The Republicans Are About to Get Away With the Most Outrageous Lies

Has there ever been a budget bill more mendacious than Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill?

Senator Josh Hawley made a big stink about the bill—but guess how he voted. | Al Drago/Getty Images

“Don’t Cut Medicaid,” Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote May 12 in The New York Times. Hawley said it was “morally wrong and politically suicidal” to cut the program, which provides health coverage to 70 million Americans, more even than Medicare. Hawley is a self-styled friend of the working class who walks picket lines and complains that “Congress is a rich man’s club.” But when the Senate on Saturday advanced to the floor a budget reconciliation bill that contains what the Congressional Budget Office estimates to be $930 billion in Medicaid cuts, you can probably guess who voted “aye.”

It’s not just Hawley who turns out to be a fraud. His whole party is, and the budget bill proves it. No budget legislation I’m aware of ever encompassed so many lies as the Big Beautiful Bill.

Start with its tax cuts, most of whose benefits go to households earning $217,000, and more than one-third of whose benefits go to households earning $460,000 or more, according to the nonprofit Tax Policy Center. These tax cuts owe their very existence to a lie that President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans told a credulous public back in 2017, which was that the cuts would expire at the end of 2025. That was necessary to minimize the tax cut’s long-term increase to the budget deficit. Republicans today admit they were lying in 2017 by rejecting traditional “current law” scoring, which measures a bill’s cost against what would happen if Congress did nothing, in favor of “current-policy” scoring, which measures a bill’s cost against what would happen if current tax and spending levels existed forever. In effect, Trump and his allies in Congress now say: You should have known we were lying when we claimed these tax cuts expired in 2025.

The only item in the 2017 tax bill that was always predestined to expire was the “pay-for,” budget-wonk talk for a provision intended to offset, at least partially, tax cuts. The pay-for in this instance was the elimination of full deductibility for state and local taxes, or SALT, which the 2017 law capped at $10,000. As I explained last week, limiting the SALT deduction was progressive; Republicans were for it only because it mostly affected blue states. But in the reconciliation bill blue-state Republicans persuaded House and Senate leaders to reinstate much of the deduction by lifting the cap to $40,000. That, too, is only “temporary”—ten years in the House bill, five years in the Senate bill—but the GOP’s new current-policy budgeting doctrine practically shouts from the rooftops that that, too, is a lie.

Applying current-law (i.e. real) scoring, the Senate bill would add $3.3 trillion to the budget deficit over the next ten years, according to an estimate released this past weekend by CBO, more than doubling the current $1.4 trillion deficit. You can see why Republicans don’t care for such analysis. But according to CBO’s bullshit current-policy analysis, the Senate bill would reduce the deficit by $500 billion over the next ten years.

The savings in the Senate bill are mainly in cutting Medicaid, with an assist from cutting food stamps by $120 billion. The dollar cost of the Medicaid cuts is greater but the percentage cost of the food-stamp cuts is greater (20 percent versus Medicaid’s 18 percent). Even funky budget scoring can’t obscure that congressional Republicans are taking food out of people’s mouths and denying them health care in order to give rich people a tax cut.

Republicans say they’re doing no such thing. The Medicaid cuts are achieved mostly by imposing a work requirement (even though most Medicaid recipients work already). The savings would be generated by the red tape the work requirement would impose on recipients—those who work and those who don’t—which one way or another can be counted on to drive potential beneficiaries away. Even Hawley, the self-styled Medicaid defender, never conceded that the work requirements constituted benefit cuts. Hawley’s opposition was bought off by small tweaks to a Medicaid provider tax and the creation of a stabilization fund for rural hospitals that will be hammered by the Medicaid cuts. According to the CBO, 12 million fewer people will receive Medicaid under the Senate bill. Hawley, apparently, is all right with that. The bill also includes higher out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries—which, even according to Hawley’s tortured definition, constitute a benefit cut.

The food-stamp cuts include technical changes in how household budgets are calculated that will reduce eligibility, and also changes in the existing work requirement, including an increase in the maximum age of beneficiaries subjected to the requirement, from 49 to 64. Quit malingering, grandpa! Again, congressional Republicans deny that these changes constitute benefit cuts. These are, in fact, the largest cuts—both percentagewise and in dollar amounts—in these programs’ history.

It’s no small task to double the budget deficit while simultaneously laying waste to the social safety net. But for some reason the Trump administration and the Republican majority in Congress don’t want to take credit. Instead, they’re lying their heads off about the Big Beautiful bill. They won’t fool anybody who’s really paying attention. Let’s hope somebody is. If not now, plenty will soon.

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