WASHINGTON—Congress is taking its time coming back to D.C., where action shifts to the Senate on GOP President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful budget bill” or “big bad budget bill” if you are looking at it with clear eyes. Unions and their allies are gearing up for the fight in the Upper Chamber, whose members reconvene on May 29. For unions, women, children and workers, it’s a bad—very bad—bill.
“This is a blueprint for long-term decline: Sick children, hungry students, shattered futures, and a society that will bear the cost for generations to come,” warns Becky Pringle, a Philadelphia science teacher and president of the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association.
The measure, officially called a “reconciliation” bill because it “reconciles” taxes and spending, needs 51 votes to pass the Senate, and the GOP has 53 senators. But four, or possibly five, are on the fence. If three of the five defect, Trump’s VP, J.D. Vance, can cast the 51st vote to break a tie.
The key features of the measure raise the most flak: Trump’s 10-year $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the rich, his $715 billion cut in Medicaid over that same time—which would deprive almost 15 million people of health care–his elimination of SNAP food aid to 42 million people, plus ending school lunches for poor kids during the summer and all aid for pregnant women, infants and toddlers all the time, and, on the other side, at least $1 trillion for the military.
And due to the right-wing’s hatred of abortions, Planned Parenthood would lose all $300 million it now gets for health centers. The ones that would close would be in rural areas of all states, it says. They don’t just offer abortions, but comprehensive pre-natal care in areas without alternatives.
“Nurses have long argued these attacks on public programs like Medicaid are simply ideologically based efforts to completely eliminate social support programs,” says Nancy Hagans, RN, president of National Nurses United. “Short of total eradication, right-wing, pro-corporate forces seek to defund these programs, to the point of systemic dysfunction, which provides the excuse to privatize them by selling off or contracting out their functions.”
There are some other lulus tucked away in the measure. Examples include taking more money out of remaining federal workers’ paychecks if they unionize, bringing federal health and safety rules to a dead halt, and sending $11.1 billion to pay right-wing Texas for “hosting” inbound migrants for the last four years. It flew or bussed many of them to blue cities and states. Other states got $900 million combined. And the bill adds $150 million for “border security,” including Trump’s Mexican Wall.
One provision lets the IRS unilaterally declare any non-profit organization, including unions and universities, that supports what the agency defines as “terrorist” groups, loses its tax-exemption. They could fight the loss in the courts, while at the same time paying millions of dollars.
One almost-definite Senate “no” vote is Rand Paul, R-Ky. He says the bill doesn’t cut enough, and complains it increases the national debt, too.
“I still would support the bill, even with wimpy and anemic cuts, if they weren’t going to explode the debt. The problem is the math doesn’t add up. They’re going to explode the debt,” Paul said on one of the May 25 television interview shows.
Other potential GOP “no” votes are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and—the most far-fetched—Josh Hawley of Missouri. Both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., are pressuring senators to pass the measure unchanged.
Expect a lot of lobbying for “reconciliation” from the corporate financiers who back Trump’s MAGA legions, along with the radical right. After all, they’ll benefit from the tax cuts.
Among unions opposing the measure, both the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees warn lawmakers their members will “remember in November”—meaning November 2026.
“House Republicans’ bill is a budget for the billionaires, plain and simple,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler says. “While this leadership has tried to claim they’re the party of workers, they are pushing forward a bill that will cause historic levels of harm to working families.
“Any member of Congress who votes for this bill is voting to betray the working people of this country—and we won’t forget it.
“It will throw millions of children, seniors and families off their health care, gut funding for nursing homes and rural hospitals with devastating effects for care jobs, cut investments in jobs of the future and push food assistance out of reach—all to give the rich and big corporations another tax cut.
“Provisions buried in this bill will take yet another swing at federal workers: Cutting their retirement benefits, imposing a monetary penalty if they choose to retain any (union) rights, then charging them a fee when they try to enforce those rights. The bill also overrides state artificial intelligence rules that protect workers’ jobs, privacy, and civil rights, and grinds health and safety rulemaking to a halt.
“If it becomes law, the House budget deal will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs in energy, manufacturing, mining and construction—and that’s on top of the 62,000 energy jobs already lost, stalled or threatened as a result of this administration’s actions,” says Shuler, an Electrical Worker. It would raise the average household’s electricity bill by $110 a year, kill or cut back energy projects that would have powered more than 15 million homes, and slash a projected $600 billion in public and private construction investments that would have created high-wage union jobs and apprenticeships.”
Rips healthcare from families
“Republicans in Congress just passed legislation that will rip healthcare from our families to line the pockets of the mega-rich,” said SEIU President April Verrett. “All those who voted for this bill will be held accountable. We should make healthcare better for everyone, not take it away. We should make costs go down for families, not set them up for skyrocketing bills. We should raise wages and make life more secure for working families, not pull the rug out from under them.”
The measure “threatens to choke off job-creating energy infrastructure projects,” says Laborers President Brent Booker. “These harmful cuts were made even worse to appease partisan extremists in the ‘Freedom Caucus’, who slashed clean energy incentives, even in their own back yards. Energy tax credits helped create thousands of good union jobs…in red and blue districts alike. Many of these hardworking men and women wouldn’t have jobs today without those credits.
