GOP’s Pro-Billionaire Budget Will Make America a Crueler, Weaker Country

For Immediate Release: July 2, 2025

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, the House passed the Senate’s version of Trump’s budget bill, which will give tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy while slashing Medicaid and food-assistance benefits for millions of Americans.

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement on the newly passed budget:

“Trump and Congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class.

“There are 800 billionaires in the United States and 12 100-billionaires. They don’t need any financial help. But that’s precisely what Trump and Congressional Republicans have done, with a monstrosity of a bill that may constitute the single biggest upward transfer of wealth in American history.

“This is certainly one of the cruelest bills in American history, backtracking on the country’s painfully slow history of expanding health care coverage and, equally remarkably, taking food away from the hungry. The bill will strip health coverage from 17 million Americans and put food assistance at risk for upwards of 5 million Americans.

“The bill aims to supercharge the Trump administration’s inhumane industrial deportation policy, providing $150 billion for more horrific detention centers of the kind MAGA is now gleefully celebrating in Florida, as well as more ICE agents.

“While using waste, fraud and abuse as the fraudulent excuse to slash funding for programs for low-income Americans, the bill showers $150 billion in additional spending on the Pentagon, by far the most wasteful government agency. The vast portion of that will go to enrich Pentagon contractors, including tens of billions for a “Golden Dome” missile defense system that can’t work and would make the world more dangerous if it could. This money is only a down payment on the Golden Dome. Its proponents hope to direct literally trillions to this debacle in the years ahead.

“Big Pharma came in at the last minute and got its share of the goodies, scoring changes to Medicare drug price negotiations that will cost taxpayers $5 billion.

“As if all that weren’t enough, the bill races the United States and the world toward climate catastrophe, ending support for renewable energy that is absolutely vital to avert worst case climate scenarios. Incredibly, Republicans have also conferred $18 billion in new subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

“This bill will leave America a far crueler and weaker place. It will drive up prices for consumers, cost more than a million jobs, lead to tens of thousands of deaths every year due to lost health care, punish lower-income people just because they are poor, supercharge wealth inequality and make climate disasters more likely and more severe. That’s a lot of needless suffering just to make the richest Americans richer.”