All through the 2024 Presidential Campaign, candidate Trump repeatedly said of Project 2025, the blueprint that would define a second administration, that it was a mystery to him. When asked, his replies would range from “no idea,” to “I have nothing to do with them (the authors).”
But last Friday, the Fourth of July, President Trump signed into law, legislation that mirrored the document he once said was unknown to him. It was, as he nicknamed it, his ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’
Project 2025 and the newly enacted big, beautiful bill if not doppelgangers are very close to kissing cousins. In the new law, there are Medicaid restrictions and work requirements, steroid injected immigration regulations, terminated green energy policies, new rules on food stamps and a 900-page roadmap of new rules and regulations.
There is also a major tax cut for the top one percent of income earners that the Congressional Budget Office calculated will add as much as $3.5 billion to the national debt and significantly more in years to come.
Colorado’s Congressional delegation voted along party lines with all three Republicans voting with the President. Republican Jeff Hurd who represents the state’s 3rd Congressional District teased a ‘no’ vote’ saying that there were parts of the new law that troubled him. But in the end, he joined his colleagues.
Democrat Jason Crow, whose 6th Congressional District includes Aurora, was blunt in his disdain for the law. “This bill is a massive wealth transfer from the working class to the rich,” he said. It will kick millions, including hundreds of thousands in Colorado, off their federal health care and, at the same time, take away food assistance to an equal number, including children.
Because of new Medicaid and Medicare policies, Democrats say it will also close scores of rural hospitals in Colorado and across the country. One Nebraska hospital has already announced plans to close as a result. The new law, said the Congressional Budget Office, will strip nearly 12 million of health care insurance by 2034.
Senator Michael Bennet said the bill was “a massive step in the wrong direction.” His Senate colleague, John Hickenlooper, was more direct, calling it “pure lunacy.”
Colorado Governor Jared Polis said Trump’s legislation would soon become Colorado’s bill, as in encumbrance. Polis said the state, already facing a billion-dollar shortfall, would have to use its own funds—as much as $200 million—to pay for changes in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The state will also have to consider how to pay $57 million to cover new Medicaid work requirements.
The whole drama before the final vote played out like an amateur hour telenovela. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski teased a no vote before she wrangled huge concessions for her state. Still, as she explained her change of heart, said she hated the bill.
Another Republican, North Carolina’s Tom Tillis, stood firm against Trump and his pet legislation. Basically, he said, Trump lied. “It is inescapable that this bill, in its current form, will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the Cabinet Room when I was there with [members of the Senate Finance Committee], where he said, we can go after waste, fraud and abuse on any programs.”
But the voice of, perhaps, Colorado’s most revered Latino political leader, former Denver Mayor and Cabinet Secretary Federico Pena was blunt in his disdain for Trump’s war on Latinos with the muscular and excessive new funding for ICE. The bill, said Pena, “would add $100 billion to ICE in order to build more border walls,” while adding 10,000 new ICE agents to the rolls. Denver’s first Latino Mayor called it “the epitome of waste, fraud and abuse.” Walls, he said have never worked and Mexico is not paying for the wall “and never will.”
The money for constructing more wall along the southern border, Pena said, will go straight into the pockets of Trump’s “crony construction friends,” while at the same time giving a green light to ICE agents who have already demonstrated a “hostility and physical abuse against Latino seniors, women and youngsters who are only here to grow our economy.”
Pena said as proof, you can look at unbadged ICE agents physically accosting and rousting Latinos. Videos have shown ICE manhandling young and older Latinas, wrestling older Latino landscapers to the ground and, in one of the most dramatic videos, ICE agents chasing a young farmworker through a strawberry field and detaining him.
Latino leaders, along with others, have also called out Trump’s touting of an Everglades prison surrounded by alligator-filled ponds as a crowning achievement of his immigration make-over. “Trump only applies the law against innocent workers by trying to convince us that they are all criminals. In effect, Trump protects the business owners violating the law and arrests everyone else,” said Pena.
Trump’s law calls for no federal income tax on tips and overtime pay from 2025 to 2028. At that point, workers benefitting from this inclusion will revert back to current policy. But the CBO says that those in the top one percent of income earners or corporations will have their tax cuts made permanent.
The last days of June and early days of July have provided a stark contrast in views of this new legislation. As Democrats predicted that massive cuts to Medicaid will hurt families and seniors, including hundreds of thousands in assisted living. Republican talking points say the cuts will actually make America economically stronger.
“If we reduce taxes on corporations, on hardworking Americans, on senior citizens,” said Tennessee Republican Representative Chuck Fleischmann, “they will go out and work harder.”
The only good thing about Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ say Democrats, is that it will boost them back into the majority after the next election.
