One Big Beautiful Betrayal

“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

So wrote James Baldwin, and never has that right felt more urgent—or more endangered—than in the shadow cast by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025. Behind the glow of patriotic branding and rehearsed talking points lies a policy so sweeping in its cruelty, so cynical in its intent, that it demands something beyond critique—it demands moral reckoning.

This is not a budget bill. It is a manifesto—an economic and social blueprint for a nation unmoored from compassion, coherence, or conscience. Sold as a monument to conservative responsibility, the bill explodes deficits while dismantling the very programs that offer dignity and hope to those most in need. It gives with one hand to the wealthy and powerful, and with the other, it takes from the poor, the sick, the striving, and the young. It mocks the very concept of shared sacrifice and sets ablaze any pretense of a common good.

The hypocrisy at the core of the bill is not simply fiscal—it is moral. Republican lawmakers who once railed against debt and big government now preside over a plan that grows deficits by $3.3 trillion over the next decade. They promise prosperity through tax cuts, but what they deliver is a redistribution of opportunity away from the public and toward a privileged few. It is a cynical inversion of Lincoln’s vision—government of the people becomes government for the powerful.

And yet they speak of growth, of innovation, of liberty. They declare that we can cut our way to abundance, that if we just demand a little more grit from the hungry, the hurting, and the hopeful, we’ll arrive at some shining American future. But there is no nobility in this austerity. As Franklin Roosevelt warned, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” This bill fails that test—not marginally, not debatably, but categorically.

At its core is a permanent extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Lower individual income tax rates for all brackets are locked in, but the true beneficiaries are not working families—they are the highest earners, the largest estates, the multinational corporations. The top rate stays at 37%, never returning to its pre-2017 level. Pass-through business owners keep their 20% deduction. The estate tax threshold—already a privilege for the few—is preserved at its doubled rate. And the corporate tax hikes passed in 2022 are undone with surgical precision, ensuring that the richest businesses pay less than their secretaries.

And what does the middle class receive in return? A minor tweak to the SALT deduction cap, raised from $10,000 to $30,000—barely a nod to upper-middle-class earners in blue states. Meanwhile, the House’s own analysis concedes that the bill “solidifies a low-tax environment” for the wealthy. This is not a tax reform. It is a reward structure for donors, disguised as policy. It is the dream of the gilded class made law.

But if this bill throws a feast for the fortunate, it leaves the rest of the country to starve—figuratively and literally. The cuts to nutrition assistance programs are devastating. SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—is gutted, with stricter work requirements and reduced benefits. The bill boasts of saving $230 billion through these changes, but those are not abstract numbers. Every dollar “saved” is a meal denied. A child goes to bed hungry. A parent skips dinner so their kid can eat. A family lives with the quiet desperation of the grocery aisle, doing the math, counting cans, knowing that the safety net has vanished beneath them.

The cruelty is not incidental—it is calculated. The bill strips states of their flexibility to waive work requirements in times of crisis or in areas with high unemployment. It eliminates funding for nutrition education. It tightens eligibility for immigrants. These are not efficiency measures; they are ideological statements. They say: if you are poor, you are suspect. If you need help, you have failed. If you hunger, you must first prove your worth.

The same punitive philosophy pervades the bill’s approach to Medicaid. By 2029, every “able-bodied” adult must prove they are working, training, or volunteering to keep their coverage. The expected “savings” of $300 billion will be achieved not through reform, but through attrition. Eligible people will lose coverage because they cannot navigate a bureaucracy designed to confuse and deny. Chronic illness will go untreated. Preventable conditions will become emergencies. Lives will be shortened—not by disease alone, but by policy.

I know what this means in human terms. My father was a Vietnam veteran who died when I was fifteen. My sister was twelve. My mother was in graduate school, working toward her education degree. We survived because programs like Medicaid and food assistance were there when we needed them. I attended college thanks to Pell Grants. Under the rules of this bill, our family’s outcome could have been very different. We could have fallen through the cracks, punished for our grief and our poverty. This bill takes that safety net—the one that caught us—and rips it to shreds.

