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wouldn’t stand for this intolerable burden on America’s large population of hardworking mass shooters, and so they repealed it.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.

The Spaceport Sweetener

For some reason, Section 70309 of Trump’s bill would allow municipalities to issue tax-exempt bonds to build spaceports, as is currently the case for airports. Digging around, we couldn’t see any explanation of why this was included except that a company called Space Florida wants it. Perhaps Martians contacted RFK Jr. and told him they need a place to disembark.

No Tax on Oil Drillers

If you listen to Donald Trump’s speeches (good luck to you), you hear a lot about certain modest elements of this bill: no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. That last one is not in the bill at all—there’s a temporary increase in the standard deduction for people over the age of 65 that is not tied to Social Security at all—but Trump always leaves one of these “no tax” items out: the provision for no tax on oil drillers. As the Prospect has reported, the bill includes an exemption for domestic oil and gas companies from the corporate alternative minimum tax, as long as they have “intangible drilling and development costs.” This is something oil companies lobbied insistently for, and it was inserted by Republican Sen. James Lankford (R-OK); most of the firms that will benefit represent his home state of Oklahoma.

Handouts for Chinese Steel Companies
As we have previously detailed, Trump’s bill not only gets rid of almost all of President Biden’s climate program, it also provides vast subsidies to coal producers. At least four million acres of federal land will be opened up to coal leasing, and the royalty rate will be cut from 12.5 percent to 8 percent. Incentivizing coal—the worst fossil fuel for the climate and also particulate pollution—in any way is bad, but Republicans are also literally subsidizing foreign steel companies in places like China, India, and Brazil, by making metallurgical coal eligible for “critical mineral” subsidies through 2030. This coal, which is used in blast furnaces to create steel, is mostly exported to poorer countries with fewer air pollution regulations. Sure enough, the coal doesn’t even have to be used domestically to get the subsidy.

The Garden of Heroes

Republicans constantly go on about how the country is broke and we cannot possibly afford to provide people with basic health care or food assistance. Yet in the same bill that includes the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in American history, there is a $40 million appropriation to the National Endowment for the Humanities to requisition statues for a “Garden of Heroes” in Washington, D.C., something that Kim Jong Un would even be embarrassed to unveil.

A Tax on Gambling Winnings

Republicans changed the tax rules around gambling to limit the amount of losses that could be deducted to just 90 percent. So if you go to Vegas and win $10,000 one day, then lose $10,000 the next, you are still on the hook for $1,000 in winnings. You could end up owing tax even if you lost money.

Now, in our view there is entirely too much gambling in American society, particularly sports. (Thanks once more to the Supreme Court!) But this is a nonsensical way to go about stopping problem gambling. What is needed above all is to get gambling out of smartphones. Companies like DraftKings are manufacturing gambling addicts at an industrial scale with a constant drip of notifications carefully tuned to get you to bet and keep betting as much as possible (ideally, until you run through your entire life savings).

This law wouldn’t do anything about that problem, while seriously punishing the tiny minority of pro gamblers who actually make money playing in poker tournaments and such.

Unlimited SALT

A major point of contention in the legislation was the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. Some Republicans wanted to increase a cap placed on how much state and local taxes people could write off on their federal returns. In the end, that cap was raised from $10,000 to $40,000 for the next five years. However, Republicans vowed they would limit the ability for people with pass-through income, like law partners or hedge fund managers, to take unlimited SALT deductions. The House and Senate wrote new rules to close this loophole. And then, at the last minute, they dropped them. So now rich people have yet another legal tax avoidance scheme, worth between $35 and $40 billion over the next decade. At least somebody gets a break in this legislation.

Tax Breaks for Puerto Rican Rum

One of the more ridiculous traditions in Congress in the recent past was continuing to advance temporary tax cuts in an annual “tax extender” package that had all kinds of pork in it: tax breaks for thoroughbred racehorses, NASCAR racetracks, and Puerto Rican rum shipments. When Congress made some of the anchors of these tax extenders, namely the tax incentive for research and development, permanent, the idea of these other tax extenders carrying along lost its luster, and many were dropped. Lobbyists still have to get paid, however, and liquor distributors in territories like Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands managed to secure their tax rebate, which will cost about $2 billion.

More Chipmaker Subsidies?

During his State of the Union address this year, Trump said that he wants to get rid of the CHIPS Act—which subsidizes domestic semiconductor manufacturers—adding, “Your CHIPS Act is a horrible, horrible thing. We give hundreds of billions of dollars. It doesn’t mean anything.” But this bill actually increases CHIPS subsidies by about 40 percent. What?

This might possibly end up being a net benefit, insofar as it doesn’t strangle the infant American chipmaking industry in the crib. We’re just baffled that it’s in there. As we’ll see, Trump probably doesn’t even know about it.

ONE WONDERS AGAIN WHY ALMOST EVERY REPUBLICAN voted for a bill that is going to devastate the economies and hospital systems of their own districts. Gleeful, willful malice is part of the explanation. Or it could be that Republicans are simply hoping that Trump does not implement the parts of the law that will lay waste to rural MAGA regions. That is what he has done with the TikTok ban—completely ignoring it despite it being duly passed and upheld by the Supreme Court.

But—ironically in view of the Supreme Court’s “unitary executive” doctrine, the baldly unconstitutional notion that the president cannot be punished for crimes committed in office—Donald Trump is certainly the most inept person ever to occupy the White House. Always an incurious, profoundly lazy dullard and a terrible manager whose real estate and casino projects imploded, he is now plainly suffering from steep mental decline. At least Warren Harding admitted his inadequacies.

As an apparent consequence, Trump reportedly has little idea even about the topline items in his bill. NOTUS reports that in meetings with congressional Republicans, Trump emphasized that if the GOP wants to win elections, they should above all avoid touching Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member replied. (As we’ve reported, the bill also forces cuts to Medicare to the tune of $500 billion.) A safe guess is that Trump bought the Republican lie that this bill only targets waste, fraud, and abuse, when in reality its work requirements are quite obviously designed to kick people off the program.

If Trump is going to stop any part of this bill, he will first have to learn what it says and how it works. We wouldn’t count on that.