US Congress approves package that cuts health and transfers income to billionaires

The House of Representatives of the United States approved on Thursday (3) the largest tax restructuring project of the Trump era, consolidating a package that transfers trillions to benefits to the richest while imposing brutal cuts on social and environmental programs.

The text, baptized by Trump of “One Big Beautiful Bill”, was approved by 218 votes to 214, with a unified opposition from the Democrats and dissent of two republicans. The proposal was sanctioned this Friday (4), Independence Day, during a ceremony at the White House.

At the center of the project is the extension of the tax cuts approved in 2017, now made permanent. The plan eliminates tips and overtime payment by 2028, the only working class signaling, expands deductions for companies and creates new tax benefits for billionaires.

At the same time, it promotes a dismantling of social programs that serve the poorest population: Medicid will lose $ 930 billion and SNAP – Food Aid Program – will be cut of $ 285 billion.

The cuts are not coming alone: ​​the new legislation requires low -income people, without children and under 65, to work at least 80 hours a month to continue having access to the programs.

It also blocks for a year the financing to Planned Parenthood, an organization that acts with family planning and is a constant target of the far right. For the largest universities, the project creates a new special tax.

In the field of migratory repression, the package injects US $ 170 billion into the ICE Agency (Immigration and Customs Service), allowing the hiring of 10,000 new agents, the construction of detention centers with 100 thousand new beds and the ambitious goal of performing up to 1 million deportations per year.

According to the American Immigration Council, the changes authorize the simultaneous detention of up to 116,000 immigrants – an unprecedented number. There are also $ 46.5 billion for the expansion of border infrastructure, including resumption of the construction of the wall with Mexico.

The sanction should take place this Friday (4), on the national holiday, and presented by Trump as a “gift to the American people.”

In Iowa, during an event of the Republican campaign, the president stated that “there could be no better gift for Independence Day than the phenomenal victory we achieved yesterday with One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Nationalist rhetoric marks the tone of the new legislative phase, which also increases defense investments, including $ 25 billion for the “gold” and $ 10 billion dome -dome system for space projects.

The process of the project exposed the internal cohesion of the trumpper and the power of intimidation of the White House about Congress.

Even with resistance between republican sectors concerned with the impact on public debt – which is expected to grow $ 3.3 trillion in the next decade, according to the Congress Budget Office (CBO) – Trump personally conducted negotiations.

Parliamentarians reported nighttime connections and political threats. “He doesn’t sleep. He called until 1 am to break resistance,” said Mayor Mike Johnson.

The Democratic opposition tried to curb the vote with the longest speech in the House’s history: the leader of the minority, Hakeem Jeffries, spoke by an uninterrupted 8:45 am, calling the text “abomination” and “project of corruption.”

“Why did the debate start at 3:28 am? Because Republicans want to approve it to the hidden,” he said. Despite the attempt, the project passed without relevant changes.

The project also imposes an increase of $ 5 trillion in the debt ceiling, weakens environmental policies by revoking the Biden Era Fiscal credits for clean energy and eliminates the $ 7,500 subsidy for the purchase of electric vehicles.

Solar and wind and wind programs will lose funds if not completed by 2028. Public hospitals and low -income communities, which depend on federal transfers, should also be immediate.

Finally, the law creates a symbolic innovation: the “Trump accounts”, $ 1,000 bank deposits for each newborn in the name of building a pro-market generation.

For critics, it is a smoke curtain in the face of the largest income redistribution process unlike recent US history-tax engineering that takes the poor to give to billionaires.