How Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will affect Waltham

The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, President Donald Trump’s flagship bill, was signed into law earlier this year. Covering a vast range of financial topics, the bill allocated or removed funding from many different government programs.

The law has faced widespread criticism from Democratic leaders, including Massachusetts governor Maura Healey, who said that the new law will raise costs and weaken the economy.

 Massachusetts U.S. Representative Katherine Clark, who represents Waltham and other nearby cities, was highly critical of the bill, saying in a statement that “this [law] is not what the American people voted for, and they will not forget this outright betrayal. We will make sure of it.”

The law had the most dramatic impact on food assistance programs, Medicaid, immigration enforcement and taxes. 

City

Waltham Mayor Jeannette McCarthy said in an email to The Waltham Times that she was not aware of any cuts to the city budget as a result of the new law.

According to McCarthy’s email, Waltham Public Schools superintendent Marisa Mendonsa has stated that the district expected to see a total of just under $500,000 of cuts, mostly affecting “small stipends, PD and summer programing.” Mendonsa noted that, unlike other districts, WPS has not targeted these funds for full-time positions. Instead, most of the costs are tied to stipends and activities, so there will not be a significant impact on staffing as a result of the cuts.

In response to questions about the OBBB, the Waltham Public Library pointed to federal-level cuts, originating instead in a March executive order targeting the Institute of Museum and Library Services, that have affected the research databases it offers.

SNAP Cuts

The law has impacted food assistance programs, including the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also known as SNAP. 

SNAP, which according to the US Department of Agriculture helps pay for food for over 15 million children in the US, will see the largest cuts in program history. 

More than a million people in Massachusetts are currently enrolled in SNAP. According to the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, an organization that advocates for low-income communities, up to 175,000 Massachusetts residents will lose some or all of their benefits.

Federal funding for SNAP will be reduced by 20%, or $186 billion, through 2034. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research and policy institute, the cuts will affect more than 40 million people nationwide who receive basic food assistance through SNAP, including 16 million children, 8 million seniors, and 4 million non-elderly adults with disabilities.

There will also be an expansion of work requirements for SNAP to at least 80 hours a month. Work can be for pay, for goods or services (for something other than money), unpaid, or as a volunteer. Homeless adults, veterans and former foster youth are no longer exempt from these requirements. 

Additionally, able-bodied adults up to age 64, including parents and caregivers with children older than 14, must also meet the work requirements to be eligible for SNAP. Previously, the work requirement for adults was capped at age 54 and did not apply to parents of dependent children. 

The bill also moves some of the cost for SNAP to states, for the first time in program history. 

These cuts to nutritional assistance will have an outsized impact on food banks, both across the country and within Waltham, according to Maria DiMaggio, the operations director for Healthy Waltham, a food pantry that’s been operating in Waltham since the early 2000s.

“The food pantries are all kind of trying to prepare for the worst,” she said. “USDA funding has been cut, so what we’re seeing more is that our partners that we get the food from, their budgets have been cut, so they have cut back. That means that there’s less available free food for food pantries.”

Chukwuemeka “BJ” Osuagwu, the executive director of Healthy Waltham noted that the cuts are especially difficult at a time when food costs have risen significantly. He added that SNAP benefits are not as bountiful as people might think, and that most families, even with SNAP, still struggle with getting enough food.

Cuts to Medicaid

One of the new law’s most significant changes was to federal health care spending, which was cut by nearly $1 trillion. Nearly 12 million people nationwide are expected to lose health insurance coverage by 2034, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 

As part of the new law, some Medicaid recipients will have to regularly file paperwork proving they are working, volunteering, or attending school for at least 80 hours each month, or that they qualify for an exemption, such as caring for a young child. This requirement will most likely start sometime before 2027.

The requirement only applies to states which have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to include nondisabled adults. Forty states, including Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., offer this expanded Medicaid.

According to several estimates, up to 300,000 residents currently insured through MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, or the state health insurance marketplace could lose coverage. 

These changes also come with enormous financial impact. State estimates show that the law could potentially cost Massachusetts up to $3.5 billion a year in federal health care funding once fully implemented.

DiMaggio said that cuts to Medicaid may affect people’s spending on other necessities like food. She expects that families who will now have to pay for health insurance out of pocket will require more aid from community organizations like Healthy Waltham.

“I feel like in terms of spending, sometimes [food is] an afterthought… First, [people] want to make sure they have paid their rent, they have to pay for the car insurance, phone, health care, and then food kind of goes down the list.”

ICE Budget Increase

The new law will allocate $150 billion to fulfill Trump’s promise of mass deportation, with a significant portion of that money going toward U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

According to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the expanded funding will allow ICE to add an additional 10,000 agents. The law also set aside $45 billion solely for the detention of immigrants. Noem said the additional funds will pay for 80,000 new ICE beds and allow for an average daily population of 100,000 detainees.

Waltham has seen a significant increase in ICE activity since Trump took office in January. Several volunteer organizations, including Fuerza, who have stepped up to try to mitigate the effects of ICE raids, have condemned the new law. 

“This budget is a death sentence for many Americans,” said Jonathan Paz, founding member of Fuerza, in a statement. “At a time when people can’t afford food, housing, or healthcare, Congress has chosen to gut Medicaid and SNAP, while handing billions to the wealthy and supercharging ICE’s unaccountable kidnapping machine.”

“Instead of fixing our immigration system, we’re turning ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history,” said Paz. “We are going to see more masked ICE agents and longer food lines in Waltham.”

Paz called for Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey to not “turn a blind eye while this new ICE regime brutalizes our communities and eliminates resources people desperately need to survive.”

Tax Benefits

The new law also makes several changes to taxes in the U.S., including making most of the tax cuts and reforms of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a bill passed during Trump’s first campaign — permanent. 

According to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax policy non-profit organization, the new law contains positive and negative changes to tax laws. The positive changes include reducing tax liability related to businesses’ research and development costs — a change that has been shown to increase economic growth — and providing certainty for households and stability to the structure of the tax code by securing permanent extension of the rates and brackets of the 2017 individual tax cuts.

The law will also create massive tax cuts across the U.S., which is welcome news for many households. Massachusetts will see especially high cuts, with The Tax Foundation estimating that Middlesex County residents alone could see an average tax cut of just over $7,000 in 2026.

However, the law will also add another layer of complexity to the tax code. According to the Tax Foundation, the removal of tax on tips and overtime, along with a few other sources of income, comes “with various conditions and guardrails that, if enacted, will likely require hundreds of pages of IRS guidance to interpret.”

The new law will also spend too much money on “political gimmicks,” according to the Tax Foundation. The exemptions for overtime pay and tips, as well as deductions for auto loan interest, may be attractive politically but violate basic tax principles of treating taxpayers equally.

According to the Tax Foundation, these exemptions will also reduce tax revenue by more than $350 billion over the four years they are in effect, a cost that would more than double if they are made permanent.