FEED Validator

for Atom and RSS and KML

Congratulations!

This is a valid Atom 1.0 feed.

Recommendations

This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.

line 36, column 0: content should not contain data-caption attribute (14 occurrences) [help]
```
<img alt="Donald Trump, left, displays a signed executive order while Educat ...
```
line 36, column 0: content should not contain data-portal-copyright attribute (14 occurrences) [help]
```
<img alt="Donald Trump, left, displays a signed executive order while Educat ...
```
line 36, column 0: content should not contain data-has-syndication-rights attribute (14 occurrences) [help]
```
<img alt="Donald Trump, left, displays a signed executive order while Educat ...
```

line 578, column 0: content should not contain data-type attribute [help]

<p class="has-text-align-none">A similar dynamic was in play in <em>Medina</ ...

line 578, column 0: content should not contain data-id attribute [help]

<p class="has-text-align-none">A similar dynamic was in play in <em>Medina</ ...

Source: https://www.vox.com/rss/index.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><feed
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0"
xml:lang="en-US"
>
<title type="text">Vox</title>
<subtitle type="text">Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters.</subtitle>
<updated>2025-07-02T21:48:21+00:00</updated>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/rss/index.xml</id>
<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="https://www.vox.com/rss/index.xml" />
<icon>https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1</icon>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Cameron Peters</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Trump vs. after-school programs, briefly explained]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/418710/trump-education-funding-7-billion-impoundment-explained" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/418710/the-logoff-template</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T17:48:21-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-02T17:55:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Education" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="The Logoff" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: Today, I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s decision to withhold nearly $7 billion in federal education funding. What just happened? The Trump administration refused to […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Donald Trump, left, displays a signed executive order while Education Secretary Linda McMahon stands next to him." data-caption="President Donald Trump with Education Secretary Linda McMahon at the White House on March 20, 2025. | Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/gettyimages-2206133236.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
President Donald Trump with Education Secretary Linda McMahon at the White House on March 20, 2025. | Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
This story appeared in <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Logoff</a>, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/logoff-newsletter-trump-administration-updates" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Subscribe here</a>.
Welcome to The Logoff: Today, I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s decision to withhold nearly $7 billion in federal education funding.
What just happened? The Trump administration refused to release congressionally mandated funding to support a variety of education initiatives: after-school and summer programs, programs for students who are learning English, teacher training, classroom technology, and more. 
The nearly $7 billion was allocated to states and local schools, and should have gone out on Tuesday. Its loss will be particularly harmful because school districts have already made plans with the assumption that the money would be there, only to have it pulled at the last minute.  
What is the administration saying? The Trump administration argues the withholding isn’t a freeze and is instead because the funds are under review. But this argument is likely a fig leaf, given the administration’s opposition to the programs in question and its previous efforts to withhold funding for programs it disagrees with. What the administration appears to be doing is called impoundment — the decision not to spend money that Congress has already appropriated for a specific purpose.
Can they do that? Not really — but we’ll see how the courts rule, since the administration’s decision is almost certain to be challenged in court. Though the president can request Congress withdraw funding — and making that request would trigger a temporary freeze — the administration hasn’t done so in this case. 
What’s the big picture here? The Trump administration is waging a war against the congressional power of the purse, led by Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought (of Project 2025 fame). 
The decision to withhold education funding is one of a number of efforts to wrest spending power from Congress, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/25/trump-budget-law-challenge/">recent reporting</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/us/politics/trump-vought-congress-spending-rescission.html">suggests</a> the administration is considering ways to step up its attack and challenge restrictions on impoundment more broadly. If it’s successful, it will be a major expansion of Trump’s powers — and another blow to Congress’s.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">And with that, it’s time to log off…</h2>
I absolutely loved <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/418023/vera-rubin-observatory-space-astronomy-asteroids-telescope">this story from my colleague Bryan Walsh</a> about the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which just last month shared <a href="https://rubinobservatory.org/news/first-imagery-rubin">its first images of the cosmos</a>. The telescope itself is a scientific marvel that has already provided useful data to researchers, but, as Bryan points out, it’s also the “ultimate perspective provider,” a reminder of our place in a vast, beautiful universe. I hope you enjoy his piece — and the photos — as much as I did, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow!
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/noirlab2521a.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0.25556204996829,100,99.488875900063" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA" />

]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Aja Romano</name>
</author>
<author>
<name>Constance Grady</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[What Diddy’s mixed verdict means — for him and for us]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/418657/sean-combs-diddy-trial-verdict-analysis-me-too" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418657</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T17:24:48-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-02T17:11:45-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="#MeToo" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Celebrity Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Music" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Sexual harassment" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="True crime" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Jurors in the federal criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs reached a mixed verdict Wednesday, finding the rapper and music mogul not guilty of the three most serious charges levied against him. The jury deliberated for 13 hours across three days before reaching the verdict and found Combs guilty of two of the five charges […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt=" " data-caption="Sean “Diddy” Combs accepts the BET Lifetime Achievement Award on stage during the 2022 BET Awards at Microsoft Theater on June 26, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. | Leon Bennett/Getty Images for BET" data-portal-copyright="Leon Bennett/Getty Images for BET" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/gettyimages-1409750905.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Sean “Diddy” Combs accepts the BET Lifetime Achievement Award on stage during the 2022 BET Awards at Microsoft Theater on June 26, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. | Leon Bennett/Getty Images for BET </figcaption>
</figure>
Jurors in the federal criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs reached a mixed verdict Wednesday, finding the rapper and music mogul not guilty of the three most serious charges levied against him.
The jury deliberated for 13 hours across three days before reaching the verdict and found Combs guilty of two of the five charges against him, both for transportation to engage in prostitution. 
They found Combs not guilty of the more serious offenses: sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. Combs will avoid the harshest sentence — life in prison — but could still face up to 20 years if given the maximum sentence for his remaining convictions. The outcome was seen as a victory for Combs, who <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/diddy-jury-reaches-verdict-all-counts-sex-trafficking-racketeering-trial">responded by falling to his knees before his courtroom chair</a>, applauding the courtroom gallery, and crying out, “Thank god” and “I love you” several times.
The verdict concludes a seven-week trial that contained plenty of lurid details about Diddy’s decades of “freak-offs” and other sex parties, along with shocking anecdotes of his bizarre and controlling behavior toward both his girlfriends and his employees. The defense ultimately chose not to present any witnesses for Diddy but rested after cross-examining the prosecution’s case, relying largely on a strategy of persistently hammering away at the credibility and motivations of the prosecution’s witnesses.
With all that hammering away, the Diddy trial resurfaced some of the very same rape myths that the Me Too movement worked to dismantle a few short years ago, including the one <a href="https://strongheartshelpline.org/abuse/deconstructing-the-myths-about-victims">about the perfect victim</a>. The fact that the defense’s tactics appear to have been by and large successful is just the latest indication that America is prepared to put the lessons of Me Too in the rearview mirror.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">1. What was the verdict? What does it mean?</h2>
Jurors convicted Diddy on two charges under the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mann_act">Mann Act</a> of transporting his then-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, and another woman known in the courtroom only as Jane for the purposes of prostitution. He was found not guilty, however, of sex trafficking Ventura or Jane.
Effectively, that means while the jury accepted the state’s argument that Diddy illegally transported the women for purposes of engaging in sex work, they were not convinced that the women were actually coerced into participating in these acts.  
Legal analyst Paul Mauro, who <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/diddy-trial-jurors-face-unrealistic-090006266.html">correctly predicted</a> this split verdict, emphasized that the prosecution had to prove coercion. Given that Judge Arun Subramanian <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/415604/coercive-control-legal-status-diddy-trial">excluded all discussion about coercive control</a> — the overall environment of controlling behavior that can have a coercive effect upon an abuse victim — from the trial, the jurors may not have had enough context to accept the prosecution’s framing of events.
Jurors revealed that they were most divided on the first charge of racketeering conspiracy, telling Judge Subramanian on Tuesday that they were deadlocked before ultimately finding him not guilty. This is a lesser charge than racketeering itself, but <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/arts/music/rico-charges-diddy-racketeering.html">it requires</a> that prosecutors prove the defendant participated in a criminal enterprise and agreed to commit crimes to further that enterprise.
