“In March, President Donald Trump stood before a joint session of Congress and vowed to “do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget.”
The first major legislative package of Trump’s second term, however, will throw the federal budget farther out of balance, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded in an updated assessment of the bill.
The CBO estimates that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cleared the House late last month and is awaiting a vote in the Senate, will increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years. The bill will reduce tax collections by an estimated $3.75 trillion over that period, while reducing government spending by an estimated $1.3 trillion.”
Trump crypto coins are a problem because people, including foreign governments and organizations, can tell Trump or one of his associates that they will purchase an exact amount of coin tomorrow at an exact time in exchange for certain presidential actions by Trump. Trump will know who paid him and for what, but it will be untraceable by anyone else.
Republican bill kicks millions of people off Medicaid. Speaker of House falsely claims that he wants to remove fraudsters from Medicaid when really he just wants the program to help less people. Rather than making the argument for having a less generous Medicaid program, he misleads.
Rather than honestly and straight-forwardly cutting Medicaid, the Republican bill adds thick layers of paperwork and bureaucratic hassles onto a bureaucracy that they purposely underfund and understaff to effectively cut Medicaid, taking away health insurance for many low income people.
“A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s sweeping layoffs at several agencies, including HHS, saying that cooperation of the legislative branch is required for large-scale reorganizations.
Kennedy eliminated thousands of jobs in early April, paralyzing programs across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and particularly in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, that monitored health threats, researched cures and investigated everything from toxic fumes in fire stations to outbreaks of gonorrhea.
The layoffs at NIOSH have halted the National Firefighter Cancer Registry, Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program, Health Hazard Evaluation Program, Respirator Approval Program and Coal Workers’ Health Surveillance Program. All are required by law, but their government websites explain they are no longer operating because of the layoffs.
“If the law requires you, the executive, to do this work, you have, in a back door way, thumbed your nose at Congress by firing the people who are actually necessary to get that work done,” said Max Stier, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, whose mission is supporting the federal workforce. “The executive branch is supposed to execute — the name says it all. It doesn’t have the right to determine where money is spent and how much money is spent. ”
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told POLITICO that “critical initiatives under NIOSH will remain intact.””
…
“while the administration has pledged that “essential services…will remain fully intact and uninterrupted,” and have repeatedly claimed that core programs will transfer to the yet-to-be-created Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA, interviews with staff and public notices on the CDC’s website show that the programs are no longer operational.”
“As a legal matter, President Donald Trump’s trade war rests on the claim that imports to the United States constitute an “unusual and extraordinary” threat requiring urgent executive action.
That’s an absurd argument, of course. The fact that Americans choose to buy or sell goods across international borders is not an emergency—it’s not even a minor worry—and certainly should not justify a massive expansion of executive power.
But Trump is going to do whatever he wants until someone stops him. On Wednesday, the Senate had a chance to do that. Instead, Republicans voted overwhelmingly to keep the “emergency” going, and thus to keep the trade war going too.
The Senate voted 49–49 on Wednesday evening to block Sen. Rand Paul’s (R–Ky.) resolution that sought to end the emergency declaration Trump signed on April 2 to impose his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States.”
“The Constitution grants Congress the sole power of the purse. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing the laws Congress passes. If Congress passes a law saying jump, it’s the president’s job to jump. And if Congress passes a law that says spend, it’s the president’s job to spend.”
Trump’s attempt to increase military spending may be hampered by Trump’s tariffs. The tariffs make gaining access to key resources more difficult, and make inputs more expensive, making the increased spending not go as far.