When the One Big Beautiful Bill comes due

If you have been a regular reader of this blog you will know some two things.

Administrative burdens are an effective way to limit people’s ability to access public services.

President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act weaponized these burdens to cut SNAP (income supports for food) and Medicaid to offset a tax cut that will largely go to wealthy Americans.

In other words, your government is making the most vulnerable Americans jump over more and more bureaucratic hurdles, rooting for them to fall, so that it can take the money it would have spent helping them and give it to the richest Americans. It is a deeply dystopian vision of governing, where the failures of the weak profit the strong.

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This was apparent even as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was being debated last year. The OBBBA mostly does not change the eligibility for our major safety net programs, but it does make them a lot smaller via administrative burdens. When the bill was being considered, we pointed to the almost one-for-one tradeoff between tax cuts and benefits cuts.

And back in October of 2025 we noted that the OBBBA, by design, would lead to millions of eligible beneficiaries losing coverage. States, facing huge financial penalties if they didn’t reduce their error rates, would add layers of new paperwork requirements that beneficiaries wouldn’t be able to navigate.

A challenge of writing before these events happen is that we deal in abstractions: numbers and graphs tell us about the size and nature of the impact. It’s one thing to predict that millions will lose critical benefits. It is an entirely different thing to watch it actually happen, and to read the stories of the people facing the consequences of political choices.

Now, the bill of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is starting to come due. Since last July, when the OBBBA was signed, more than 4 million people, including…