Credit: (AP Photos/Mariam Zuhaib; Manuel Balce Ceneta; Francisco Seco)WASHINGTON — Republicans are assembling what is probably the most significant bill in this Congress, an immense piece of legislation that could leave lasting impacts on U.S. society.
The bill contains trillions of dollars in cuts to federal programs — cuts to health, food, education, climate, housing and social services. The bill would write into law dozens of both temporary and permanent changes to the federal tax code.
By last week, committees in the Republican-majority House finished writing and passed 11 separate pieces of the larger bill, sending them to a different group of lawmakers — the House Budget Committee — to stitch the pieces together into one bill.
On Friday, the budget committee voted down the freshly assembled bill after all Democrats opposed it and some conservative Republicans, who want deeper cuts than their GOP peers, voted no too.
But late Sunday night, the committee passed the bill after pressure from President Donald Trump and Republican leaders.
How NJ’s delegation voted
New Jersey’s delegation is firmly split along party lines, with Democrats against the bill and Republicans for it, though Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd) has voiced some concern about cuts to Medicaid, the 60-year-old health insurance program for low- and moderate-income Americans.
The bill appears on track to become law, after House negotiations and edits from the Senate.
Here are some significant themes of the legislation, as it’s currently written, and how they could affect the public:
Taxes
The bill would expand the child tax credit to $2,500 per child from $2,000. It would also bump up the standard deduction from $15,000 to $16,000 for single filers and from $30,000 to $32,000 for joint filers. And the bill would allow workers in fields where tipping is common to deduct those tips. But all those provisions would expire at the end of 2028.
The bill would also close an IRS program called Direct File, a free online service available in many U.S. states, including New Jersey.
Notably for New Jersey, the bill’s text also raises a cap on the state and local tax deduction, often called SALT, from $10,000 to $30,000, though that sum may not be sufficiently high for some Republicans in left-leaning states like New York and California to back the broader bill.
Private colleges and universities would also face a new endowment tax levied on a sliding scale, from 1.4% to 21%, depending on the size of their endowment.
Health
An estimated 8.6 million people would be removed from Medicaid and about 5.5 million people nationwide would lose health coverage who receive their insurance through the 2010 health law often called Obamacare, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, or CBO.
That would happen due to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of cuts to Medicaid and the loss of federal subsidies for the 2010 health law, CBO said.
Republicans maintain Medicaid is rife with corruption and abuse, and that they are trying to clean up the program.
To meet that goal, they are pushing requirements that people aged 19 to 64 work, are enrolled in school or volunteer 80 hours a month to receive Medicaid coverage.
Food
Republicans want big changes to the nation’s biggest anti-hunger policy — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Administered by both the U.S. government and states, SNAP is fully funded through the federal government. But under new language in the bill, states that have a “payment error rate” of more than 10% will have to pay 25% of SNAP benefits.
New Jersey’s payment error rate — a metric of how accurately the benefits are distributed — for the 2023 fiscal year was 35.7%, which would force the state to pay one-quarter of benefits.
Energy, the environment and tech
The legislation would rescind a host of Biden-era climate and clean-energy tax incentives, including a phaseout of the 45U tax credit, which has been a lifeline for the nuclear energy industry.
Van Drew, who has nuclear plants in his district, has pushed for that tax credit to be protected, though he voted against the law that created it.
The bill creates a new annual registration fee of $250 for electric vehicles and a $100 fee for registering hybrid cars, both of which would be collected by state departments of transportation.
And it would allow companies wishing to export natural gas from the U.S. to pay a one-time $1 million fee to the U.S. government to expedite their export request.
On artificial intelligence, the bill would block any state “or political subdivision thereof” from enforcing laws or regulations about artificial intelligence technology, or AI, for 10 years.
Defense and immigration
The Trump administration’s recent budget request calls for big spending increases for the U.S. military and immigration enforcement.
The bill follows that trend. It would allocate $150 billion to the Pentagon, including for a “Golden Dome” missile defense system Trump wants for the U.S., inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome system.
It also would levy a new $1,000 fee for people seeking political asylum and a separate, also new, fee of $8,500 to sponsor an unaccompanied immigrant child.
Other new fees include a $500 charge under a federal immigration program known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for migrants seeking safety from their home nations, an increase from the current sum of $50.
Another new fee in a host of costs Republicans proposed is $5,000 for someone who has been ordered to be deported and fails to appear for their immigration court hearing.
— Editor’s note: This story was updated at 12:15 p.m. Monday.
