The bill is going to pass. Maybe not in its original form, but close enough to do what it was built to do—break people.
It just made it through the Senate with Vice President Vance breaking the tie. Now, back to the House. It will not spare the margins. It will not blink at the center. It is not reform. It is redistribution—from the vulnerable to the already protected, from working families to billionaire donors, from public to private, from care to control.
The Senate Democrats fought back with the only tools they had. They forced the bill’s full reading. They drafted amendments so precise they felt like courtroom exhibits—one for every hospital bed, every empty lunch tray, every dollar clawed back from the wrong hands. They knew they’d lose the votes. That wasn’t the point. The point was to put it on the record. To name what was being done, and who was doing it. To make sure history has receipts. And that matters.
But it won’t stop the harm. The budget is policy, and policy is power, and power is moving now without shame. Medicaid will be slashed. Food aid will vanish in state after state. Student loans will tighten while private equity gets new loopholes. The cruelty is deliberate. It’s not a flaw in the system. It is the system, reasserting itself with a smirk. The most immediately at-risk populations under the 2025 Budget Resolution will begin feeling the effects almost as soon as implementation begins.
The harm will not be abstract. It will be personal, measurable, and devastating to the most vulnerable. Low-income households—especially children, seniors, and single adults—will be among the first to suffer. Medicaid, the primary health lifeline for tens of millions, will face a near trillion dollar reduction over ten years. That will translate into capped federal funding, stricter eligibility, and punitive work requirements.
Children will lose access to pediatric care. Seniors in long-term facilities will face eviction. People with disabilities will be denied home-based services that keep them alive. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over 16 million people will lose coverage. That is not a projection—it is a countdown.
SNAP benefits will be slashed by nearly 30% over the decade. This will mean smaller grocery budgets and reduced eligibility. Adults aged 50 to 55, newly swept into work mandates, will be particularly vulnerable—many will lack the physical ability or employment opportunities to comply. Studies already predict up to 1.2 million jobs will be lost due to ripple effects in low-income communities.
Households in the bottom income quintile will see average income losses of 7.4%, even as the top 1% benefit from tax breaks that amount to a 4% gain. This won’t be fiscal discipline. It will be engineered inequality—extraction masked as reform.
Rural and Southern communities will be disproportionately affected. These regions depend heavily on Medicaid, SNAP, and the fragile ecosystem of rural hospitals. Many hospitals will close or drastically reduce services as Medicaid reimbursements shrink. Southern states that refused Medicaid expansion under the ACA will be hit the hardest. With no fiscal buffer and few local resources, uninsured rates will climb and access will crater.
People will die in these communities. Think about the mantra neurologists say when they speak about the treatment of stroke “time is brain”. There will be unnecessary mortality because Jeff Bezos, once he moves to Wife #3, will want to rent out Monte Carlo for his next wedding.
People with disabilities and chronic illnesses will endure deep and specific harm. Medicaid is the largest payer for long-term care, home and community services, and durable medical equipment. Budget caps will turn essential services into luxuries. Waitlists will grow. Coverage denials will rise. Networks of care will dissolve.
Women and children in poverty will see safety nets disintegrate. Medicaid and SNAP support prenatal care, nutrition, housing stability, and school meals. Cuts will lead to spikes in child poverty, hunger, and housing insecurity. School-based food programs will shrink or disappear altogether.
Mixed-status and undocumented families will face a parallel assault. With $168 billion allocated for border operations and deportation infrastructure, federal enforcement will escalate. Parents will be detained or deported. U.S.-born children will be left without guardians, without resources, without protection. Benefits will be denied based on household status. Fear will drive disengagement from schools, clinics, and aid agencies. Entire families will vanish from public life—not because they’ve left, but because the system will erase them.
Elderly Americans without private wealth will face bleak choices. Social Security and Medicare may escape direct cuts for now, but the surrounding scaffolding—Medicaid-funded long-term care, heating and housing assistance, food support—will be torn down. Seniors in need of assisted living will be turned away. Those relying on food or heating assistance will find eligibility narrowed, or programs simply gone.
Rising deficits, created in part by the very tax cuts layered into the resolution, will later be used as justification for future cuts to Medicare itself. Safety nets that took decades to build will come undone in months.
The damage will spread from emergency rooms to classrooms, from home health aides to food pantries, from housing courts to employment centers. The system won’t collapse all at once. It will shed layers of protection, one by one, until survival becomes a full-time job.
The question now is not what Democrats will do next. It’s what you’re going to do. You don’t have to wait for 2026 to fight back. You don’t need permission to defend your neighbor. Start building systems of survival right now. Mutual aid. Community bailouts. School meal drives. Tenant unions. Medication circles. Everything the government just decided isn’t its problem anymore.
Push your state and local governments to step up. Every blue state with a budget surplus needs to start acting like it’s in a triage ward. Replace what the feds cut. Fund what the bill stripped. Stop pretending this is abstract. It's not. People are going to go hungry. People are going to get sick. Some are going to die because a party of cowards and donors signed off on it in a marble room.
Track the money. Find the companies that wrote the language, the lobbyists who shaped it, the billionaires who bankrolled it. Don’t let their names drift out of sight. Make them own what they’ve built. Organize, not just around ideas, but around targets.
And create. Not escape, not denial—art and content and speech as confrontation. Music that refuses to flatter. Words that won’t be softened. Not everything has to be beautiful right now. Some things just have to be true. Because what’s coming isn’t a wave. It’s a dismantling.
Coda
“What’s Going On” – Marvin Gaye
Because it’s the sound of a man watching his country fall apart and refusing to look away. Because its softness is a kind of defiance—a refusal to scream, but also a refusal to shut up. Because it names war, poverty, neglect, and brutality with the intimacy of someone who’s lived it. Because the groove is unrelenting but mournful, like a march that knows it may never reach the capital. Because fifty years later, the question still echoes: “Who are they to judge us, simply 'cause our hair is long?”—or hungry, or poor, or undocumented, or disabled, or Black, or brown, or barely hanging on. Because Marvin sang it like a prayer, and we still need one.
“The Creator Has a Master Plan” – Pharoah Sanders
Long, hypnotic, ecstatic—but full of rage just beneath the surface. Recorded after King’s assassination, it channels chaos into transcendence. It sounds like a search for survival in the wreckage, and ends up feeling like spiritual resistance. The shimmering modal lines—it’s not peace as comfort, it’s peace as confrontation.
Shostakovich – Symphony No. 5, IV. Allegro non troppo
Composed under the eyes of Stalin’s censors, this movement plays like a victory anthem—loud, triumphant, relentless. But listen closer. That triumph is hollow. The rhythm is forced, mechanical, almost grotesque. It’s a work that survives by disguising defiance as obedience. That’s the American mood now. The mask over the collapse.
The flag I will fly this 4th of July is black, with two blue stripes, one on either side of a white stripe in the center. It's called a mourning flag, to signal the loss of a dear one, presumably to war. And this is a war, of right vs wrong, good vs evil, and the one under threat of death, or already lost, is every one of us.
“Organize, not just around ideas, but around targets.” Exactly right Mark. Thank you for another terrific post.