The Stark Math on the GOP Tax Plan: It Doesn’t Cut the Deficit

House Republicans advance bill late Sunday, as budget analysts across the political spectrum warn that the proposal worsens the U.S. fiscal picture
By Richard Rubin
Updated May 19, 2025 9:50 am ET

WASHINGTON—House Republicans pushed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending bill past a key hurdle late Sunday night, but the last-minute grappling has them colliding with a stark reality: The plan won’t reduce federal budget deficits and would make America’s fiscal hole deeper.

The current proposal would increase projected budget deficits by nearly $3 trillion through 2034, locking in tax cuts and spending increases that outweigh reductions in spending on Medicaid and nutrition assistance. While Republicans, who have vowed to reduce red ink, say higher economic growth will fill the gap, budget analysts across the political spectrum have panned the Republican plan, warning that it worsens the U.S. fiscal picture.

Hurting the most vulnerable in our society to give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires

Alt National Park claims these provisions are in the “big beautiful bill” and they’re frightening, yet I’ve seen no reporting on them.

– Closure of the U.S. Department of Education
– 25% expansion of logging in national forests, bypassing environmental reviews and fast-tracking timber production
– Rollbacks on clean energy incentives, cutting tax credits for EVs and renewables, gutting key climate provisions
– More public lands opened up for drilling, mining, and logging, with royalty breaks for fossil fuel companies
– Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, ending U.S. participation in global climate efforts
– Executive Order 14215, forcing independent federal agencies to follow White House legal interpretations and centralizing authority under the presidency
– Pension changes for federal workers hired before 2014, cutting take-home pay by raising required contributions, reducing future payouts, and eliminating early retirement supplements
– REINS Act-style regulation repeal, where major federal rules expire unless Congress re-approves them every 5 years allowing Trump to quietly erase protections without rewriting laws
– Expanded executive control over agency budgets, allowing the White House to move federal funds internally without explicit congressional approval
– Restoration of impoundment powers, giving Trump the ability to block or delay spending already passed by Congress reviving powers stripped after Watergate
– Creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), placing White House–aligned teams inside every federal agency with access to internal systems and influence over hiring and daily operations
– Sharp cuts in regulatory enforcement, with agencies like the EPA, CFPB, and Labor and Transportation Departments halting enforcement of key safety, environmental, and anti-discrimination rules
– Trump’s personal control over economic policy, strengthening his power to direct tariffs, pressure private companies, and dictate pricing with little resistance treating the U.S. economy like his own business

PHONEBANK FOLKS IN KEY DISTRICTS

Excellent comment from Balloon Juice:

RevRick

May 19, 2025 at 2:56 pm

@sab: Except the way they have arranged their Medicaid cuts, the real target is single women with children working part time. The GOP likes to advertise this as kicking able-bodied, non-working men off the rolls, but they are as fictional as unicorns. Their 80-hours per month work requirements will fall hardest on said single women. How do they successfully juggle childcare and those work requirements, especially given how irregular scheduling that part time job can be?
Though they won’t come out and say it, the MAGA desire is to force women into marriages from which they cannot escape. We need to look at these Medicaid cuts not only through the lens of economics, as important as that is, but also through the lens of culture, because for MAGAest of MAGA that is the crux of the matter.

Josh Marshall’s take:

Fight or Don’t Fight and Take the Consequences
May 19, 2025 1:37 p.m.

It’s become almost commonplace in recent years, and especially in the last four months, that the divisions among Democrats are less progressives vs. “centrists” or liberals than one between institutionalists and what we might call Team Fight. There’s a separate issue which is that there needs to be a lot more elaboration or articulation about just what “centrists” or “moderates” even are. The language is typically used as an electoral self-definition for the purposes of intra-party dynamics. But let’s leave that topic for another day. So we have the mounting knowledge that the divisions are more Team Fight vs. Team No Fight than the more ideological definitions. At the same time, though, you have non-progressives (see the problem of definitions?) worried that the highly polarized climate of 2025 will “push the party to the left.” (I have my own thoughts on that latter question.) A lot of those voices came to the fore during the Bernie and AOC barnstorming tour, which I guess is paused, at least for the moment. But for “centrists” or non-progressive liberals, if it’s really true that the real issue is Team Fight vs. Team No Fight (and I believe it is), you’ve got to get out there and do your own barnstorming tours or find other ways to demonstrate the fight.

This is just obvious. In a period of high polarization and high threat, the center of gravity of the party and inevitably the ideological center of gravity of the party will move to those fighting hardest, most successfully, with the fewest apologies.

Here’s an anecdote from my reporting travels. Sen. Chris van Hollen (D-MD) is by common consent a fairly normal liberal senator from a safely blue state. Everybody gets that he scored a big coup both for himself and for the fight against immigration abuses and unlawful detention by his trip to El Salvador. I know there’s been a push from biomedical researchers and, for lack of a better word, Team Science over at the NIH to have members come over to the building and meet with some researchers who can explain just the scope of research and new cures that are being tossed in the garbage each day. Just think one of your family members may end up needing one of those cures the garbage truck picked up just this morning.

That’s how you focus attention. You create kinetics and visuals and actions that reporters gravitate toward. I’m not saying exactly that model is the only way. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But a press release ain’t it. Do a thing that seems out of the norm, man bites dog, and draws attention to an issue in which the public doesn’t like what the White House is doing. Boost the salience, spread the word. Reps and Sens, fucking help me here? Good lord.

But my understanding is that those emissaries have basically been told some version of, “it sounds like a bit much, a bit out there.” “That’s not how we roll.” Or, “it doesn’t fit with the comms strategy.” That is both highly surprising to me (surprising and not surprising) and deeply disappointing? What are we doing here? Are we worried that young people are getting increasingly open-minded about supporting cancer and degenerative disorders? Really? No one supports this shit.

It is true that Democrats need to create room for candidates to depart from party orthodoxies in parts of the country dominated by Republicans. But the big and overwhelming issue that Democrats face right now has very little to do with this. The overriding problem Democrats have today is a general belief that they’re not effective at fighting for what they believe in or what the country needs to be protected from. There’s a related, but secondary issue that they worry that Dems are most focused on issues that are obscure or not connected to the lives of the great majority of people struggling to make ends meet. That lack of fight is shattering for self-identified Democrats as well as highly damaging for genuine independents and low-information voters who genuinely flip from party to party from election to election. That is overwhelmingly the challenge Democrats have right now.