In its current form, the bill upends tax incentives that have promoted clean energy projects and put tens-of-thousands of [union] members to work…There is nothing ‘beautiful’ about leveraging our members’ jobs to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.”
The Laborers, Booker said, “will always fight to protect these critical investments—and the jobs they support. “We urge the U.S. Senate to advance a budget that works for all workers—not just billionaires at the top. There is a path forward, one that protects good jobs and puts the American people first.”
“When Congress guts Medicaid to give tax breaks to billionaires, millions stand to lose healthcare,” warned Becky Pringle, the National Education Association president.
“When they slash meal programs, children will go hungry. Counselors and nurses will vanish from our schools. When they redirect public dollars to fund private school vouchers”–$20 billion nationwide—”they weaken public education and limit opportunities for students. They siphon crucial funding from public schools—serving 90% of students—and redirect it to private institutions with no accountability.
“The changes as written into the budget reconciliation bill would eliminate health care for more than 8.6 million lower-income patients, impose new costs for patients who can’t afford it, establish onerous work rules, yank health care from low-income legal immigrants, cut benefits to veterans, deny patients gender-affirming care, and much more. Together, they will rob tens of millions of our patients of health and security, leading to more suffering and even death,” Pringle predicted.
“All people in the United States automatically deserve health care simply because you exist, period,” said Hagans, the NNU president. “Everybody knows our health care system is a total failure and that what we really need is Medicare For All, which we nurses are already fighting for.
“Until we win guaranteed health care for everyone, we have programs like Medicaid to help those among us who are suffering the most. For Congress to take even that away shows their fundamental cruelty and how they want to ultimately destroy our public health programs and services.”
“A better name for this bill is the big, ugly betrayal. Passed in the dead of night, it is a direct attack on working people and the essential services Americans rely on. And for what? To pay for tax cuts for billionaires,” says Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten.
“This bill would make Americans, particularly children and older people, sicker and poorer through a direct transfer of wealth to the rich. Seventy percent of benefits will go to the top 5% at the expense of the bottom 40%, a reverse Robin Hood heist that will add trillions of dollars to the national debt, hobbling economic growth.
Bill cuts Medicare and Medicaid
“Rather than protect Medicare and Medicaid, this bill cuts them, denying healthcare to 14 million people. Rather than strengthen public education, it weakens it. Rather than feeding poor families, it rips food out of their mouths.
“The bill includes $20 billion for a reckless school voucher program in the guise of a tax shelter for the well-off. Vouchers syphon crucial funds away from public schools into private hands. They are directly responsible for some of the largest student achievement drops ever recorded and mostly go to parents with kids already in private school.
The Steelworkers calculate the reconciliation bill in its present form would cost at least 1.4 million jobs: 450,000 in health care next year alone, 630,000 good unionized jobs in construction and factories, by canceling job-creating tax credits for clean energy, semiconductors and other factories, and 140,000 jobs in school cafeterias, retail, agriculture and food processing. That’s from the SNAP cuts alone “and hungry families would be left with nowhere to turn.”
“That means fewer orders, plant shutdowns, lost opportunities and whole communities left without the projects they were promised” under legislation approved during the Democratic Biden administration, the union adds.
“The measure gives huge tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations–and makes working families pay the price. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it would reduce income for the poorest 10% of U.S. households while boosting income for the top 10%,” USW says. Calculations by others say most of that “top” boost would go to the top 1%.
Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley said the reconciliation bill hits federal workers three ways. And that’s not counting Trump’s unilateral cancellation of union contracts covering a million of them.
The federal cuts in the bill would reduce the average pay used to calculate a worker’s pension by using the five years of highest earnings, not the current three years, as a base, postpone eligibility for full pensions to age 65 and charge workers 9.24% of their paychecks if they elect to join a union.
“This provision is an un-American, anti-union, morally bankrupt attempt to charge workers for exercising their basic rights,” said Kelley. “ The Congressional Budget Office estimates it would force 75% of new federal employees into at-will status, while saving less than $500 million a year. If enacted, this change will lead to the eventual extinction of the merit-based, nonpartisan civil service, which is certainly its true purpose.”
The BlueGreen Alliance of eight unions and seven green groups, said the reconciliation bill’s virtual elimination of green jobs funding would cost jobs and drive up consumers’ energy bills.
“More than $237 billion was spent on manufacturing construction in December 2024. And the law spurred massive private sector investment. Business and consumer investment in the law’s first two years totaled $493 billion, a 71% increase from the two-year period preceding its passage.
“The law is a bridge to the middle class for workers, already creating good jobs you don’t need a college degree to get. Roughly two-thirds of the jobs created by the Inflation Reduction Act are in construction and manufacturing.” Those jobs “mean supporting blue-collar working Americans and the communities they live in.
“Costs are already too high, and this will only make them higher. Research shows that repealing clean energy tax credits would raise electricity prices…Average household utility bills would rise by more than $110 per year, while businesses would see at least a 10% increase in energy costs, that will then be passed on to consumers.”
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