This is a complicated charge, however, since it requires the jury to accept that Combs intended to run a criminal enterprise. The defense instead portrayed Combs as a swinger with a troubled history of incidents of domestic abuse rather than a controlling, powerful mogul who systematically used his many businesses to support illegal sexual activities.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">2. What happens next? </h2>
Prosecutor Maurene Comey has stated the government will seek the maximum on the remaining two counts, which means Combs could still face up to 20 years in prison — 10 years for each count.
Judge Subramanian, a federal district court judge, is currently weighing whether to release Combs from detention while awaiting his sentencing hearing.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">3. What new information did we learn from Diddy’s trial?</h2>
From the moment testimony in the case <a href="https://www.cnn.com/entertainment/live-news/diddy-sean-combs-trial-05-12-25">kicked off May 12</a>, the trial was packed with one jaw-dropping anecdote after another. Ventura, Combs’ ex-girlfriend, played an inadvertent role in jump-starting the federal investigation into Combs when <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/entertainment/video/sean-diddy-combs-cassie-venture-surveillance-digvid">2016 surveillance footage</a> surfaced in 2024, that appears to show Combs violently beating her in a hotel hallway.
In addition to that harrowing moment, a litany of Combs’ former girlfriends and staff testified to experiencing what amounted to decades of abusive and controlling behavior from Combs. Bryana Bongolan, a friend of Ventura’s, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg4prl4p21o">testified</a> that Combs once allegedly hoisted her to the balcony ledge of a 17th-story apartment and then threw her into the balcony furniture. One longtime staffer, Capricorn Clark, testified that <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/05/27/nx-s1-5413561/former-sean-combs-employee-capricorn-clark-says-he-kidnapped-her">Combs threatened to kill her</a> on the first day she worked for him, physically assaulted her, and at one point, forced her to come with him to stalk Kid Cudi, whose car he later allegedly firebombed out of jealousy over Cudi’s relationship with Ventura.
Multiple former Combs staffers testified to having been <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/sean-diddy-combs-fbi-lie-detector-test-assistant-1235343452/">required to take polygraph tests</a> by Combs to keep their jobs, sometimes including days of grueling interrogations before he was satisfied. Often, the abuse staff allegedly endured was every bit as terrifying as the incidents against his girlfriends. One former staffer, using the pseudonym Mia, testified <a href="https://apnews.com/article/sean-combs-diddy-trial-cassie-mia-3134e4be64b95457d0f999e284bf2527">that she was forbidden to lock the doors</a> or leave the property while she was staying at Combs’ residence. At one point, she alleged on the stand, Combs began a pattern of intermittently sexually assaulting her over the eight years she worked for him.
Even though Combs was acquitted on the most serious charges against him, it will be hard — justifiably so — for the public to erase many of these stories and allegations from their collective memory.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4. What does the mixed verdict mean for Me Too?</h2>
The jury’s mixed verdict represents, in a sense, the fraught place the Me Too movement holds in America’s public consciousness these days.
Me Too arguably opened the door for the federal investigation into Combs, which appears to have kicked off after Ventura <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/arts/music/sean-combs-diddy-cassie-rape-lawsuit.html">filed a civil lawsuit against him in 2023</a>. In it, Ventura made the first shocking public accusations that Combs was involved in human trafficking and sexual assault, launching the stream of accusations that would end in a criminal trial and a mixed verdict.
<a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/g-s1-64329/sean-diddy-combs-cassie-lookback-window-law">Ventura filed her lawsuit under the New York Adult Survivors Act</a> (NYASA), a law explicitly passed as a response to the Me Too movement. It offered survivors of sexual violence a one-year window, from November 2022 to 2023, to file civil lawsuits against their alleged attackers, even if the statute of limitations had lapsed. 
The idea behind the NYASA was to acknowledge the unusual cultural moment that Me Too created. It’s well established that <a href="https://phys.org/news/2021-06-explores-women-sexually-assaulted.html">survivors of sexual assault frequently face too much shame</a> to acknowledge what happened to them, which is part of why sex crimes are so difficult to prosecute: By the time a survivor decides to come forward, the statute of limitations may well have lapsed. The Me Too movement briefly created a space in which survivors were able to acknowledge what had happened to them, which meant that suddenly, a lot of people were coming forward about sex crimes that could no longer be prosecuted. The NYASA was designed to allow survivors to get closure for their attacks in civil court, without reopening the door to criminal charges.
Although Ventura eventually <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/11/18/1213962223/sean-diddy-combs-cassie-settle-lawsuit">settled her civil lawsuit with Diddy</a>, it led to more accusations. It turned out that some of the charges were still prosecutable in criminal court, and that’s where the federal case began. Me Too and its legal victories made the whole thing possible. 
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse.</blockquote></figure>
Yet at the same time that the NYASA was making it possible for survivors to face their attackers in court, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23581859/me-too-backlash-susan-faludi-weinstein-roe-dobbs-depp-heard">a backlash against Me Too was mounting across America</a>. Cultural consensus began to coalesce around the opinion that Me Too had gone too far. Coverage of <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23043519/johnny-depp-amber-heard-defamation-trial-fairfax-county-domestic-abuse-violence-me-too">the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard domestic violence case in 2022</a> devolved into a gleefully misogynistic spectacle. The status of feminism dropped precipitously in <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/06/01/poll-finds-support-great-replacement-hard-right-ideas#gender">public opinion polls</a>. Most traumatically of all, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/6/24/23176750/supreme-court-overturns-roe-v-wade-read-dobbs-decision-text">the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade</a>, depriving generations of women of the reproductive freedom with which they were born.
Now, the cultural energy that animated public interest in the first wave of Me Too trials has faded away. All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse, especially the one about how no true rape victim will appease their attackers. During Ventura’s cross-examination, lawyers for Combs <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/diddy-trial-cassie-text-always-ready-to-freak-off-2025-5">dwelled at length on text messages</a> in which Ventura appeared to speak positively about the encounters Ventura now says she was coerced into participating in. If she were really raped, their argument implied, she would never have been willing to pretend otherwise.
In real life, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7375443/">it’s extremely common for victims of sexual assault to maintain contact with their attackers</a>, even sometimes covering for them. Most perpetrators of sexual violence know their victims, and in many cases — especially in these celebrity trials — they hold professional or financial power over their victims, too. All of those facts combine to leave survivors frequently unwilling to completely sever ties with their attackers. All of this was discussed at great length in Me Too discourse back in 2017.
Yet <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/411261/harvey-weinstein-trial-candace-owens-joe-rogan">Harvey Weinstein has high-profile supporters</a> who make much of the fact that his victims maintained contact with him after he attacked them. Combs’s lawyers relied on the same argument in this case, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/415604/coercive-control-legal-status-diddy-trial">the judge blocked prosecutors from presenting expert testimony on coercive control</a>. Apparently, the angle convinced enough members of the jury that they felt no need to convict Combs of the most serious charges he faced.
Me Too achieved real legal victories, but they were temporary — a one-year statute here and there. Its great achievements were its cultural changes. And every day, it seems they are chipped away more and more. The mixed verdict in Combs’s case, and Combs’s partial victory, show just how badly they’ve already eroded. 

]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Andrew Prokop</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[What Trump’s massive bill would actually do, explained]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418599/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-details-explained" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418599</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T14:10:14-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-02T14:15:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Republicans are close to passing President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut taxes, slash programs for low-income Americans, ramp up funding for mass deportation, and penalize the solar and wind energy industries. Oh, and it adds enormously to the nation’s debt — but who’s counting? (Independent analysts are, and they estimate […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="President Trump signing a bill at his desk" data-caption="President Donald Trump signs a bill on June 12, 2025. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/GettyImages-2219160677.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
President Donald Trump signs a bill on June 12, 2025. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
Republicans are close to passing President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut taxes, slash programs for low-income Americans, ramp up funding for mass deportation, and penalize the solar and wind energy industries.
Oh, and it adds enormously to the nation’s debt — but who’s counting? (Independent <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects">analysts</a> are, and they <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/cbo-score-shows-senate-obbba-adds-over-39-trillion-debt">estimate</a> it will add at least $3 trillion.)
The sprawling, <a href="https://punchbowl.news/file_3921/">887-page bill</a> contains far too many provisions to name here. But to get a better sense of the bill’s impact, it’s worth running down what it does in a few key areas. 
