Politics
Trump’s Big Bill Would Be More Regressive Than Any Major Law in Decades
The Republican megabill now before the Senate cuts taxes for high earners and reduces benefits for the poor. If it’s enacted, that combination would make it more regressive than any major tax or entitlement law in decades.
Estimated annual average change in resources between 2026-34
How the Bill Would Affect Households at Different Income Ranks
The bill as passed by the House in May would raise after-tax incomes for the highest-earning 10 percent of American households on average by 2.3 percent a year over the next decade, while lowering incomes for the poorest tenth by 3.9 percent, according to new estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.
The shape of that distribution is rare: Tax cut packages have seldom left the poor significantly worse off. And bills that cut the safety net usually haven’t also included benefits for the rich. By inverting those precedents, congressional Republicans have created a bill unlike anything Washington has produced since deficit fears began to loom large in the 1990s.
“I’ve never seen anything that simultaneously really goes after poor people and then really helps rich people,” said Chuck Marr, the vice president for federal tax policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
To the extent that some prior bills have also been regressive, they still haven’t looked quite like this.
Comparing Major Tax and Entitlement Bills
The G.O.P. plan is among the bills projected to benefit the highest-income group while hurting the lowest.
2025
Current G.O.P. bill
Lose
Gain
2017 Obamacare repeal*
Lose
Gain
1997
Tax and budget acts Unclear
Gain
1996
Welfare act
Lose No change
2022
Inflation Reduction Act
Gain Lose
2021
Build Back Better*
Gain
Lose 2010
Affordable Care Act
Gain
Lose
1993 Clinton budget act
Gain
Lose
1990
H.W. Bush tax act Gain
Lose
2017
First Trump tax cuts Gain
Gain most
2013
Obama tax cuts
Gain Gain most
2001/03
W. Bush tax cuts
Gain
Gain most
The calculations the C.B.O. published are what’s known as a distributional analysis. This type of study estimates how legislation will affect people across the income distribution, taking into account the taxes they pay and the government benefits they receive. Lawmakers often think about legislation in terms of its overall effects: Does it raise or lower the deficit? Does it grow or stifle the economy? But this kind of analysis helps illustrate who benefits and who is hurt by a bill.
“Ultimately, people care about who are the winners and who are the losers,” said Alan Auerbach, a professor of economics and law at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied fiscal policy for decades.
Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, dismissed the C.B.O.’s analysis as missing who those winners are in the bigger picture.
“The best way to help workers across the income distribution, including all the folks in the bottom, is to create an environment in which firms want to hire them,” he said, pointing to rising wages and low unemployment after the passage of the major tax cut package during the first Trump administration. He disputed that low-wage workers would now be hurt in this bill by changes to Medicaid and food assistance.
To put the current bill in context, we have assembled similar analyses of major tax and social welfare bills from the last four decades.
The analyses below aren’t all exactly the same. Most were originally published around the time each bill was debated in Congress. They were produced by a few different analysts, because no one group has routinely published distributional tables. They don’t always cover every provision in every bill, which means some charts may be missing a few relevant effects. They evaluated slightly different time windows after enactment. In cases where we lacked complete data, we have not shown a complete chart, but instead characterized a bill’s effects on the highest- and lowest-income households.
Compared with other legislation, this bill is notable because it’s so regressive — while neither reducing the deficit nor supercharging growth, according to analysts across the political spectrum.
“This bill definitely compromises too much on growth, and it doesn’t make smart use of tax cuts either,” said Erica York, vice president for federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, a research group that generally favors lower taxes. “If you look at the revenue cost, it’s really large. If you look at the economic impact, it’s not that meaningful.”
Regressive bills
Since 1990, there have been a couple of other major bills that leave the poor worse off, but they differ from the current proposal in key ways.
The current bill cuts health care spending, food assistance and other programs that benefit the poor, in addition to extending tax cuts for individuals that passed in 2017. Those 2017 tax changes, on average, benefited all income groups, but were skewed toward higher earners. New tax policies in the current bill would shift those benefits up the income scale even more. And some new tax provisions that would help lower-income households — like no tax on tips and no tax on overtime — would expire after a few years, while many benefits for high earners would be made lasting.
