How Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ is boosting the rich and harming the poor — one year later

One year after President Donald Trump signed the law he dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” on the South Lawn of the White House, it has begun reshaping the country — altering who gets help from the government and who goes without.

The most consequential legislation of Trump’s second term reaches into nearly every corner of American life. It supercharges immigration enforcement, pouring billions into border security and deportations. It rewrites student loan rules. It dismantles tax incentives for electric vehicles and clean energy. It creates a national school-voucher tax credit.

And at its core is a seismic shift: extending roughly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts disproportionately benefiting corporations and the wealthy over 10 years while cutting about $1.1 trillion from healthcare and food assistance programs serving poor and working-class people.

It ultimately adds a projected $4.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Historians say the law represents a watershed moment in a decadeslong conservative effort to shrink the social welfare system built during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and expanded through Great Society legislation of the 1960s. To Chris Howard, a professor of public policy at the College of William & Mary and an expert on America’s safety net programs, the result amounts to “Robin Hood in reverse.”

“It deliberately targets some of the most vulnerable members of society,” he said, “while providing huge windfalls to the richest individuals and to big business.”

Supporters frame the act as a long-overdue correction. They argue it’s reducing dependence on government programs, rooting out waste, encouraging work and making American businesses more competitive. They point to larger tax refunds for many households — including the middle class — and an uptick in business investment as early evidence.

“Overall, it’s been a good thing. … It’s really helped our guys out.”

But many health policy experts, economists and antipoverty advocates see it as something else: one of the largest transfers of resources from low-income Americans to the rich in U.S. history.

Once all of the law’s major provisions are fully phased in, Congressional Budget Office estimates show, the poorest households will end up with roughly $1,200 less each year on average, while the wealthiest Americans will gain about $13,600.

“I don’t think it could be much clearer,” said Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank that analyzes federal budget and tax policy. “They extended tax cuts for very wealthy people, they expanded tax cuts for very large estates, they put in new tax cuts for quite profitable businesses, and they did that in the same bill that they made millions of people lose food assistance and health coverage.”

The law is also the legislative engine powering Trump’s mass deportation agenda, pairing an unprecedented expansion of immigration enforcement funding with cuts to healthcare and food assistance for many immigrants living in the U.S. legally.

The political fight over its impacts is only beginning.

Polling suggests Republicans may face an uphill battle selling a law that was unpopular with voters from the start, while Democrats are preparing to make it a centerpiece of their midterm elections message.

The White House, meanwhile, is emphasizing new tax breaks included in the law, as well as the extension of major tax cuts passed in 2017 during the first Trump administration, which lowered the tax rate for most filers. The White House pointed to a Treasury Department analysis that found that nearly 70% of filers receiving a tax cut this year earned less than $100,000.

“Tens of millions of Americans have a lower tax bill and are no longer paying taxes on tips, Social Security, or overtime — this policy fulfilled many key promises from the President’s campaign,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “From lowering drug prices to creating good-paying jobs, President Trump and his entire Administration will continue pursuing policies that provide relief to American families.”

Still, the biggest gains go to the wealthy. For roughly every $1 the law cuts from major programs serving low-income Americans, it delivers $1 in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress based on projections by the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office.

Many of the law’s largest program cuts won’t begin to take effect until next year, but the first consequences are already visible: families struggling to afford food, hospitals preparing for shrinking revenues and immigrant communities living in fear of deportation and the loss of basic benefits.

Those early impacts are only a fraction of what’s to come, according to Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on the economic well-being of working people.

The result, she said, will be “the largest short-term rise in inequality in U.S. history.”

Since the creation in 1965 of Medicare, which insures older Americans, and Medicaid, which covers low-income Americans and those with disabilities, the broad arc of federal health policy has been toward expanding access to care. The “big, beautiful bill” bends sharply in the opposite direction — representing the biggest cut to the healthcare safety net the country has ever seen.

The first cracks are already showing.

In Georgia, a rural hospital stopped delivering babies. In Nebraska, a clinic serving a farming community shut down. Outside Las Vegas, a hospital laid off 70 workers and eliminated key services. All pointed to the looming federal Medicaid cuts as a factor.

Joan Alker, executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, called these changes “a harbinger of what’s to come.”

What’s to come, according to researchers and advocacy groups: Hundreds of hospitals already struggling with thin margins could close or slash services, millions of working-class families may be pushed into medical debt, private insurance premiums could rise to account for the cost of uncompensated care, and tens of thousands of people could die each year because of lost coverage under Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

“It’s devastating,” Alker said. “We’ve never had cuts like this before.”

The law is projected to slash federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over the next decade while tightening eligibility for Obamacare subsidies; 10 million fewer people are expected to have coverage by 2034 as a result. The Trump administration argues the changes are necessary to preserve programs for the most vulnerable by encouraging work, reducing fraud and reining in spending.