The big picture, though, is that Trump is targeting Democratic or liberal-coded programs and constituencies — programs for the poor, student borrowers, and climate change — to cover part (but nowhere near all) of the cost of his big tax cuts and new spending.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Taxes: The current tax rates stick around – plus there’s some new tax cuts</h2>
The bill makes a <a href="https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jun/tax-changes-in-senate-budget-reconciliation-bill/">variety of changes to tax law</a>, some of which are about keeping tax breaks set to expire soon, others of which are adding new goodies in the tax code.
1) Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent: In Trump’s first term, Republicans lowered income and other tax rates with his 2017 tax law. However, in a gimmick to make that law look less costly, the new lower rates they set were scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 — meaning that, if Congress did nothing, practically everyone’s taxes would go up next year.
So the single most consequential thing this bill does, from a budgetary perspective, is making those 2017 tax levels permanent, averting their imminent expiration. 
That saves Americans from an imminent tax hike, but notably, it just keeps the status quo tax levels in place. So, in practice, many people may not perceive this as a new cut to their taxes.
2) New “populist” tax cuts: The bill also creates several new tax breaks meant to fulfill certain Trump 2024 campaign promises, such as “no tax on tips.” There will be <a href="https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jun/tax-changes-in-senate-budget-reconciliation-bill/">new deductions</a> for up to $25,000 in tip income, $12,500 in overtime income, $6,000 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/02/senior-deduction-trump-social-security/">for seniors</a>, and a deduction for interest on loans for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/us/politics/senate-trump-bill-new-car-interest.html">new US-made cars</a>. The bill also creates savings accounts for children called “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/upshot/senate-republican-megabill.html">Trump accounts</a>,” in which the government would invest $1,000 per child.
3) Tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses: Wealthy Americans wanting to pay less in taxes have the most to be happy about from this bill, because they benefit hugely from making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent. 
Other wealthy winners in the bill include owners of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/11/28/16709634/pass-through-republican-tax-bill">“pass-through” businesses</a> (partnerships, LLCs, or other business entities that don’t pay the typical corporate income tax); they get their tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 bill made permanent. Some wealthy heirs stand to gain too, as the exemption from the estate tax was raised to inherited estates worth $15 million).
Affluent blue state residents got a big win. The 2017 Trump tax law had sharply limited a deduction that typically benefited them — the state and local <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/14/22375306/salt-tax-deduction-repeal">(SALT) deduction</a>, which it capped at $10,000. (People in blue states tend to have more state and local taxes they can deduct.) The new bill <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/senate-republican-bill-salt-tax.html">raises that</a> limit to $40,000.
Businesses also get some big benefits, as the bill makes three major corporate <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/28/republican-senate-trump-tax-immigration-plan/">tax breaks permanent</a>: bonus depreciation, research and development expensing, and a tax break related to interest deduction. 
All this, combined with the cuts for programs for poor people, is why <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/12/upshot/gop-megabill-distribution-poor-rich.html">many</a> <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/30/trump-bill-helps-wealthy-hurts-low-earners-yale-report.html">analysts</a> calculate the impact this bill would be regressive overall — it will end up financially harming low-income Americans, and benefiting the rich the most.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The safety net: Big cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans</h2>
Trump has repeatedly <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-medicaid-republican-bill-cut-benefits/story?id=121756481">promised that he wouldn’t cut Medicaid</a>, and this bill breaks that promise bigly. Its new work reporting requirements and other changes (such as a limit to the “<a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/5-key-facts-about-medicaid-and-provider-taxes/">provider tax</a>” states may charge) could end up <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/29/trump-tax-medicaid-snap/">cutting Medicaid spending</a> by as much as 18 percent. The bill also makes changes to the Affordable Care Act individual insurance marketplaces. Altogether, these provisions would result in 12 million people losing their health insurance, per the <a href="https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/how-will-the-2025-budget-reconciliation-affect-the-aca-medicaid-and-the-uninsured-rate/">Congressional Budget Office</a>.
Food stamps are another target. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could be cut by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/29/trump-tax-medicaid-snap/">as much as 20 percent</a>, due to new work requirements and new requirements states pay a higher share of the program’s cost. One <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/senate-bill-snap-error-rates-murkowski-alaska_n_68644b9ce4b06a831253f20f">bizarre last-minute provision</a>, aimed at winning over swing vote Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), seemingly gives states an incentive to make erroneous payments, because states with higher payment error rates get to <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/senate-bill-snap-error-rates-murkowski-alaska_n_68644b9ce4b06a831253f20f">delay their cost hikes</a>.
Student loans also come in for <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/gop-megabill-poised-to-change-the-way-americans-borrow-and-repay-student-loans-56c49da3">deep cuts</a>, as the bill overhauls the existing system, ending many repayment plans, requiring borrowers to repay more, and limiting future loan availability. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Clean energy: The bill singles out solar and wind for harsh treatment</h2>
Three years ago, with the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats enacted a swath of new incentives aimed at making the US a clean energy powerhouse. Trump’s new bill moves in the exact opposite direction. It repeals many of Biden’s clean energy benefits, but it doesn’t stop there – it goes further by <a href="https://heatmap.news/politics/senate-big-beautiful-bill">singling out clean energy</a>, particularly solar and wind, for harsh treatment.
Under the bill, new Biden-era tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency will be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/upshot/senate-republican-megabill.html">terminated this year</a>. Biden’s clean electricity production tax credits, meanwhile, will be gradually rolled back, though solar and wind will see their credits vanish more quickly. The bill also requires clean power projects to start using fewer and fewer Chinese-made components, which much of the industry heavily relies on.
Things could be worse, though. A recent draft of the bill included <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418187/big-beautiful-bill-senate-trump-tax-cut-ai-wind-solar">far harsher policies toward solar and wind</a>, which could have had truly apocalyptic consequences for the industry — but some of them were <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-removes-excise-tax-renewable-energy-industry-trump-domestic-policy-bill/">dropped</a> or <a href="https://x.com/AlexEpstein/status/1940089077409489010">watered down</a> to get the bill through the Senate.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Trump’s new spending goes to the border wall, mass deportation, and the military</h2>
Counterbalancing some of these spending cuts on the safety net and clean energy, Trump’s bill also spends a bunch more money on two of his own top priorities: immigration enforcement in the military.
About $175 billion will be devoted to immigration, including roughly <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/house-reconciliation-bill-immigration-border-security/">$50 billion for Trump’s border wall</a> and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities, $45 billion for expanding the capacity to detain unauthorized immigrants, and $30 billion for enforcement operations. This is a lot of money that will now be devoted to Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda, and the question will now be whether they can put it to use.
The military, meanwhile, will get about $150 billion from the bill, to be used to start construction on Trump’s planned “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, as well as on shipbuilding, <a href="https://www.airandspaceforces.com/pentagon-replenish-munitions-stockpiles-billions-congress/">munitions</a>, and other military priorities.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The debt: It goes up a whole lot</h2>
In the end, Trump’s spending cuts were nowhere near enough to balance out the enormous cost of the tax cuts in this bill. So, estimates suggest, <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects">at least $3 trillion more will be added to the debt</a> if this bill becomes law.
Every president this century has come in with big deficit-increasing bills, dismissing concerns about the debt, and the sky hasn’t yet fallen. But all these years of big spending are adding up, and <a href="https://www.crfb.org/blogs/interest-debt-grow-past-1-trillion-next-year">interest payments on the debt</a> are rising. This could make for a significant drag on the economy in future years and make even more painful cuts necessary.
Republicans are betting that the tax cuts in this bill will juice business and economic activity enough to keep the country happy in the short term — and that the cuts, targeting mainly low-income people or Democratic constituencies, are unlikely to hurt them too much at the ballot box. 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Umair Irfan</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Trump’s plan to replace clean energy with fossil fuels has some major problems]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/climate/418563/trump-big-beautiful-bill-clean-energy-fossil-climate" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418563</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T14:21:28-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-02T13:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Climate" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Energy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Fossil fuels" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Renewable Energy" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[The first solar cell ever made was built in the United States. Tesla, based in the US, was once the largest EV manufacturer in the world. The lithium-ion battery was codeveloped in the US. But today, China — not the US — is the largest manufacturer of solar cells and batteries. China’s BYD — not Tesla […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="" data-caption="The Senate budget bill pares back incentives for renewable energy and aims to boost fossil fuels like coal." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/GettyImages-1902316419.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
The Senate budget bill pares back incentives for renewable energy and aims to boost fossil fuels like coal. </figcaption>
</figure>
The first solar cell ever made was <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/brief-history-solar-panels-180972006/">built in the United States</a>. Tesla, based in the US, was once the largest EV manufacturer in the world. The lithium-ion battery was <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/goodenough/facts/">codeveloped in the US</a>.
