(The Center Square)–Republicans’ mammoth budget reconciliation bill includes major changes to Medicaid, food stamps, student loans and more. It also permanently extends President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts – at a cost of at least $3.3 trillion.
Passing the House Thursday by a razor-thin margin, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act funds large swaths of Trump’s policy agenda while authorizing a $4 trillion debt ceiling hike. The legislation consists of 11 separate House committee prints that collectively fulfill the budget resolution’s 10-year spending and savings instructions.
The bill includes more than $1.5 trillion in savings found by congressional committees. But budget watchdogs say the package, if passed by the Senate without major alterations, will still add anywhere from $3.3 to $5.2 trillion to the national debt and at least $3.2 trillion to the primary deficit by 2035.
Most of the cost stems from the Ways and Means committee’s portion, which deals with codifying most of the sunsetting 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law.
That includes the higher standard deduction for nearly all tax filers, the $2,000 child tax credit – both parents will need a Social Security number to claim it – and the 20% Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction.
American manufacturers would particularly benefit from the legislation, which would allow them to deduct 100% of facility improvement or construction costs. The bill would deal a blow to large universities by increasing endowment taxes, as well as hiking taxes on many private foundations.
Republicans clashed over how high to raise the state and local tax, or SALT, deduction cap, eventually settling on $40,000 for taxpayers earning less than $500,000 annually, via a last-minute Rules Committee amendment.
The tax portion of the reconciliation bill also features many short-term tax provisions set to expire after four years. Those include boosting the maximum standard deduction from $15,000 to $16,000 for single filers and from $30,000 to $32,000 for joint filers. The maximum child tax credit will see a $500 increase and the QBI deduction will rise to 23%.
Other temporary changes lasting until fiscal year 2028 include nixing taxes on tips and overtime, making the adoption tax credit partially refundable, ending interest on loans for American cars, and increasing tax deductions for eligible seniors by $4,000.
While lawmakers on the Ways and Means committee contributed most to the cost of the reconciliation package, the Energy and Commerce committee found the most savings – over $988 billion – primarily via scaling back the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and Medicaid spending.
Energy and Commerce’s addition claws back unobligated funds from the IRA and repeals or phases out more than a dozen IRA renewable energy-related subsidies.
Four tax credits related to alternative fuel vehicles, three credits related to home energy efficiency or “clean” energy sourcing, and the clean hydrogen production credit will end by 2026. After facing pressure from fiscal hawks, the Rules Committee pushed forward the 2032 phaseout deadline for the IRA’s clean electricity production and investment credits to 2028.
Medicaid reforms in the bill include changing program eligibility requirements back to pre-COVID-19 standards, imposing work requirements on most able-bodied adults without dependents, and closing loopholes exploited by states.
The plan also axes federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other reproductive clinics, as well as prevents Medicaid and CHIP funding from going to gender transition procedures on children.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the changes will save hundreds of billions of dollars and make at least 7.7 million current Medicaid recipients – including 1.4 million people without verified citizenship status – ineligible for Medicaid coverage by 2034. But given the Biden-era 20% spending increase on Medicaid, total program spending will still grow by at least 3% a year for the next decade.
Another last-minute addition by the Rules committee doubled down on Medicaid reforms, accelerating the work requirement deadline to take effect in 2026 and preventing states from implementing new taxes on providers.
House Democrats, none of whom voted for the bill, repeatedly called the Medicaid changes “cruel.” They similarly blasted the Agriculture Committee’s section of the bill, which saves $230 billion by reforming the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
SNAP reforms include requiring states to cover 5% of their SNAP benefit cost share by fiscal year 2028, with their contribution increasing the higher the state’s payment error rate. States have an average payment error rate of 11.68%, as of 2023.
The bill also closes state “waiver gimmicks” that have exempted 84% of able-bodied adult beneficiaries without dependents from SNAP work requirements, plus bans all noncitizens aside from legal permanent residents from receiving benefits.
Trump’s border security and defense priorities received hundreds of billions of additional dollars collectively from the Homeland Security, Judiciary, and Armed Services committees’ portions of the megabill.
The Homeland Security committee authorized approximately $47 billion for the construction of the “Border Barrier System,” a technologically enhanced southern border wall. Roughly $5 billion will go toward building new U.S. Customs and Border Patrol facilities and checkpoints and $6 billion toward border agent workforce and hiring.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement receives a $45 billion funding boost meant for building new detention centers from the Judiciary Committee’s print.
Notably, the bill also imposes new fees on immigrants, implementing a $1,000 minimum fee on migrants seeking asylum and a $500 fee on individuals requesting Temporary Protected Status, which is currently free. Sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children will face a $3,500 charge, while many work permit applications will carry a $550 fee that renews every six months.
The Armed Services committee portion contributes $5 billion to border security efforts, but most of the $150 billion in spending is slated for shipbuilding, restocking munitions, increasing weapon production capacity and nuclear deterrence, and financing the Golden Dome for America project.
While the Transportation and Infrastructure committee gives $22 billion to the Coast Guard and $15 billion to the Federal Aviation Administration for infrastructure modernization, it imposes new fees on electric vehicle owners.
Under the bill, EV owners will have to pay $250 annually as a contribution to the dwindling Highway Trust Fund. Owners of combustion engine vehicles contribute to the HTF every time they fill up their gas tank.
The Natural Resources committee checks the box for Trump’s energy agenda by expanding onshore oil and gas leasing on federal lands, reducing drilling royalty rates to 12.5%, and permanently reinstating coal leasing suspended by Biden.
A final blow to the Biden administration in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” comes from the Education and Workforce committee’s addition. It axes the 2023 SAVE loan repayment program, which amounted to potentially billions in complete loan forgiveness for thousands of student borrowers.
The legislation also simplifies and shrinks student loan repayment options and penalizes higher education institutions that allow students to take out unaffordable levels of debt. Additionally, it restricts Pell Grant eligibility to students taking more than six credit hours and low-income students in short-term programs.
Under normal Senate filibuster rules, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would have no chance of passing. But since the budget reconciliation process bypasses the filibuster, Republican leaders are hopeful the package will make it to the president’s desk. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is aiming for that to happen by Independence Day.
Senate Republicans are eyeing potentially derailing changes, however, with some senators opposing the IRA and Medicaid cuts – key compromises Johnson made with House hardliners – with others wanting even more spending reductions.
“I think you can improve the product,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in an interview about the bill with Punchbowl News. “There are certain things the Senate wants to have its imprint on.”
House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, cautioned against drastic bill reforms.
“I’m urging my Senate colleagues to take up our balanced reconciliation package – and only consider changes that further strengthens our fiscal reforms – so we can quickly advance this One Big Beautiful Bill to the President’s desk and deliver for the American people,” he said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