“That makes this specific episode kind of exceptional,” said Owen Zidar, a Princeton economist. “We just don’t usually have big tax cuts running in different directions from the bottom than at the top.”
Mr. Zidar noted that one tax provision that mostly benefits the rich — an expansion of the tax deduction for certain types of business income — is estimated to cost about as much as the bill’s major reductions in Medicaid spending would save.
Republicans’ attempted repeal of Obamacare (2017, not enacted)
Bottom earners would lose; top earners would gain
The legislation that looks the most like the current bill is the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare in 2017. A bill that passed the House would have reduced spending on Medicaid for the poor and would have redistributed tax credits for health insurance up the income scale. It also would have reduced the federal deficit, whereas the 2025 House-passed bill is projected to add about $3 trillion to it over the next decade, when interest is included. The 2017 repeal bill, which was unpopular with the public, did not become law.
Like the repeal effort, the current bill includes big cuts to Medicaid and changes to Obamacare marketplaces that would disadvantage lower-income workers.
Clinton tax and budget acts (1997)
It’s unclear how bottom earners would be affected. Top earners would gain.
A pair of bipartisan bills enacted together in 1997, the Balanced Budget Act and the Taxpayer Relief Act, were designed to balance the federal budget. The legislation aimed to limit growth in Medicare expenses and created the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Child Tax Credit. The tax package also included other tax cuts that helped higher-income families. Hard-to-measure changes to health programs, such as reduced payments to hospitals that treat Medicaid patients, left its full effect on the poor less clear.
Welfare reform act (1996)
Bottom earners would lose; top earners would see no change
The welfare reform reconciliation bill passed in 1996 did appear at the time to reduce after-tax incomes for poor Americans.
“People are likening this to welfare reform,” said Heather Hahn, an associate vice president at the Urban Institute who studies welfare policy. But she added that they’re quite different, for one major reason: “That ’96 bill was not tied to big tax cuts for anybody else.”
Progressive bills
Budget bills with the opposite shape — larger gains at the bottom and tax increases at the top — have tended to come during Democratic presidencies.
Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Bottom earners would gain; top earners would lose
The Biden administration oversaw several such bills. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, expanded clean energy subsidies and health insurance subsidies for the middle class, and paid for the changes partly with reductions on prescription drug prices. Our chart shows the distributional effects in the first year after passage. By the end of the decade, the bill’s effects were projected to become less progressive, since the insurance subsidies are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
Build Back Better (2021, not enacted)
Bottom earners would gain; top earners would lose
The Inflation Reduction Act was a scaled-back version of “Build Back Better,” President Biden’s signature domestic policy priority that never became law. It would have expanded social spending, benefiting lower-income Americans, and paid for much of it through higher taxes on corporations and high earners. Many of the proposed benefits for low-income Americans — including for child care, paid family leave and home health care — are not reflected in the chart, suggesting that this group may have gained even more than what’s shown.
Affordable Care Act (2010)
Bottom earners would gain; top earners would lose
The 2010 Affordable Care Act passed under President Barack Obama vastly expanded spending on health care for poor and middle-class Americans, and paid for it through higher payroll taxes on high earners, taxes on expensive employer health insurance and cuts to Medicare spending on hospitals and private insurance. While no one published a formal distributional analysis of the bill around the time it passed, several subsequent studies have measured its effects. Ultimately, several of the taxes that were originally projected to help reduce the deficit were repealed, mostly during the first Trump administration.
Clinton budget act (1993)
Bottom earners would gain; top earners would lose
A 1993 budget bill under Bill Clinton combined spending cuts with additional tax increases, particularly for the wealthy. It also increased the earned-income tax credit.
George H.W. Bush tax act (1990)
Bottom earners would gain; top earners would lose
The bill George H.W. Bush signed into law in 1990 raised taxes across the board, but boosted the earned-income tax credit for low-income workers.
Regressive bills that would benefit all groups
Several presidents have signed major tax cut bills that benefited Americans across the income spectrum while vastly increasing the deficit.
First Trump tax cuts (2017)
Bottom earners would gain; top earners would gain most
“On average, that’s been the pattern: that big tax cut bills help everyone,” said Benjamin Page, a senior fellow with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, which produced many of the analyses shown here.