But today, China — not the US — is the largest manufacturer of solar cells and batteries. China’s BYD — not Tesla — is the largest EV manufacturer in the world. And China is starting to outrun the US on <a href="https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/30/china-outpacing-us-rd-spending-new-report-urges-nsf-tip-funding/">research and development investment</a>. 
The US has a long history of taking the lead in clean energy, and a long history of losing it. And President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which passed the Senate on Tuesday, would again leave the US on the margins of a global clean energy revolution that it could have dominated. 
For years now, clean power has been the <a href="https://www.wri.org/insights/clean-energy-progress-united-states">largest source of new electricity</a> in the US. Solar, batteries, and wind are on track to make up more than <a href="https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586">90 percent of new electricity capacity</a> on the US power grid this year. <a href="https://e360.yale.edu/digest/us-2024-solar-wind-coal">Wind and solar now produce more electricity</a> on the US power grid than coal. Almost <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/2023/10/30/23938581/ev-uaw-strike-gm-ford-stellantis-clean-energy">twice as many Americans work in clean energy</a> compared to fossil fuels, and the sector is still growing.
But thanks to the bill, that may not be the case for much longer. 
Some of the more extreme provisions in earlier drafts of the bill have been removed, like an <a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/senate-leaders-scrap-new-tax-on-renewable-energy/">excise tax targeting renewable energy</a>. But the latest version of the bill rolls back many of the investments from the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/8/8/23296951/inflation-reduction-act-biden-democrats-climate-change">2022 Inflation Reduction Act</a>, the single-largest US investment to address climate change by giving the energy transition a boost. It calls for <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/07/01/congress/senate-bill-to-ease-wind-and-solar-phaseout-00434983">more rapid phaseouts of tax credits for wind and solar power</a> and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/01/trump-big-beautiful-bill-axes-7500-ev-tax-credit-after-september.html">eliminates a $7,500 tax credit</a> for the purchase of a new electric vehicle. The spending bill working its way through Congress doesn’t just undo incentives for clean energy — it also creates a new <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02072025/big-beautiful-bill-met-coal-tax-break/">tax credit for coal</a>.
These provisions are in line with Trump’s longstanding antipathy toward renewable energy and disbelief in climate change. But they stand to hobble the US economy more broadly. 
The US is facing significant load growth on the power grid for the first time in decades as the tech industry scrounges for electrons to power their <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/409903/ai-data-center-crypto-energy-electricity-climate">electricity-devouring data centers</a>. Energy demand is rising and the cheapest, most readily deployable supplies of energy are being throttled. 
The alternatives, however, are not likely to make up the gap in time. Fossil fuels take longer to ramp up. The US is currently the <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/24098983/biden-oil-production-climate-fossil-fuel-renewables">largest oil and gas producer in the world</a>, but it can take years to site, permit, and acquire the materials to build power plants that burn these fuels. Since these are internationally traded commodities, their prices can fluctuate based on factors beyond the US’s control.
Right now, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/oil-falls-more-than-2bbl-opec-set-accelerate-output-hikes-2025-05-04/">oil prices</a> are at four-year lows and <a href="https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm">natural gas prices are falling</a>, and when prices are low, it’s much harder to make the business case for more mining, drilling, and power plants, even with incentives. Trump may have some levers to pull — he can, for example, open up more federally managed lands for energy production — but many of those <a href="https://westernpriorities.org/2022/03/by-the-numbers-oil-industry-awash-in-permits-leases-while-pushing-for-more-drilling%EF%BF%BC/">leases sit unused</a> because energy companies don’t want to create a supply glut. Meanwhile, <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021100001">employment in the oil and gas industry</a> remains volatile, while <a href="https://www.wvva.com/2025/06/27/roughly-700-people-are-being-laid-off-mining-related-jobs-wva-this-summer/">coal jobs</a> are continuing their <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001">decades-long decline</a>.
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-02-at-12.27.45%E2%80%AFPM.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,3.5847452715365,100,92.830509456927" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="Energy Information Administration" />
“We’re in this moment of surging demand and you can’t build another gas turbine for at least five years beyond what’s already been booked,” said <a href="https://energyinnovation.org/bio/robbie-orvis/">Robbie Orvis</a>, senior director for modeling and analysis at the think tank Energy Innovation. “We have this <a href="https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65264">demand growth</a> that’s going to have to be met. The only thing you can build to meet it on the timeline needed over the next five to 10 years is solar, wind, or battery storage.”
The Senate bill does extend <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/07/what-they-are-saying-senate-approves-landmark-one-big-beautiful-bill/">tax credits and loan programs for nuclear energy</a> and <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/policy-regulation/senates-big-beautiful-bill-would-be-a-disaster-for-clean-energy">geothermal power</a>. However, the cuts in the bill would also slow efforts to build up the domestic energy supply chain needed to bolster other zero-emissions technologies, from raw materials like <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/415038/critical-minerals-supply-chain-lithium-innovation">lithium and rare earth minerals</a> to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/business/energy-environment/trump-battery-factories-electric-vehicles.html">battery factories</a>. It would do little to relax the <a href="https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-2023-dominated-requests-solar-wind-and-energy-storage">bottlenecks for connecting new power plants to the grid</a>, which are adding years to project timelines. The US is also <a href="https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/06/10-ways-that-trumps-tax-bill-would-undermine-his-energy-promises/">dismantling research and development</a> that could yield the next energy breakthrough. On top of all this, Trump’s tariffs are <a href="https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Tariffs-and-Turmoil-Undermine-Trumps-Oil-and-Gas-Promises.html">raising operating costs</a> not just for renewables, but also for the fossil fuels he loves so much.
The net result is a policy suite that will not only hamper clean electricity, but energy overall, making it more expensive for everyone across the country. According to Energy Innovation, the Senate bill would reduce how much energy the US adds to the grid in the years to come compared to the current trajectory, thereby <a href="https://energyinnovation.org/wp-content/uploads/One-Big-Beautiful-Bill-Senate-Reconciliation-Analysis_July-2025.pdf">increasing household electricity prices</a> on average by $130 per year, eroding almost a trillion dollars in economic productivity, and costing 760,000 jobs by 2030.
<div class="twitter-embed"><a href="https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1940089426400756223" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View Link</a></div>
While the US is putting clean energy in reverse, other countries are racing ahead. <a href="https://www.iea.org/news/global-energy-investment-set-to-rise-to-3-3-trillion-in-2025-amid-economic-uncertainty-and-energy-security-concerns">Clean energy technology investment</a> is poised to increase to $2.2 trillion this year around the world. Renewables are on track to overtake coal as the <a href="https://rmi.org/the-energy-transition-in-2025-what-to-watch-for/">biggest power source in the world</a> this year. Wind, solar, and batteries are still getting cheaper. Effectively, the US is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/climate/china-clean-energy-power.html">ceding one of the biggest growth industries in the world to China</a>, particularly as developing countries industrialize and other wealthy countries look to decarbonize their economies.
<div class="twitter-embed"><a href="https://twitter.com/CleanPowerDave/status/1939735730110308522" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">View Link</a></div>
The <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/377072/data-energy-trends-renewables-transition-escape-velocity">case for more clean energy</a> — lower costs, faster deployment, fewer greenhouse gas emissions — remains robust. Even with all the deliberate obstacles the Trump administration is placing ahead, there are some wind, solar, and battery projects <a href="https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586">still poised to come online</a> in the US as they work their way through the pipeline, albeit at a much slower pace than before.