Its authors speak of self-reliance, of discipline, of responsibility. But as Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The test of good government is not how grand it can make things seem, but how well it meets the needs of its people.” And this government, under this bill, fails that test completely.

Education is not spared. In fact, it is targeted. Student debt relief programs are dismantled. Income-driven repayment plans are gutted. Public Service Loan Forgiveness is repealed. Future executive efforts to relieve debt are blocked. The government projects $351 billion in “savings” here, but what it really saves is the dream of debt-free education—for the rich. Everyone else must pay, and pay dearly.

Young Americans who chose to serve—teachers in low-income districts, nurses in underserved communities, public defenders—are told their work means nothing. Their debt will remain. Their sacrifice is ignored. And the message is unmistakable: education is a private luxury, not a public good.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon thrives. The bill pours $144 billion in new spending into the defense budget. New warships. New fighter jets. New munitions. All fast-tracked under the guise of national security. Even border security receives military support—more agents, more walls, more drones.

It is, as President Eisenhower once warned, the triumph of the military-industrial complex: a government that finds endless resources for weapons, but none for welfare. A government that argues we cannot afford prenatal care, but can always afford a new aircraft carrier.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it out long ago: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” This bill is a suicide note, written in appropriations.

And as if to ensure that our future is just as bleak as our present, the bill assaults environmental protections with the same cold efficiency. It repeals funding for clean energy initiatives, climate resilience, and pollution reduction. It eliminates incentives for electric vehicles and solar energy. It strips the EPA of its power to enforce emissions standards. It pulls America out of the green economy and plants it squarely in the fossil-fueled past.

Over $900 billion in climate-related investments are scrapped—investments that could have created jobs, reduced emissions, and prepared our communities for the disasters ahead. The authors call this “energy independence.” But in truth, it is dependence on denial, on short-term profits, on political spite.

They are gambling with the only planet we have. And those who will pay first and worst are the poor, the young, the marginalized—those who contribute least to the crisis but suffer most from its effects. As Frederick Douglass said, “A man’s soul is tried in adversity, but a nation’s soul is tried in how it spends its treasure.” This bill spends ours on pipelines and tax shelters while the skies burn and the seas rise.

And still, they speak of freedom.

But what freedom is this? Not the freedom to control one’s body. The bill defunds Planned Parenthood by barring Medicaid reimbursements to any provider associated with abortion—even though federal dollars already cannot be used for abortion care. Clinics that provide cancer screenings, birth control, and prenatal care will close. Rural communities will lose their only providers. Lives will be lost—not unborn lives, but the lives of women denied access to preventive care.

Nor is it the freedom to live as oneself. The bill bans Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care for transgender youth, inserting the government between doctors, patients, and families. It is cruelty cloaked in morality, an intrusion masked as protection. And it reveals the lie at the heart of conservative rhetoric: they do not want limited government—they want obedient citizens.

This is not freedom. This is coercion. This is not moral leadership. This is state-sponsored conformity. As Baldwin warned, “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” And here, that alliance is absolute.

This is not a budget—it is a manifesto. It reveals the vision of its architects: a nation where the rich grow richer, the poor are punished, and dissent is suppressed. Where profit is sacred and need is suspect. Where freedom is for the favored, and everyone else must conform, comply, or be cut off.

But we are not without choice. The moral weight of this moment is heavy, but it is not immovable. As Abraham Lincoln reminded us, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”

We must reject this bill not only because it is bad policy, but because it is bad faith. We must demand that our lawmakers remember the purpose of government—not to reward the powerful, but to protect the vulnerable. Not to hoard wealth, but to secure liberty and justice for all.

I believe America can do better because I have seen what it means to be lifted by it. I survived because someone believed that a poor, grieving kid deserved help—not suspicion. That a student’s dreams mattered. That a mother’s struggle was worthy of support. That our family’s future had value, even if our bank account didn’t.

We are at a crossroads. The Senate is next. Light up the switchboards. Write your representatives. Make them understand that their seats are not safe if they choose silence over service, cruelty over care.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Now is the time to demand our country back.