Policy experts warn the cuts will ripple through the healthcare system. As more patients lose insurance, hospitals will be forced to absorb billions in unpaid care, with the strain falling hardest on rural providers. Congress included a $50 billion rural health fund to soften the blow, but experts say it won’t come close to making up for lost revenue.

The first major change to Medicaid arrives Jan. 1, when many able-bodied adults insured through the program will have to prove they’re working, attending school or volunteering.

Supporters say this will ensure taxpayer-funded benefits are reserved for those who truly need them. But critics point to what happened when Arkansas attempted a similar policy: Thousands of people lost coverage, many of them already working but caught in paperwork snafus, increasing administrative costs while producing little evidence of higher employment.

The first test of the nationwide work mandate is underway in Nebraska, where state officials rushed ahead of the federal deadline. Advocates fear thousands in the state could wrongfully lose coverage as soon as this summer.

Sarah Maresh of Nebraska Appleseed, a nonprofit organization that advocates for workers, immigrants and child welfare, said many of those in danger of losing care as a result of new red tape are already working but don’t earn enough to afford private insurance.

“They’re gas station attendants. They’re people who work in restaurants. They’re front-line workers,” Maresh said. “Our health system frankly can’t support this many more people losing coverage.”

Work requirements are only the beginning.

Over the next several years, states will face new restrictions on how they fund their share of Medicaid, which experts say will force cash-strapped legislatures to make difficult budget choices.

Among the most at risk: Medicaid-funded home-care programs that help older adults and people with disabilities stay out of nursing homes. Because those services are optional under federal law, experts say, they’re often the first to go when budgets tighten.

Families who depend on those programs are already bracing for what comes next.

“If I did not have the waiver, I don’t think that I would be alive right now.”

Trump’s law rests on an economic wager: that $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for individuals and businesses will spur investment, accelerate job creation and leave Americans better off.

“This bill will fuel massive economic growth,” Trump said during the July Fourth celebration at the White House where he signed the legislation.

The law locks in tax cuts for corporations and individuals signed into law by Trump in 2017 and expands exemptions for multimillion-dollar inheritances. It also adds new tax breaks for tipped and overtime workers and some Social Security recipients, increases the child tax credit by $200, expands incentives for business investment and allows residents of high-tax states to deduct more of their state and local taxes.

Another provision creates tax-advantaged “Trump accounts” for children born from 2025 to 2028, seeded with a $1,000 federal contribution.

The average taxpayer got about $350 more in their refund this year because of the changes, an 11% increase compared to last year, according to the IRS. Had the law not extended the 2017 tax cuts that were set to expire last year, many Americans would have seen a tax increase, supporters of the bill have noted.

But those benefits haven’t been shared equally. Economists say the gains have disproportionately gone to higher-income households. An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that about 60% of the tax savings from the law are projected to go to the top 20% of households, those earning more than $217,000.

It’s too soon to say how the tax changes will affect the wider economy, especially amid other pressures, like tariffs and higher fuel costs. Investment by businesses could take time to translate into new jobs.

Still, the tax cuts have likely boosted overall economic growth, including through tax breaks helping fuel the AI data center boom, said Torsten Slok, chief economist with Apollo Global Management, a major Wall Street investment firm. Those tax changes, called bonus depreciation, allow companies to write off 100% of the cost of expensive hardware and equipment used in data centers in the first year rather than spreading it out over time.

“The one big, beautiful bill is indeed playing a very important role in why growth has been so strong in the first half of this year,” Slok said.

“Not only did I solve my backlog and increase my chance to take on new work, I protected people’s jobs.”

However, there aren’t clear signs the law has improved the job market. Unemployment has been relatively unchanged, and while there are indications that hiring picked up over the spring, the number of people out of work for more than six months has risen. Wages have failed to keep upwith a recent jump in inflation driven by rising energy costs, and consumer sentiment in May fell to a record low.

The Treasury Department heralded the law’s benefits for 7.5 million tipped workers and 29 million overtime workers who deducted, on average, thousands of dollars in earnings under the changes, potentially lowering their tax bills.

Critics, however, argue those provisions function more as political messaging than meaningful relief. The deductions are subject to income limits and other restrictions, reducing their value for some workers. Others, including many truck drivers and airline workers, aren’t eligible to deduct overtime.

Plus, the provisions are temporary.

The tax breaks for overtime and tipped workers are set to expire at the beginning of 2029, just as Trump is set to leave office. The tax cuts primarily benefiting wealthy households and corporations? Those are permanent.

The law is also hitting kitchen tables. States are rolling out $187 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the steepest in the food stamp program’s more than 60-year history.

