If a budget is a mirror of values, what does the “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) say about America?
On July 4, President Donald Trump signed into law Congressional Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill.” If you held up the bill to a mirror, most Americans would probably say that what they saw in the reflection was anything but beautiful.
A budget is much more than numbers. It is a representation of one’s values and priorities. So goes for the federal budget and our nation’s ideals.
The BBB prioritizes immigration, deportation, and tax cuts for the wealthy, while cutting Medicaid and food stamp programs, and with no regard to fiscal responsibility.
While the 870-page bill covers a whole host of issues and federal programs, there are four big takeaways from the BBB: an exponential explosion on the amount spent on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, and wide-sweeping cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), all with the backdrop of adding $3 trillion to the federal deficit, piling on to a national debt that is already out of control.
The Republican-led Congress set aside roughly $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security efforts through the legislation, including $45 billion to ICE to expand its detention system over the next four years.
ICE will have more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI); the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF); the U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons combined.
The bill marks the largest investment in detention and deportation in U.S. history, and scholars have even noted that ICE will become the largest federal law enforcement agency "in the history of the nation.”
In comparison, the FBI's fiscal year 2024 budget was approximately $11.4 billion.
While most Americans will see a small tax benefit as well as the addition to some new tax breaks, such as no taxes on tips up to $25,000 and a “senior deduction” that will allow more people over 65 to avoid Social Security taxes, the Tax Policy Center notes that the tax measure in the bill is regressive, which means it distributes most of its benefits to high-income households. They report that the bill’s revenue provisions would cut 2026 taxes on average by about $2,900.
The biggest beneficiaries would be households making between $460,000 and $1.1 million (the 95th-99th income percentile), who would get an average tax cut of $21,000, raising their after-tax incomes by 4.4 percent.
The monetary cuts, in contrast, will likely affect the most vulnerable Americans. The legislation includes an estimated $863 billion in budget cuts for Medicaid and $295 billion in cuts for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for fiscal years 2025 to 2034. The combined cuts exceed $1 trillion.
The KFF, which was formerly known as The Kaiser Family Foundation, reports that the cuts to Medicaid represent 29% of state Medicaid spending per resident and are likely to lead to reduced access to care, increased uninsurance rates, and potential strain on state budgets and healthcare systems.
SNAP currently provides basic food assistance to more than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and non-elderly adults with disabilities, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research and policy institute.
These newly enacted changes to SNAP may cause 22.3 million families to lose some or all of their benefits, according to research from the Urban Institute.
Currently, many individuals are limited to three months of SNAP benefits every three years unless they are working for 20 hours per week or qualify for an exemption. The new legislation
expands work reporting requirements for adults from an upper limit of age 54 to age 64 and lowers the age limit for dependent children from 18 to 7.
Finally, the bill shows that Republicans no longer value fiscal responsibility as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the bill could add $3.3 trillion to federal deficits over the next 10 years.
The federal deficit is the annual shortfall between the U.S. government's revenue, primarily through taxes, and its spending in a given fiscal year. To pay for a deficit, the federal government borrows money by selling Treasury bonds, bills, and other securities.
The national debt, on the other hand, is the total national debt owed by the federal government of the U.S. to treasury security holders. As of this writing, the United States’ national debt is well over $36 trillion.
The reflection of the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” in the country’s moral compass mirror is downright ugly.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.