 36 million Americans of their health coverage—half of Medicaid’s 72 million enrollees, according to a February report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which warned that eligible Medicaid recipients could get strung up in the bureaucracy of increasingly frequent eligibility checks, potentially lapsing coverage for individuals who are entitled to the benefit.

But tampering with the third rail of American politics comes at Trump’s behest, as his acolytes in Congress work to make an enormously expensive tax cut—that won’t add any noticeable benefit for the majority of Americans—more palatable to their base. Trump’s bill is estimated to add somewhere between $3.8 trillion and $5.3 trillion to the national debt.

“This is not a governing philosophy. It is a scam,” McGovern said. “For the life of me, I cannot understand why you are doing this. Why the hell did you choose a career of public service just to do this? Just to rip away the health care and food assistance and security of working- and middle-class Americans.

“I don’t understand this, I don’t understand the cruelty,” McGovern added.

Eric Trump on Wednesday broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf course in Vietnam. The deal will “focus on developing 5-star hotels, championship-style golf courses, and luxurious residential estates and unparalleled amenities” near Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, according to a statement in October.

Eric Trump will also meet with Vietnamese officials on Thursday to discuss plans for a skyscraper in the southern business district.

“Vietnam has tremendous potential for luxurious hospitality and entertainment,” said Trump, who serves as senior vice president of his father’s Trump Organization. “We are incredibly excited to enter this dynamic market.”

This news comes as Vietnam is in the midst of an attempt to avoid Trump’s 46 percent retaliatory tariffs on the country. Vietnam has made multiple concessions to the White House already, including a deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink and a pledge to crack down on counterfeit goods. President Trump also just made a massive arms deal with Saudi Arabia and accepted a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar.

The Trump administration is deporting immigrants to countries they aren’t from and refusing to tell judges where exactly, claiming that the information is classified.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ordered the government to maintain its custody of immigrants on a plane that the immigrants’ attorneys said was headed to South Sudan, and said that authorities might be violating an injunction he issued in late March. The judge’s order came after a hearing in which administration officials refused to say where the flight was or even where it was going.

Lawyers for the immigrants told Murphy that at least two of them were told they were being sent to South Sudan, a country with instability, violence, and political unrest that the State Department warns Americans not to visit. One Justice Department lawyer told Murphy that a Vietnamese man was deported, but refused to provide any details about the flight, including how many other immigrants were on it.

“Where is the plane?” Murphy asked DOJ lawyer Elianis Perez.

“I’m told that that information is classified, and I am told that the final destination is also classified,” Perez responded, claiming that no court order was violated because the man wasn’t afraid of deportation.

But then Murphy asked Perez the authority the government was invoking to classify the location of the flight.

“I don’t have the answer to that,” Perez responded.

Murphy had ordered the government in March not to deport immigrants to countries they aren’t from without allowing them time to challenge their removal in court. He warned the administration that any government official who took part in Tuesday’s flight and knew about the order, including the pilots, could face criminal penalties.

“Based on what I have been told,” Murphy said, “this seems like it may be contempt.”

On multiple occasions, the administration has sent immigrants to countries they aren’t from, all over the world, including Rwanda, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. The administration has resisted any attempts at oversight, and even judicial orders to stop or slow their actions, refusing to turn planes around. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even claimed he doesn’t have to listen to court orders.

Weeks after a judge ordered the government to allow immigrants some recourse to challenge their deportations, Trump officials still won’t listen. Will the courts have to enforce criminal sanctions against government officials to compel this administration to follow the law?