A key driver is an expanded mandate that all able-bodied adults under 65 document that they are working, going to school or volunteering at least 80 hours a month unless they have a child under 14. The law also removes exemptions to the work requirement for veterans and homeless people and strips benefits from many immigrants.

As with Medicaid, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have said the changes are necessary to encourage more Americans to work.

Since the law was enacted, the number of people receiving food benefits had fallen by more than 4 million as of March, according to the latest data.

In West Virginia, Rachel Culbertson, the SNAP benefits coordinator at the Facing Hunger Foodbank, said she’s heard from those in food pantry lines about their struggles in meeting the work requirement. About 15,000 people have lost food stamps in the state since last summer, a figure that’s expected to rise.

Jobs are scarce in many of the state’s rural counties, and finding a place to volunteer or a training program to participate in can be a challenge, Culbertson said. Before the law passed, around 1 in 6 people in West Virginia received food benefits, one of the highest rates nationally.

Some have struggled to get transportation, especially with higher gas prices, she said. Others are physically unable to work because of their age but aren’t legally disabled.

“If they can’t find work, if they can’t find the volunteer hours, if they can’t find the training, then they’re not getting anything, and they’re forced to come to our pantry. It’s really hard on them,” Culbertson said.

“People don’t know what to do. Seniors have no idea how to navigate all this and survive.”

No state has seen a more dramatic drop than Arizona, where more than 450,000 people had lost their food benefits as of May, according to state data. Advocates say many of them are eligible but struggling to comply with documentation requirements the state added to avoid hefty federal penalties for errors. That’s a new requirement in the “big, beautiful bill” that Republican backers argued would root out waste and fraud.

The manager of Alabama’s SNAP program warned last month that the state could be forced to end its program entirely because of changes in the law that will require states to cover a larger share of the costs, a concern echoed by governors in more than 20 other states.

A growing number of people are already going hungry. A February surveyby the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that 10% of households nationwide said they had been forced to skip meals because they didn’t have enough food, the highest level in the six years of the survey, including during the height of the pandemic. Among households making less than $50,000 a year, nearly 20% said they didn’t have enough food.

Trump rode back to the White House on a promise to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in American history. The “big, beautiful bill” provides the money, manpower and infrastructure to make it possible.

The law devotes roughly $170 billion to immigration enforcement and border security, transforming ICE into the most heavily funded federal law enforcement agency. At the center of that investment: $45 billion to build a network of warehouse-style detention facilities that one top ICE leader likened to Amazon Prime, “but with human beings” — although officials have begun walking back those plans.

At the same time, the law strips healthcare and food assistance from many immigrants living in the country legally while erecting new financial barriers to asylum, work permits and other immigration pathways, making it harder for them to build lives here.

“This is a strategy to make life here untenable and unattractive so folks either leave or don’t come in the first place,” said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center.

Republicans say the strategy is working. Five times more immigrants were deported in the first year of Trump’s term compared to the end of the Biden administration, and unauthorized crossings at the southern border hit a 50-year low.

Among those swept up in the changes are many who entered the country legally. The law strips Medicaid and SNAP eligibility from broad categories of immigrants — including refugees, people who have been granted asylum and certain survivors of domestic violence and sex trafficking. Researchers estimate 1.4 million immigrants living in the country legally will lose health coverage; about 90,000 fewer are expected to receive food assistance each month.

Daniel Pflueger, associate director of resettlement services at IRIS, a refugee aid organization in Connecticut, said the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP will devastate families who fled war and persecution.

Pflueger described a Syrian father of four who is on dialysis and a Sudanese mother who lost a leg during wartime. Without Medicaid and food assistance, he said, refugee families like those could struggle to pay rent and buy food.

“We are at risk of creating a dispersed refugee camp in the United States,” Pflueger said.

“For a superpower, the richest country in the world, to be treating the most vulnerable in this way, it’s mind-boggling.”

Other provisions in the bill impose new fees on immigrants at nearly every stage of the legal process — ranging from $100 a year for asylum applicants to $5,000 for those apprehended crossing the border. Republicans have said the fees are needed to offset the costs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Critics say they also serve a broader purpose: making the legal process so costly that people give up.

Altogether, advocates say, the law has left many immigrants navigating a brutal new arithmetic.

“Do you forgo some food purchases in order to be able to access the healthcare that your child needs?” Altman said. “These are impossible choices no one should ever be confronted with.”

Art and photo direction: Zara Katz, Chelsea Stahl, Elise Wrabetz

Visuals and development: Javier Zarracina, Jiachuan Wu, Ashley Mowreader, Joe Murphy, Joelle Gross

Image credit index: Jesse Reiser, Annie Flanagan, David Jaewon Oh, Martina Tuaty, Daniel Lozada for NBC News; Getty Images; AFP; Bloomberg; SIPA; AP; Houston Chronicle; The Washington Post; Chicago Tribune, The White House