But without continued investment, the US will lose ground to the rest of the world and condemn itself to dirtier, more expensive energy while worsening a problem that will <a href="https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/climate-change-may-cost-38-trillion-a-year-by-2049-study-says/">extract a dear toll from the economy</a>. 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Dylan Matthews</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The One Big Beautiful Bill is one big disaster for AI]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/418380/big-beautiful-bill-ai-data-center" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418380</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T11:29:30-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-02T08:30:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Trump Administration" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[To hear many smart AI observers tell it, the day of Wednesday, June 25, 2025, represented the moment when Congress started to take the possibility of advanced AI seriously. The occasion was a hearing of Congress’s “we’re worried about China” committee (or, more formally, the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Trump at the podium with business leaders" data-caption="President Donald Trump, from left, Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., Masayoshi Son, chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., and Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 21. | Aaron Schwartz/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Aaron Schwartz/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/gettyimages-2194585190.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
President Donald Trump, from left, Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., Masayoshi Son, chief executive officer of SoftBank Group Corp., and Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 21. | Aaron Schwartz/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
To hear many smart AI observers tell it, the day of Wednesday, June 25, 2025, represented the moment when Congress started to take the possibility of advanced AI seriously.
The occasion was a <a href="https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=118428">hearing of Congress’s “we’re worried about China” committee</a> (or, more formally, the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party) focused on the US-China AI competition. Members of both parties used the event to express concern that was <a href="https://www.transformernews.ai/p/congress-ccp-agi-hearing">surprisingly strident and detailed</a> about the near-term risks posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI) or even artificial superintelligence (ASI).
<div class="wp-block-vox-media-highlight vox-media-highlight">
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">This story was first featured in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup">Future Perfect newsletter</a>.</h2>
Sign up <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup">here</a> to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.
</div>
Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) expressed fear of “loss of control by any nation-state” that “could give rise to an independent AGI or ASI actor” threatening all nations. Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) <a href="https://x.com/RepNateMoran/status/1937901999900483631">predicted</a>, “AI systems will soon have the capability to conduct their own research and development,” and asked about the risks that might pose. Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) declared, “Anybody who doesn’t feel urgency around this issue is not paying attention.”
<a href="https://www.transformernews.ai/p/congress-ccp-agi-hearing">Shakeel Hashim of Transformer</a>, one of the best reporters working on AI today, summarized the hearing this way: “Washington seems to finally be waking up to the potential arrival of AGI — and the many risks that could accompany it.” Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy headlined his post on the hearing, “<a href="https://peterwildeford.substack.com/p/congress-has-started-taking-agi-more">Congress Has Started Taking AGI More Seriously</a>.”
Yet even as that hearing was unfolding, the Senate was frantically putting the finishing touches on the <a href="https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/415825/trump-big-beautiful-bill-congress-deficit-tax-cuts">One Big Beautiful Bill</a>, the gargantuan deficit-exploding legislation to cut taxes, boost military and border spending, and cut to the bone various social programs. As part of their effort, culminating in Senate passage on Tuesday, Republican senators managed to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/29/trump-tax-medicaid-snap/">worsen some of the safety net cuts</a> in the House version of the bill and tried (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to add a <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/06/28/congress/new-tax-on-solar-wind-power-00431388?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email">new tax on clean energy</a> that could make building the energy-hungry data centers AI requires substantially more expensive.
The negotiations were a reminder that, even as some parts of Congress have finally started to appear to take AI seriously, others are on autopilot and taking a series of actions that will make the US less competitive on, and less prepared for, the future of AI.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Recapping the beautiful bill</h2>
As I <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/416339/ai-openai-automation-big-beautiful-reconciliation-trump">wrote a month ago</a>, the One Big Beautiful Bill, in general, is not the work of policymakers who take the possibility of powerful AI seriously.
The House-passed provision stripping broadband funding from states that regulate AI suggested its authors do not think AI will be a sufficiently important technology that will need to be regulated the way telephones, electrical transmission, the internet, and other major technological breakthroughs have always been by state and local governments. Luckily, the <a href="https://www.axios.com/pro/tech-policy/2025/07/01/senate-strips-ai-moratorium">Senate voted to strip this provision</a> from its version of the bill on Monday night, but that hardly means the rest of the bill is harmless.
The bill’s cuts to, and imposition of new work requirements upon, safety net programs, such as Medicaid and SNAP (aka food stamps), suggest the authors do not take the risk of automation-caused job loss at all seriously. If huge numbers of Americans are <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/403708/artificial-intelligence-robots-jobs-employment-remote-workers">about to be displaced from their jobs</a> due to technological advancements, the last thing we ought to do is condition more support programs on work. Yet that is exactly what the bill does, and the Senate version is in many ways worse than the House one.
While the Medicaid work requirements in the House bill only apply to adults without children, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/27/us/politics/house-senate-bill-trump-agenda-comparison.html">Senate bill extends them to parents with children 14 and over</a>. It cuts Medicaid funding to states by changes to policies called “provider taxes.” Its food stamp work requirements are slightly less stringent than the House’s, but both bills <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/by-the-numbers-senate-republican-leaderships-reconciliation-bill-takes">open the door to states opting out of the food stamps program entirely</a> if they so choose.
How does this connect to a future with far more powerful AI?
Imagine you lose your job as an Uber driver because of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/411522/self-driving-car-artificial-intelligence-autonomous-vehicle-safety-waymo-google">increased popularity of Waymo</a> and other self-driving services. You suddenly have no income. If, like most Americans, you live in a state that expanded Medicaid as part of Obamacare, you will be eligible for free health coverage as well as food stamps to help with grocery costs while you get back on your feet.
But this bill changes that. Your state might not offer you food stamps at all, and if it does, both them and your health coverage could lapse if you don’t swiftly get a new job, which will be that much harder in a world where AI <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic">eats up more and more labor</a>. 
This is not what a smart policy for people displaced by advances in AI looks like.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Trump energy drought</h2>
But perhaps the most important AI-related changes to the Senate bill are found on the energy side. 
The House bill’s cuts to sources like nuclear and geothermal, which can produce the constant stream of power needed for fueling data centers and AI model training, were so severe that <a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/wright-backs-long-term-tax-credits-for-nuclear-geothermal/">even Energy Secretary Chris Wright asked for them to be tapered back</a>.
The Senate version indeed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/27/us/politics/house-senate-bill-trump-agenda-comparison.html">tapered those back a bit</a> by allowing credits for projects that start construction before 2034, a few years later than the House deadlines. But it makes up for that by repealing wind and solar credits faster. In the House bill, wind and solar companies had to be operational by the end of 2028; in the Senate version, by the end of 2027.
In its initial form, the Senate bill would have taken another hatchet to wind and solar by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/climate/gop-bill-adds-surprise-tax-that-could-cripple-wind-and-solar-power.html">actively taxing them</a>, proposing a provision to tax wind and solar farms coming online after 2027 if they use components from China. The thing is that essentially every wind and solar farm uses components from China, <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/415038/critical-minerals-supply-chain-lithium-innovation">given how dominant</a> that country is in supply chains for these sources, and that will not change any time soon.
The energy tax was struck from the final version of the Senate bill. But its repeal of wind and solar credits remains a threat to AI as an industry.
For one thing, the bill makes everyone’s electricity, including that for AI training, more expensive. The Rhodium Group modeled an earlier, less severe version of the bill and found it would increase energy costs for industry by <a href="https://rhg.com/research/the-stakes-for-energy-costs-in-budget-reconciliation/#:~:text=4%2D6%%20more%20per%20year%20for%20energy">4 percent to 6 percent annually</a>. Most of this comes in the form of increased spending on fossil fuels. Because the economic case for new wind and solar production is so much worse, natural gas and coal will have to be a bigger part of the energy mix, and because they can <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/377072/data-energy-trends-renewables-transition-escape-velocity">be more expensive than renewables</a>, that pushes up costs.
Wind and solar are intermittent sources (it’s not always windy, it’s not always sunny), which is not ideal for projects that need constant power, such as data centers. But <a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/408381/energy-transition-renewables-grid-scale-energy-storage-giant-batteries">with the addition of batteries, wind and solar can provide more constant wattage</a>, and sure enough, <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/google-has-a-20b-plan-to-build-data-centers-and-clean-power-together">data center users like Google</a> have bet on wind/solar-plus-batteries as an energy source for their facilities.
More to the point, AI is moving very quickly, and the buildout of these data centers and their power sources has to happen fast. Nuclear can provide clean baseload electricity, but the two most recent nuclear plants in the US <a href="https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time">took a decade to come online</a>. <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23825844/geothermal-enhanced-fervo-demonstration-superhot">Enhanced geothermal</a>, the kind that can be installed anywhere and not just in seismically active places like Iceland, is still years away from deployment at scale, despite <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/11/fervo-energy-lands-206m-in-financing-to-build-massive-geothermal-power-plant/">big</a> recent <a href="https://cleantechnica.com/2025/06/06/quaise-proof-of-concept-demo-goes-live-in-texas/">strides</a>.