The bill before Congress today, which breaks that pattern, extends many provisions of major tax legislation passed during President Trump’s first term, which are set to expire at the end of the year. The benefits of that bill also skewed toward the wealthy, although to a lesser degree than the current bill.
Obama tax cut extension (2013)
Bottom earners would gain; top 20 percent would gain most
In 2013, President Obama extended most of the tax cuts that had passed under George W. Bush and were due to expire. But the bipartisan tax bill he oversaw eliminated a tax cut for top earners.
George W. Bush tax cuts (2001 and 2003)
Bottom earners would gain; top earners would gain most
The original major tax cut bills from the George W. Bush administration delivered an even greater share of benefits to the highest earners than the current bill would. But unlike the Trump bill, the Bush tax cut did not cut benefits to the poor. That made the laws regressive, but no group looked worse off.
The cases of emergency stimulus
One other major category of bills has come during times of acute economic stress, when the government temporarily increases spending, often disproportionately aimed at providing assistance to the poor. This happened during the Great Recession in the late 2000s and the Covid pandemic. Those major stimulus bills had no losing group.
Distributional data is limited in showing the full effects of the 2009 Obama stimulus and the 2021 American Rescue Plan, the largest of several pandemic relief bills. Both increased funding for unemployed workers, expanded spending on health care and made investments in infrastructure.
Those bills made an explicit trade-off that it was worth adding to the deficit during a time of crisis. But no such trade-off exists today: The 2025 bill, in addition to its regressivity, adds to the deficit amid a much healthier economy.
About the data
We collected distributional analyses for major tax and social welfare bills dating to the 1990s (most were also reconciliation bills). For consistency, we included only charts for those analyses that looked at the effects of most provisions of a bill on after-tax income, though income is not always measured in exactly the same way.
Sources for each chart are listed. Most came from the Tax Policy Center.
Some analyses looked only at the change in taxes or in pre-tax income resulting from a bill, and we used that information to characterize its distributional patterns in our tables.
Politics
Trump renews bridge, power plant threat against Iran in push for deal, mocks ‘tough guy’ IRGC
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President Donald Trump mocked the Islamic Revolutionary Guard on Sunday morning for staking claim to a Strait of Hormuz “blockade” the U.S. military had already put in place.
“Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing.
“In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be ‘the tough guy!’”
Trump declared Saturday’s IRGC fire was “a total violation” of the ceasefire.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement!” his post began.
“Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it? My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations.”
Trump remains hopeful about diplomacy, but is not ruling out a return to force, where he once warned about ending “civilation” in Iran as they know it.
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran,” Trump’s stern warning continued.
“NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
“They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!”
Judge Troy Nunley was fed up.
Federal immigration officials had once again flouted his authority by keeping a man locked up in a California City detention center after Nunley ordered him released. When he was finally set free, the man was booted onto the street with no passport, driver’s license or other personal effects. The judge’s demand that the items be returned were met with silence.
And so on Tuesday, Nunley, the chief judge of the Eastern District of California, slapped Department of Justice attorney Jonathan Yu with an official sanction and a $250 fine.
In a scathing order, Nunley laid out why he was compelled to take such a rare step. The fine may have been less than some traffic tickets, but it’s nearly unheard for a judge to formally admonish a government lawyer.
By Yu’s own admission, he was drowning in work. In his order, Nunley recounted the attorney’s claim he’d been assigned more than 300 nearly identical cases in the last three months, all of immigrants in detention who argued they were being held without cause.
Court filings show many California cases involve longtime U.S. residents unexpectedly hauled off to jail after routine check-ins with immigration officials. One was an Afghan who’d helped the American war effort. Another a Cambodian grandmother of eight who fled Pol Pot’s killing fields as a girl nearly 50 years ago.
Until last year, most would have fought deportation on bond after a brief hearing with an immigration judge. Now, their only hope of release is to file a petition for writ of habeas corpus — a legal maneuver once typically reserved for death row inmates and suspected terrorists — inundating the country’s busiest federal courts with thousands of emergency suits.
The Trump administration attorney said he was trying to “triage” the situation, but Nunley found he repeatedly failed to comply, leaving people with the right to walk free stuck behind bars.
