Sorry Grandma and Grandpa, but Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' Is Coming for Medicare

The basic unfathomability of the federal budget process is such a boon to legislators who want to do mischief without leaving any fingerprints on the gun or DNA on the knife. There are so many statutes, regulations, informal rules and customs, and parliamentary bear traps that an appropriation to clean Lincoln’s nose on Mount Rushmore might well also commit the federal government to build 12 nuclear aircraft carriers in a boat basin outside Yankton, South Dakota.

At the time of this writing, the House Rules Committee is in the seventh hour of a hearing that began at 1 a.m. Under discussion is the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act—yes, that is its official name because we have an angry toddler whipping votes from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue—which purports to fund the federal government for the fiscal year upcoming. What matters most, however, is the bomb that Rep. Brendan Boyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania and ranking member of the Budget Committee, reading from the Congressional Budget Office report, dropped into the proceedings at 2:16 a.m. on the morning of May 21.

On Tuesday, the CBO issued its “Preliminary Analysis Of The Distributional Effect Of The One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The report was quite plain about the massive amount of wealth the OBBB would shove upwards to the richest Americans and away from the great mass of ordinary citizens. An earlier CBO report estimated that 8.6 million citizens would lose their health insurance, while 7.7 million would go uninsured. This will result from the massive cuts to Medicaid that are necessary for the GOP plan to approximate actually adding up. But that wasn’t what Boyle came to the Rules Committee to explain. He said:

There was a commitment from Trump that there would be no Medicare cuts. Here we are tonight because, as you explained it, because of the size of the deficits, because of the pay-as-you-go act—that would trigger sequestration of Medicare and would total over $500 billion. The official figure that CBO confirms is $535 billion in cuts to Medicare.

That’s MediCARE, folks. Not MediCAID. That’s mom and dad, grampy and meemaw, Uncle Fud and Aunt Babs, and, well, me, now that I think about it. It’s easy to sell cuts to Medicaid to the conservative crowd, who reflexively look at poor people as grist for their favorite economic fantasies. But $535 billion in cuts to Medicare? You are fucking with your heartbeat on that one. Or should be, at any rate.

As of 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the Rules Committee was still meeting, and the OBBB was still being written elsewhere in the Capitol because Speaker Moses was handing out sweets to recalcitrant members of his caucus. Unfathomable is the least worst thing you can say about it.