Solar/wind plus batteries is a technology that can be deployed fast. The Solar Energy Industries Association (hardly a disinterested actor, but I think it’s right on this) found that while <a href="https://seia.org/blog/we-need-solar-and-storage-to-address-the-energy-emergency/">solar and wind plants take on average less than two years</a> from conception to coming online (as do battery plants), natural gas can take twice as long and coal three times. Small wonder that in 2024, <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/chart-96-percent-of-new-us-power-capacity-was-carbon-free-in-2024">93 percent of new power capacity</a> in the US last year came from solar, batteries, or wind. It’s just about the only electricity source you can get up quickly.
If you can’t get fast, clean energy anymore, because Trump’s policies have made it uneconomical, then AI firms are going to have to rely on slow-to-build, dirtier energy. There is a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/business/energy-environment/gas-turbines-power-plants.html">huge shortage of natural gas turbines in the US right now</a>, with waiting times doubling in the past year. That shortage will get worse if the tax bill shifts demand currently aiming for wind and solar toward natural gas. That will, in turn, slow the data center buildout.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">No one wins</h2>
It might be tempting, if you’re skeptical of AI’s benefits or worried about its risks, to think that this is a positive. They’re slowing down progress, and progress in this field could be dangerous. 
I fear this is failing to think an extra step ahead. The most likely result isn’t that no data centers get built, but that they get built in countries that do subsidize solar, wind, and batteries. It would be very good news indeed for China, for one thing, whose AI firms would gain a great opportunity to match US labs, which they’re <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA4012-1.html#:~:text=China%E2%80%99s%20AI%20development%20will%20likely%20remain%20at%20least%20a%20close%20second%20place%20behind%20that%20of%20the%20United%20States">not too far behind as it is</a>. It would also be very good news for the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/stargate-uae-ai-datacenter-begin-operation-2026-2025-05-22/">United Arab Emirates</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-11/saudi-arabia-s-neom-signs-5-billion-deal-for-ai-data-center">Saudi Arabia</a>, which are putting huge amounts of oil money behind data center projects for AI firms, <a href="https://helentoner.substack.com/p/supercomputers-for-autocrats">projects that inevitably will be subject to the pressures of these dictatorships</a>.
The bill would not increase AI safety. It would simply cede leadership in the race to China, and/or force the US to rely on dirty energy and worsen climate impacts to keep up.
If you put a bill before Congress stating that it is the policy of the United States to fall behind China in AI development and to put American firms like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic at a disadvantage to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Tencent, and Huawei, it would get no votes. But this is effectively what the One Big Beautiful Bill is offering. 
What Congress seems ready to pass is less an industrial policy than an industrial suicide note. It is truly beyond me that any members of the House or Senate, let alone majorities, are signing it.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Zack Beauchamp</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Canada: More American than the United States?]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/on-the-right-newsletter/418274/canada-day-july-4-2025-trump-51st-state-george-grant" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418274</id>
<updated>2025-07-01T17:08:03-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-02T07:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="On the Right" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="World Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[I’ve always found something charming about Canada Day, the July 1 national celebration, landing just three days before America’s Independence Day. The two holidays are ideologically opposed: Canada Day celebrates the country’s 1867 confederation under British law, while July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution against the crown. Yet after centuries of peace, with the two […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="A person holds a Canadian flag with the words “never 51st state” written on it." data-caption="Hundreds of people rally against US tariffs and threats of annexation at the Manitoba Legislature. | Lyle Stafford/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Lyle Stafford/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/gettyimages-2208407433.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Hundreds of people rally against US tariffs and threats of annexation at the Manitoba Legislature. | Lyle Stafford/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
I’ve always found something charming about Canada Day, the July 1 national celebration, landing just three days before America’s Independence Day.
The two holidays are ideologically opposed: Canada Day celebrates the country’s 1867 confederation under British law, while July Fourth celebrates a violent revolution against the crown. Yet after centuries of peace, with the two countries now sharing the <a href="https://rcmp.ca/en/federal-policing/border-integrity/border-integrity-defined">longest undefended border in the world</a>, the timing normally feels less like dueling celebrations than a week-long joint birthday party.
So leave it to Donald Trump to reintroduce tension to the holidays.
Last Friday, just as Canadians were getting ready for the pre-holiday weekend, Trump declared that the United States is renewing hostilities in the briefly suspended trade war. “We are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114756567645919781">he wrote on Truth Social</a>, adding that “we will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”
And then, in <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lsqwatfdb42g">a Sunday interview on Fox News</a>, he renewed the rhetoric that most infuriated Canadians: his claim that Canada should be annexed by the United States. “Frankly, Canada should be the 51st state. It really should,” he told anchor Maria Bartiromo. “Because Canada relies entirely on the United States. We don’t rely on Canada.”
In thinking through all of this, I’ve found one voice especially clarifying: the Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant.
In 1965, Grant published a short book — titled <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Lament-Nation-Canadian-Nationalism-Anniversary/dp/077353010X">Lament for a Nation</a> — arguing that Canada’s increasing integration with the United States was a kind of national suicide. This was, in part, a political matter: By hitching its economy and defense to those of a much larger neighbor, Canada effectively surrendered its ability to set its own political course.
But it was also a kind of spiritual death: By embracing free trade and open borders with the United States, Grant argued, Canada was selling its conservative soul to the American ethos of never-ending revolutionary progress. It was, in effect, turning Canada Day into an early July Fourth.
Given the Trump threat, Grant’s argument feels more vital than it has in decades — prompting a round of intellectual reconsiderations. Recent pieces by <a href="https://www.postliberalorder.com/p/make-canada-conservative-again">Patrick Deneen</a>, a leading American “postliberal,” and <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-america-george-grant-economic-sovereignty/?intcmp=gift_share">Michael Ignatieff</a>, a leading Canadian liberal intellectual (and Grant’s nephew), have highlighted elements of the argument that feel especially relevant in the current moment.
Yet Lament for a Nation is also notable for what it failed to foresee. While Grant predicted America’s liberalism would swallow Canada, it is, in fact, the most philosophically illiberal administration in modern American history that threatens Canadian sovereignty.
And Canadian resistance to Yankee imperialism has rallied under the banner of Liberal Party Prime Minister Mark Carney — a central banker who fully embraces Canada’s modern identity as the most tolerant and multicultural country on the planet.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A conservative Canadian’s Lament</h2>
Lament for a Nation takes, as its central event, the 1963 defeat of then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. His defeat, per Grant, was the moment that Canada’s fate was sealed.
Diefenbaker was the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party (now more simply called the Conservative Party). Grant writes about him a bit the way that some on the intellectual right talk about Trump today: as an imperfect but basically necessary bulwark against the depredations of the liberal elite.
A “prairie populist” raised in Saskatchewan, Diefenbaker was culturally and politically distinct from the traditional power elite in cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. These elites, per Grant, believed that Canada benefited from increasing economic and military interconnections with the US, such as eliminating trade barriers and joint participation in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Diefenbaker, in Grant’s telling, took a different approach — one that valued Canadian self-determination over the material benefits of trade and security cooperation. On key issues, most notably the 1962–’63 debate over stationing American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, Diefenbaker resisted the intellectual and political elite’s “continentalist” approach — instead raising concerns that too much integration with the United States would threaten Canadian nationhood.
It is this hesitancy, Grant argues, that brought the wrath of the elite class down on his head, ultimately leading to the Progressive Conservatives’ defeat in the 1963 election. With Diefenbaker cleared away, there was no longer any barrier to a policy of economic and political integration with the United States.
“Lamenting for Canada is inevitably associated with the tragedy of Diefenbaker. His inability to govern is linked with the inability of this country to be sovereign,” Grant writes.
It’s easy to ridicule this sentiment in hindsight. After all, Canada remains standing 60 years after Grant’s predictions of doom. Wasn’t he just wrong that integration with the US meant national suicide?
But to take this line is to misunderstand Grant’s argument. His position was not that the integration with the United States would literally lead to Canadian annexation. Rather, it’s that Canada would lose the ability to chart its own course, surrendering its effective sovereignty and, more fundamentally, sacrificing what made it culturally distinct from the United States.