“The Court is not persuaded,” he wrote, issuing the sanctions.
The order came days after Nunley took the unusual step of announcing a “judicial emergency” in the district, which covers nearly half of California, stretching from the Oregon border to the Mojave Desert in the inland part of the state, including Fresno, Bakersfield and Sacramento.
In the last year, the Eastern District has received more petitions from immigration detainees than almost any other jurisdiction in the United States: More than 2,700 since January, compared to fewer than 500 last year and just 18 in 2024. Similar crises are playing out elsewhere, with federal courts in Minnesota briefly paralyzed amid the Trump administration’s enforcement blitz there last winter.
People detained are seen behind fences at an ICE detention facility in Adelanto, California on July 10, 2025.
(Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
In an interview with The Times, Nunley said dealing with the surge of activity since last summer has been “like being hit over the head with a bat.”
“We’re up all night doing these cases,” he said.
So far this year, the Eastern District’s six active judges have ordered almost people 2,000 freed.
“The majority of the cases that we see are cases where people should not be detained,” Nunley said. “They should be receiving hearings to determine whether or not they are to remain in this country, and until they receive those hearings, they should be free.”
Since last July, the Department of Homeland Security has ordered that all immigrants it arrests are subject to “mandatory detention” — a policy that had previously only applied to those caught at the border.
The change came four days after President Trump signed a spending bill that earmarked $45 billion to expand the federal network of immigrant lockups.
“This has been a sea change in the way the government has read the law,” said My Khanh Ngo, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “Almost every judge who has looked at this has agreed these people should get bond, and yet thousands of people are still sitting in detention.”
Elizabeth Vega, 15, right, and Darlene Rumualdo, 15, from Torres High School join labor organizers, clergy leaders and immigrant rights groups to protest immigration raids nationwide at La Placita Olvera in downtown Los Angeles on January 23, 2026.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Longtime U.S. residents who might once have fought removal from home — where they can more easily gather evidence to support their case and confer with lawyers — are instead being held indefinitely.
Many have no criminal record. Some have been in the U.S. so long that the countries they came from no longer exist.
“People are locked up in the same facilities as people accused of crimes, people who’ve been convicted of crimes … and then you’re telling people, you have no shot of getting out,” Ngo said. “Detaining people and not giving them the chance to get out of detention is a way of coercing people to give up their claims.”
The habeas process can take weeks or months depending on the judge and the district.
“When the immigration cases dropped on our district, we got hit harder than any other outside West Texas,” Nunley said. “Initially we had more cases than anyone else.”
Today, data compiled by ProPublica and legal activist groups including the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative show almost a quarter of the roughly 30,000 active habeas petitions in the United States are in California courts. Nunley’s own tabulations show half the California cases are in his district, where a perfect storm of stepped-up enforcement, a large population of immigrant workers and a concentration of detention centers produced a flash flood of habeas petitions.
The cases rely on the Constitution’s guarantee of due process before being deprived of life, liberty or property. But according to court filings, in some instances the government has argued “the Fifth Amendment does not apply” to detained immigrants.
DOJ lawyers responding to the bids for freedom now regularly complain they’re being crushed under paperwork.
Judges accustomed to having government lawyers comply with their orders have been left fuming.
In California’s Central District, which includes L.A. and surrounding areas, Judge Sunshine Sykes wrote a fiery decision earlier this year that said the Trump administration is inflicting “terror against noncitizens.”
Sykes is one of several federal judges across the country that have tried to compel the government to resume bond hearings. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked that decision in March, leaving the habeas system in place for now. But with challenges or recent decisions across multiple circuits, experts say the fight is fated for the Supreme Court.
“ICE has the law and the facts on its side, and it adheres to all court decisions until it ultimately gets them shot down by the highest court in the land,” a Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to The Times.
A woman holds a “ICE not welcome here!” sign at a vigil in San Pedro in January.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
The lawyers fighting to free those jailed under the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy say they were not initially equipped for these legal battles because they used to be exceedingly rare.
Most federal judges had only seen a handful of habeas petitions before last summer — then suddenly they had hundreds of requests for urgent relief, according to Jean Reisz, co-director of the USC Immigration Clinic.
