Donald Trump signed his sweeping spending package into law on Friday during a Fourth of July picnic at the White House, significantly cutting back on federal safety-net programmes and increasing funds for aggressive immigration enforcement.
During the picnic, Mr Trump gloated about the Bill’s passing. “It’s the most popular Bill ever signed in the history of the country,” Mr Trump said, while standing next to his wife, Melania Trump. “What we’ve done is put everything into one Bill. We’ve never had anything like that before.”
Mr Trump previously touted the legislation’s passage as a “birthday present for United States”, speaking before a crowd at a campaign-style rally in Iowa on Thursday evening, even as Democrats expressed their displeasure at the spending package.
“If you see anything negative put out by the Democrats, it’s all a con job,” Trump said of opposition to the Bill.
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Mr Trump signed the Bill while surrounded by supporters, including the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who gave Mr Trump the gavel he used to enact it.
After months of deliberations, the Bill passed by a single vote in the Senate and later passed the House with a 219 to 213 vote on Thursday, with only two Republicans voting against it. The sweeping legislation accomplishes what right-wingers have pushed for, for decades, and provides Trump a huge legislative win.
[ Democrats react with fury as Trump’s Bill passesOpens in new window ]
The law will significantly cut taxes, building on the 2017 tax cuts during Trump’s first term. Although temporary tax exemptions for tips, overtime pay and car loan interest are included, research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the Bill is skewed to the rich, with the wealthiest in the US benefiting the most from the tax relief.
“After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship, economically,” Mr Trump said during Friday’s event.
Additionally, the law will add new restrictions to Medicaid, which provides healthcare to low-income and disabled people, and Snap, also known as food stamps, which helps low-income people afford food. Researchers estimate that the Medicaid cutbacks will leave as many as 11.8 million people without healthcare, while eight million people will lose their Snap benefits. Critics say the Medicaid cuts will have massive ripple effects on healthcare nationwide.
“This is highway robbery,” the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The Bill Republicans just passed steals from you to give to the rich.”
Proponents of the law say the Medicaid and Snap changes are designed to root out waste and abuse.
Additionally, the spending package will allocate $170 million to immigration enforcement, a monumental amount of money that will help support the Trump administration’s push to engage in “mass deportations”.
“This disgraceful, anti-immigrant budget hands the Trump administration a blank cheque to further ramp up its shameful efforts to terrorise American communities and separate families,” said Nicole Melaku, the executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, an immigrants’ rights organisation. “Instead of safeguarding people’s access to healthcare and wellness, the bill gives tax cuts to big corporations and funnels billions of dollars to hire more immigration agents, build more immigration jails and deny people their fair day in court.”
[ Trump takes ‘big beautiful Bill’ victory lap as his grip on power tightensOpens in new window ]
Already, the Trump administration has engaged in widespread attacks on immigrant communities, by increasing resources to immigration enforcement operations.
“This budget promises to supercharge US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests that disappear community members, leave children parentless and threaten constitutional and due-process rights for all of us,” said Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, a legal organisation.
A recent Guardian analysis shows that undocumented immigrants without any criminal history have been arrested at an exponentially increasing rate, after top White House officials instructed agents to increase arrests.
Mr Trump temporarily walked back some of Ice’s aggressive immigration enforcement actions after complaints from leaders in the farming and hospitality industries: last month, the Trump administration engaged in a short-lived pause on raids at farms, restaurants and hotels. But at Thursday’s event, Mr Trump again brought up the idea of pausing large-scale enforcement on farms.
“If a farmer is willing to vouch for these people in some way, Kristi, I think we’re going to have to just say that’s going to be good, right?” Mr Trump said to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. “We don’t want to do it where we take all of the workers off the farms.”
In addition to tax cuts, restrictions on Medicaid and Snap and the aggressive supercharging of immigration enforcement, the law seeks to end green energy incentives created under Joe Biden, seen as a further blow against efforts to combat the climate crisis.
The US budget deficit will increase with this law, leading to opposition by some Trump allies. The non-partisan congressional budget office estimates the law will add $3.3 trillion ($2.8 trillion) to the country’s debt through 2034, leading to clashes with some right-wingers.
One of the two Republicans who voted against it, Thomas Massie, said he opposed the spending Bill “because it will significantly increase US budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates”.
Elon Musk, the right-wing billionaire who established the federal government’s office tasked with slashing federal spending during the first few months of the Trump administration, has also publicly called out the spending Bill. Days before Congress passed the Bill, Musk repeated his call for the creation of a new political party to oppose the Republicans and Democrats. – Guardian