The United States, per Grant, is the physical avatar of Enlightenment liberalism: a worldview that he described as celebrating the emancipation of the individual from whatever fetters society might put on them. The American ideology of capitalist freedom was a solvent dissolving local cultures and national borders, homogenizing everything into a single mass of modern technological sameness.
Canada, by contrast, took its core identity from British conservatism — a sense that politics is not about individual freedom but rather conserving and incrementally improving the traditions and cultural inheritance that define its essence and maintain its good functioning.
In Canada, Grant says, this conservatism was “a kind of suspicion that we in Canada could be less lawless and have a greater sense of propriety than those in the United States.” Partnering with the French speakers in Quebec (Lament for a Nation made scant reference to indigenous Canadians), the new country was in opposition to the American vision of frenetic capitalist change.
Yet this conservative identity, Grant feared, was weakly rooted — and vulnerable to American imperial influence in the absence of a political class willing to wield nationalist policies in its defense. He narrated its ideological decline in three steps:
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
First, men everywhere move ineluctably toward membership in the universal and homogenous liberal state. Second, Canadians live next to a society that is the heart of modernity. Third, nearly all Canadians think that modernity is good, so nothing distinguishes Canadians from Americans. When they oblate themselves before “the American way of life,” they offer themselves on the altar of the reigning Western goddess.
</blockquote>
Diefenbaker was, per Grant, the last gasp of authentic Canadian conservative resistance to this process. His defeat marked the moment that Canada’s spiritual death at American hands became inevitable.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Grant in the age of Trump</h2>
Today, Canada is facing a nakedly imperialist American president who is attempting to weaponize Canadian dependence on American markets into political submission. Grant, the liberal Ignatieff writes, was “the first to warn us that this was how continental integration would end.”
Yet the circumstances are very different from what Grant might have expected. While Grant warned that American ideology was seductive, that Canadians risked voluntarily submitting to a liberalism that would subtly alienate them from themselves, they are today facing a brash American illiberalism led by a right-wing populist most Canadians revile.
“Even in the fury of Lament for a Nation, America was seen as a benign hegemon — at least to us — who respected the fiction of our sovereignty. Today’s President disdains his allies and can’t stop telling Canada he wishes we didn’t exist,” Ignatieff writes. 
For this reason, the anti-Trump resistance has been led not by Canada’s Conservatives but by the Liberal Party.
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/gettyimages-2220430309.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,14.275255838018,100,71.449488323964" alt="Trump with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney" title="Trump with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney hold a bilateral meeting during the G7 Leaders' Summit on June 16 in Alberta, Canada. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images" />
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals won Canada’s April election on the back of anti-Trump resistance. This was not only because Carney took vocally anti-Trump positions, but because his chief rival — Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre — was a right-wing populist <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/410854/canada-election-results-mark-carney-pierre-poilievre-donald-trump">whose political style seemed far too close to Trump’s for Canadian comfort</a>.
Carney won, in short, because Canadians saw conservatism as too American — and Carney’s liberalism a better representation of Canadianness in the current moment.
This irony owes itself, in part, to Canada’s national reinvention since Grant’s original publication. In the past several decades, Canada has engaged in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/6/8/11879482/ramadan-justin-trudeau-canada">a collective nation-building project</a> to redefine its national identity around ideas of tolerance and multiculturalism. This effort has been extraordinarily successful: Canada has a notably higher percentage of foreign-born residents than the United States, yet faces a far weaker anti-immigrant backlash.
Grant would surely see this as vindication of his thesis: Canada has abandoned its traditional identity in favor of a Canadian copy of America’s Ellis Island narrative. Yet what Grant didn’t foresee is that this kind of liberalism could form an effective resistance against Yankee imperialism. 
Canadian nationalism today is not just about symbols, like the flag or the crown, but about a sense that Canadians do not want their politics to take on the bitter ugliness of Trumpified American politics. Their attraction to what Grant identified as too-American liberal ideals of freedom and progress forms a key part of the hard ideological core uniting Canadians against American pressure.
In this sense, and perhaps this sense only, Canadians have become more American than the Americans. This year, July Fourth may have come three days early.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Ian Millhiser</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[What the Supreme Court did to America while all eyes were on Trump]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/418460/supreme-court-donald-trump-end-of-term" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418460</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T09:29:02-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-02T06:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Abortion" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Education" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health Care" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Religion" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Supreme Court" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[There are two big winners in the Supreme Court’s most recent term. One is social and religious conservatives. In the last two days of its term, the Court imposed heavy new burdens on public schools at the request of religious conservatives, and it rendered much of federal Medicaid law unenforceable in a case lashing out at […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Justice Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts" data-caption="Justice Neil Gorsuch, left, and Chief Justice John Roberts." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23168775/696327606.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
Justice Neil Gorsuch, left, and Chief Justice John Roberts. </figcaption>
</figure>
There are two big winners in the Supreme Court’s most recent term. 
One is social and religious conservatives. In the last two days of its term, the Court imposed heavy new burdens on public schools at the request of religious conservatives, and it rendered much of federal Medicaid law unenforceable in a case lashing out at Planned Parenthood. It heard its first major pornography case in over two decades, upholding a Texas law that seeks to limit youth access to porn. And the Republican justices handed a <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417281/supreme-court-skremett-transgender-tennessee-health">historic defeat to transgender Americans</a>, permitting states to block at least some trans people from receiving gender-affirming medical care.
Four justices also voted that the Constitution <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/414008/supreme-court-religious-public-charter-school-oklahoma-drummond">requires most states to fund religious public charter schools</a>. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was recused from this case, is likely to provide the fifth vote for religious public schools in the future.
Indeed, as I’ll explain in more detail below, the Court’s Republican majority is willing to tear down major American institutions in order to advance the cultural right’s political goals.
Another winner is President Donald Trump. One year after the Republican justices ruled that Trump is <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/358292/supreme-court-trump-immunity-dictatorship">allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes</a>, these same justices continue to treat him as the special favorite of the laws.
The Court’s most high-profile Trump-related decision, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf">Trump v. CASA</a>, placed vague new restrictions on lower courts’ power to block Trump administration policies. This decision is defensible — the Biden administration <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417954/supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-trump-casa-nationwide-injunctions">sought a similar ruling while it was in power</a> — but it is notable that the justices waited until a Republican was president before weakening lower courts’ power to rein in the executive.
Even before the CASA decision, however, the Court frequently blocked lower courts that ruled against the Trump administration. When lower courts block Trump’s policies, the Republican justices routinely reinstate those policies on the Supreme Court’s “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/11/21356913/supreme-court-shadow-docket-jail-asylum-covid-immigrants-sonia-sotomayor-barnes-ahlman">shadow docket</a>,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the justices consider on an expedited basis.
There was also one unexpected loser this term: the business and fiscal conservatives that have historically dominated the Republican Party. In the same week that the Court handed down most of its biggest decisions, it also <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-316_869d.pdf">rejected an attack on Obamacare</a>. And it <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-354_0861.pdf">waved away a request</a> to put drastic new limits on federal agencies’ power to regulate business.
So, while the Court now hands out victories to the cultural right as if it were passing out candy on Halloween, several of the GOP justices did show more moderation on the kinds of issues that preoccupied Republicans as recently as a decade ago. It was a lot to keep track of, especially given Trump’s ability to dominate the news, so here’s a quick rundown of how the Court reshaped the law during its recent term.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Court gravely wounded key American institutions to benefit social conservatives</h2>
At least two cases this term did serious harm to institutions that millions of Americans depend upon, both in decisions that benefited cultural conservatives. 
In <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-297_4f14.pdf">Mahmoud v. Taylor</a>, the Court’s Republican majority ruled that public schools must inform parents before their children are taught a lesson those parents might object to on religious grounds, and that those parents must be given an opportunity to opt their child out of that lesson.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect.</blockquote></figure>
Mahmoud arose out of a dispute over queer-themed books — Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters that could be used in classroom instruction. But the <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/408356/supreme-court-mahmoud-taylor-dont-say-gay">First Amendment prohibits discrimination among people with different religious beliefs</a>. So, if parents with anti-LGBTQ religious views have a right to notification and an opt-out, so too does every parent who might object to any lesson on any religious ground.
