To Be Equal: Trump’s Disastrous Big Ugly Bill Is an Assault on the Working Poor
“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.”
—Nelson Mandela
I invite you to take a moment and reflect on the last time you received a medical bill in the mail. Think about the times an invoice from routine bloodwork from an annual physical, or charges from a past hospital visit that weren’t fully covered by your insurance, found its way into your monthly budget and disrupted your latest travel plans or opportunities to save for your future.
If that resonates with you in 2025, consider yourself fortunate. For 1 in 5 Americans and almost half of the children in this country, healthcare costs are more than a minor interruption in summer plans; they are the difference between eating and going hungry, and in some cases, life or death.
When Senator Joni Ernst told her constituents that “we are all going to die,” in a heated town hall about the millions [of] Americans who would lose health care coverage under the budget she supported, she wasn’t lying. Health economists from the University of Pennsylvania estimate that the original House bill’s health provisions would lead to 51,000 preventable deaths per year. The current Senate bill before the House increases the Medicaid cuts to over $1 trillion.
In the bill that passed in the Senate [last] week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that nearly 12 million more Americans could become uninsured by 2034.
To put this into context, let’s break it down by the numbers.
• 71.4 million. That represents the number of Americans who enrolled in Medicaid today.
• 41%. That is the number of children in the United States who are on Medicaid as of January 2025.
The cuts in this bill have been framed as an attempt to thwart fraud in a nearly 60-year-old healthcare program, promising to make enrollees responsible for receiving coverage by enforcing new work requirements. But when 64% of current enrollees who are physically able already work full or part-time according to KFF, this rhetoric is just fodder for conservative talking heads to convince the public to support a piece of legislation that will make the top earners wealthier and force millions to choose between healthcare and the dinner table.
And for the 42 million Americans who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps or SNAP, they stand to lose both as this bill targets the program to pay for a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires, which will add $3.4 trillion to the national deficit by 2034.
Simply put. This bill isn’t just a disaster; it’s an assault on the working poor.
According to findings from the Budget Lab at Yale, the bottom fifth of earners will see their annual after-tax incomes fall on average by 2.3 percent within the next decade, while those at the top would see about a 2.3 percent boost, as reported by the NYTimes.
In a nation with a workforce threatened by the rapid expansion, integration, and unregulated use of AI and automation, we cannot afford to repeal fundamental programs to help Americans get by in exchange for tax cuts for the wealthiest of us.
We cannot enforce policies that restrict reproductive rights from struggling families and strip them of Medicaid, when 41% of child births in this country are covered by that very program, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This bill is another disastrous policy proposal from an administration whose agenda is full of dangerous contradictions and divisive rhetoric that continue to cost Americans their futures and their lives.
When the National Urban League introduced our D3 framework two years ago, we committed to combating poverty through our direct services and our policy arm, which has been fighting for communities for over 100 years.
Now is not the time to cower in fear or submit to intimidation like so many of our so-called elected leaders do today. It is a time to stand for what is right and defend those among us who are unable to defend themselves. —July 5, 2025
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Come back next week to read from Marian Wright Edelman
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This Independence Day, Remember Fighting Back is America’s Great Tradition
I told my son recently that we’re descendants of the youngest combatant in the battle of Lexington and Concord. Our ancestor’s teenage ears were among the first to hear “the shot heard ‘round the world.”
Then I reminded him of something he already knew. That on the other side of his family tree are men and women who were enslaved. Who risked everything to get free and to free others. Who fought for their own rights and those of their communities after emancipation.
“You see,” I told him, “we come from freedom fighters. On both sides. Black and white. We fought back against monarchy. We fought back against slavery. And now we are being called to fight back against oligarchy. And just like before, we will win.”
This is our story. It is also America’s.
There is nothing as definitively American as fighting back—against injustice, the denial of fundamental rights, and the exclusion of vast swaths of people from the American promise.
This country has never been perfect. But it has always been capable of profound change. It has risen time and again to advance the cause of freedom and human dignity—because people stood up and demanded it. That is what we celebrate on the Fourth of July. Not just our independence from a king. But our ongoing willingness to push this nation toward liberty and justice for all.
It is not a straight line. Progress has always been followed by backlash. Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. The civil rights era gave way to mass incarceration. Each new expansion of democracy has been met by those determined to hoard power for themselves.
Today, the threat is oligarchy—a government run for the rich and powerful, by the rich and powerful, at the expense of everyone else.
You do not need a Ph.D. in political science to see what is happening. The same politicians trying to gut voting rights are pushing laws that make billionaires richer and the rest of us poorer. The same leaders who talk about “freedom” taking away basic rights from workers, women, and families. The fossil fuel industry is being handed billions in subsidies and incentives to pollute the air our children breathe. Public lands are under threat. So are public schools, public libraries, and even public information and history.
When the Trump administration took down the government website hosting congressionally mandated research and data about climate change and its impacts on the US, could it really be seen as anything other than a gift to fossil fuel oligarchs?
Climate scientist Peter Gleick, who coauthored the first National Climate Assessment in 2000, called it “scientific censorship at its worst” and “the modern version of book burning.”
And what about Senate Republicans’ attempts to give massive handouts to fossil fuel interests— including the forced sale of millions of acres of our cherished public lands—while trying to deal a death blow to the clean energy transition with new taxes on wind and solar projects? All of that hurts everyday Americans in so many ways: the health impacts of all the added pollution, the cost of those health
impacts on working families, the higher energy bills, the end of the good green economy manufacturing jobs boom, and the ceding of global economic leadership for the next century to the Chinese government—just to name a few!
That was a gift to fossil fuel oligarchs so egregious it even helped reignite the public tiff between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who lamented the “utterly insane and destructive handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”
And now, they are trying to rewrite the very idea of America.
This Orwellian-named “America First” agenda is not patriotic. It is predatory. It is not about preserving American greatness. It is about protecting corporate greed. It is about shielding the few from accountability. It is about convincing us to turn on each other while they loot the country.
But the good news is Americans are fighting back. As we always have.
The public backlash to attempts to sell off our public lands was swift and fierce, from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike. And we got it pulled from the Senate’s massive budget bill.
The resistance to smash-and-grab policies that enrich oligarchs and harm the rest of us will only continue to grow. That is because—and it is crucial that we remember this on Independence Day—we are a country built not on fear, but on hope. Not on exclusion, but on inclusion. Not on silence, but on speech. We are the America of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez. Of Harriet Tubman, who led people to freedom through forests and fields that are now public lands. And of my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather who fought on a battlefield that 250 years later is also now a national park.
The America that keeps fighting, even when the odds seem long.
As I told my son, we are part of that tradition. And this Fourth of July, we recommit to it. That is what it means to be American.
—July 1, 2025
Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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