Reisz said there are efforts to get pro bono law groups trained on how to effectively argue habeas cases, “but it takes a while to get up to speed.”
A federal agent asks residents to move back after a shooting during an immigration enforcement operation in Willowbrook on January 21, 2026.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
At the same time, Reisz said, lawyers are pushing judges who oversee the cases to act swiftly, since interminable procedural delays ensure people remain incarcerated.
“Most of the habeas petitions include a motion for temporary restraining orders, and that requires emergency decisions from the courts, which requires the courts to act very fast,” Reisz said.
In California’s federal district courts, the backlog remains thousands deep. Nunley said the system is struggling to keep up with the crush of cases.
“There’s nothing that says that noncitizens should not be entitled to due process,” Nunley said. “These are our people, they reside in our district. They’re entitled to the same due process that you and I are entitled to.”
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Saturday that the Trump administration is sanctioning a senior Nicaraguan official over alleged human rights violations.
Rubio said the U.S. is designating Vice Minister of the Interior Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa for his role in “gross violations of human rights” under the government of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, marking what he said was the latest effort to hold the regime accountable.
“The Trump administration continues to hold the Murillo-Ortega dictatorship accountable for brutal human rights violations against Nicaraguans,” Rubio said in a post on X. “I’m designating Nicaraguan Vice Minister of the Interior Luis Roberto Cañas Novoa for his role in human rights violations.”
RUBIO TESTIFIES IN TRIAL OF EX-FLORIDA CONGRESSMAN ALLEGEDLY HIRED BY MADURO GOVERNMENT TO LOBBY FOR VENEZUELA
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks at the State Department, April 14, 2026. The U.S. announced sanctions on a Nicaraguan official tied to alleged human rights abuses under the Ortega-Murillo government. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The designation was made under Section 7031(c), which allows the State Department to bar foreign officials and their immediate family members from entering the United States due to involvement in significant corruption or human rights abuses.
The State Department has said the Ortega-Murillo government has engaged in arbitrary arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings following mass protests that began in April 2018.
“Nearly eight years ago, the Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega dictatorship unleashed a brutal wave of repression against Nicaraguans who courageously stood against the regime’s increased tyranny, corruption, and abuse,” the statement reads.
The State Department said that the sanction marked the anniversary of the 2018 protests, after which more than 325 protesters were murdered in the aftermath.
A panel of U.N.-backed human rights experts previously accused Nicaragua’s government of systematic abuses “tantamount to crimes against humanity,” following an investigation into the country’s crackdown on political dissent, according to The Associated Press.
The experts said the repression intensified after mass protests in 2018 and has since expanded across large parts of society, targeting perceived opponents of the government.
TRUMP ADMIN ANNOUNCES EXPANSION OF VISA RESTRICTION POLICY IN WESTERN HEMISPHERE
Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the 199th Independence Day anniversary, in Managua, Nicaragua Sept. 15, 2020. (Nicaragua’s Presidency/Cesar Perez/Handout via Reuters)
Nicaragua’s government has rejected those findings.
The designation follows a series of recent U.S. actions targeting the Ortega-Murillo government. In February, the State Department sanctioned five senior Nicaraguan officials tied to repression, citing arbitrary detention, torture, killings and the targeting of clergy, media and civil society.
Earlier this week, the department also announced sanctions on individuals and companies linked to Nicaragua’s gold sector, including two of Ortega and Murillo’s sons, accusing the regime of using the industry to generate foreign currency, launder assets and consolidate power within the ruling family.
The State Department said the move is part of ongoing efforts to hold the Nicaraguan government accountable for its actions.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Nicaraguan government and its embassy in Washington for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
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A man waves a Nicaraguan flag during a demonstration to commemorate Nicaragua’s national Day of Peace, which is celebrated in the country on April 19, and to protest against the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega in San Jose, Costa Rica on April 16, 2023. (Jose Cordero/AFP)
The Trump administration has taken an increasingly aggressive posture in the Western Hemisphere in recent months, including a Jan. 3, 2026, operation that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
The U.S. has also carried out a series of strikes targeting suspected drug-trafficking vessels in the region, part of a broader crackdown tied to regional security and narcotics enforcement efforts.
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