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Ten Bizarre Things Hidden in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill
Well, everyone, it’s official. Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act passed the House last Thursday afternoon and was signed into law on the Fourth of July. You’ll likely be able to celebrate with a local hospital closure of your very own, very soon—or, if you live in Red Willow County in southwest Nebraska, which voted for Trump 84-15, right now.
For obvious reasons, the enormous cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the bill, along with the permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts tilted mostly to the wealthy, got the most attention. But this thing is stuffed to its back teeth with provisions, almost all horrible, and many of them downright weird.
Incentivizing SNAP Fraud
As the Prospect has reported, one of the ways Republicans cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is by forcing states, which have a vastly smaller capacity to tax and borrow, to shoulder more of the program’s cost. But in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski got a two-year exemption from cost-sharing for states with an erroneous payment rate of above 13.3 percent. That includes her home state of Alaska, which has the highest payment error rate in the nation. It was a giveaway for Murkowski in particular. But to comply with budget reconciliation rules, this exemption extends to the states with the ten highest error rates. This is literally incentivizing states to increase waste and fraud in the program. Indeed, in all seriousness, liberal states would be wise to make their SNAP program as sloppy as possible right now.
The Mass Shooter Subsidy
One of the vanishingly few American gun regulations that still exists is a tax on silencers, which has existed for almost 100 years, and sits at $200—or did until now. Republicans wouldn’t stand for this intolerable burden on America’s large population of hardworking mass shooters, and so they repealed it. They also wanted to remove a requirement that silencers be registered, but that was ruled out of order by the Senate parliamentarian. Still, killing the silencer tax is egregious. Anyone on their way to a workplace or schoolyard to do their part to maintain America’s number one record of gun massacres could already get a fully automatic “bump fire” rifle (thanks to the Supreme Court), but now you won’t even hear them coming.
For obvious reasons, the enormous cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the bill, along with the permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts tilted mostly to the wealthy, got the most attention. But this thing is stuffed to its back teeth with provisions, almost all horrible, and many of them downright weird.
Incentivizing SNAP Fraud
As the Prospect has reported, one of the ways Republicans cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is by forcing states, which have a vastly smaller capacity to tax and borrow, to shoulder more of the program’s cost. But in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski got a two-year exemption from cost-sharing for states with an erroneous payment rate of above 13.3 percent. That includes her home state of Alaska, which has the highest payment error rate in the nation. It was a giveaway for Murkowski in particular. But to comply with budget reconciliation rules, this exemption extends to the states with the ten highest error rates. This is literally incentivizing states to increase waste and fraud in the program. Indeed, in all seriousness, liberal states would be wise to make their SNAP program as sloppy as possible right now.
The Mass Shooter Subsidy
One of the vanishingly few American gun regulations that still exists is a tax on silencers, which has existed for almost 100 years, and sits at $200—or did until now. Republicans wouldn’t stand for this intolerable burden on America’s large population of hardworking mass shooters, and so they repealed it. They also wanted to remove a requirement that silencers be registered, but that was ruled out of order by the Senate parliamentarian. Still, killing the silencer tax is egregious. Anyone on their way to a workplace or schoolyard to do their part to maintain America’s number one record of gun massacres could already get a fully automatic “bump fire” rifle (thanks to the Supreme Court), but now you won’t even hear them coming.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-07-ten-bizarre-things-hidden-in-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/