This rule, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warns in a dissenting opinion, is likely to cause “chaos for this Nation’s public schools.” Requiring every public school teacher to anticipate which lessons might implicate a parent’s religious beliefs “will impose impossible administrative burdens on schools,” especially in a nation as diverse as the United States.
In the past, courts have rejected <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417974/supreme-court-dont-say-gay-mahmoud-taylor-schools">similar lawsuits brought by parents who object to books</a> or lessons that feature magic, women who have achievements outside the home, and include topics as diverse as divorce, interfaith couples, “immodest dress,” and “false views of death.” After Mahmoud, however, all of these parents now have a right to advance notice.
Schools that fail to predict that a lesson about a Jewish woman with a career, a Hindu husband, or an immodest wardrobe will offend a parent’s religious belief will now face very serious financial consequences. Federal law often lets the “prevailing party” in a suit about constitutional rights <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417974/supreme-court-dont-say-gay-mahmoud-taylor-schools">collect attorney’s fees from the losing party</a>. So lawyers can hunt for parents with idiosyncratic religious views, file a lawsuit against a school, and demand payment to avoid litigation that will be even more expensive for the school district.
The Supreme Court used to treat public schools with more respect, out of concern that the Constitution should not be read to prevent such an important institution from functioning. 
Like the right to free exercise of religion, the right to free speech is also <a href="https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/">protected by the First Amendment</a>. That is why the Court held in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15235797139493194004&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr">Tinker v. Des Moines</a> (1969) that public school students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
But Tinker recognized that free speech should not be used as a weapon that can shut down classroom instruction altogether — if any student could get up in the middle of class and start yelling, for example, their right to free speech would destroy every one of their classmates’ right to an education. 
And so Tinker also held that public school students may not engage in speech that “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” The Court struck an appropriate balance between protecting free expression by young people, and making sure that public schools continue to produce an educated workforce that ultimately benefits every single American.
That decision stands in stark contrast to Mahmoud, which establishes that the rights of religious objectors must be advanced at all costs, even if it would mean imposing such enormous burdens on public schools that every child receives an inferior education.
A similar dynamic was in play in Medina, which pitted the GOP’s disdain for abortion providers against a <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417844/supreme-court-medicaid-abortion-medina-planned-parenthood-south-carolina" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417844/supreme-court-medicaid-abortion-medina-planned-parenthood-south-carolina">federal law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own doctors</a>. Just as in Mahmoud, the Republican justices handed a sweeping victory to social conservatives — seemingly without any regard for how their decision would damage Medicaid.
Federal Medicaid statutes are riddled with provisions establishing who must be covered by Medicaid, how that coverage should be provided, and what minimum standards of care Medicaid patients are entitled to receive. South Carolina illegally forbade Medicaid patients from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health care provider. Rather than ordering South Carolina to comply with the law, in Medina the Republican justices effectively repealed the choice-of-provider provision.
The question of which Medicaid laws can be enforced through federal lawsuits, and which provisions are essentially worthless, is one of the most important questions in American poverty and elder law and has been litigated for decades. But two years ago, in Talevski, the Supreme Court finally settled on a clear rule that judges could apply to identify which provisions are enforceable. 
If you want to know more about these many decades of litigation, I <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/405010/supreme-court-abortion-medicaid-kerr-planned-parenthood">explain many of those details here</a>. But the most important thing to know about Talevski is that it established that Medicaid laws which are “phrased in terms of the persons benefitted” and that “focus on the benefitted class” are enforceable. So, if a specific provision of Medicaid law mentions Medicaid patients, or otherwise names the individuals who are supposed to benefit from that law, it is enforceable.
The choice-of-provider provision at issue in Medina refers to “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1275_e2pg.pdf">any individual eligible for medical assistance</a>.” So it was enforceable under Talevski. Medina should have been an open and shut case.
Yet, instead of following Talevski, the Republican justices produced an incoherent opinion that does not even announce a new legal rule, beyond a vague statement that <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417844/supreme-court-medicaid-abortion-medina-planned-parenthood-south-carolina">Medicaid laws are “especially unlikely” to be enforceable</a>. Much of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina fixates on seemingly random facts about the choice-of-provider provision, such as the fact that it “appears in a subsection titled ‘Contents,’” as if that’s somehow relevant to the question of whether this provision is a meaningless husk.
It is impossible to come up with a principled explanation for why, two years after Talevski, the Republican justices decided to abandon that decision and replace it with a new legal standard that renders much of federal law completely useless. But it’s certainly possible to come up with a political explanation. Unlike Medina, Talevski did not involve an abortion provider. Several of the Court’s Republicans appear to have flipped their votes between Talevski and Medina in order to lash out at Planned Parenthood.
The worst thing about the Medina decision is that the Republican justices could have come up with some good-for-this-ride-only legal reasoning that denied Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, but that otherwise left Talevski intact. Instead, they appear to have overruled Talevski and replaced it with a vague new rule that does little more than tell lower court judges that Medicaid plaintiffs should nearly always lose.
It seems that, in order to spite Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court stripped tens of millions of Americans of countless rights protected by federal law.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Donald Trump’s fixers</h2>
Many of the Court’s most consequential decisions were handed down on its shadow docket, a process that allows a party that lost in a lower court to seek an immediate Supreme Court order blocking that decision. 
This term, the Republican justices used the shadow docket to temporarily <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/417583/supreme-court-convention-torture-deportation-south-sudan-dhs-dvd">nullify the Convention Against Torture</a>, a treaty that is supposed to prevent the United States from deporting noncitizens to countries where they may be tortured. The Court also used its shadow docket to <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/414274/supreme-court-federal-reserve-trump-wilcox">effectively repeal federal laws</a> protecting the leaders of several federal agencies from being fired by Trump, and to <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/416073/supreme-court-justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-shadow-docket-trump">prevent lower courts from interfering with the chaotic work of Elon Musk’s former office</a>, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). (In an unusual liberal victory on the shadow docket, the justices also ruled that Trump <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/409736/supreme-court-order-pause-deportations-venezuela-el-salvador-aclu">must give certain immigrants due process</a> before he ships them off to a notorious Salvadorian prison.)
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/temp.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,17.901463878989,100,64.197072242022" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="The Supreme Court’s shadow docket, visualized." data-portal-copyright="" />
Traditionally, the Supreme Court takes months or even longer before it decides a case. With rare exceptions, a case must be heard by a trial court and at least one appeals court before the justices will even consider taking it up. And getting the justices to hear a case is a bit like winning the lottery. 
Lawyers hoping the Court will review their case <a href="https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=316498&p=2114300">file over 8,000 petitions</a> seeking such review in any given year, but the justices <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/24">only grant about 60–70 of these petitions</a>. Then, once a case is granted, that’s only the beginning of a months-long process where lawyers submit briefs, the justices review them and hold oral arguments, and then they spend months working on the final decision. Contentious suits can <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/23-477.html">wait an entire year for a decision</a>, even after the justices announce that they will hear the case.
The reason for this slow, highly selective process is that the Supreme Court has the final word on questions of US law. So if it gets a case wrong, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/11/21356913/supreme-court-shadow-docket-jail-asylum-covid-immigrants-sonia-sotomayor-barnes-ahlman">that mistake can linger uncorrected for decades</a>. The Court’s plodding deliberation is supposed to minimize the risk of that happening.
Beginning in Trump’s first term, however, the Court started relying heavily on a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/11/21356913/supreme-court-shadow-docket-jail-asylum-covid-immigrants-sonia-sotomayor-barnes-ahlman">separate, much less cautious process</a> to decide cases involving Trump and his government. 
Historically, the Court’s shadow docket was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5449087/supreme-court-trump-nationwide-injunctions">used primarily for death penalty appeals</a>, where the petitioner seeking Supreme Court review would be killed if the justices did not act very swiftly. Litigants in non-death penalty cases could seek expedited review on the shadow docket, but it was so discouraged, and shadow docket petitions were so rarely granted, that smart lawyers typically decided not to annoy the justices with them. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Justice Department sought shadow docket review <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/11/21356913/supreme-court-shadow-docket-jail-asylum-covid-immigrants-sonia-sotomayor-barnes-ahlman">about once every other year</a>.
Now, however, whenever the Trump administration claims that it must have a Supreme Court order blocking a lower court’s decision, the Court treats that claim as an emergency that must be tended to immediately. 
In <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/556/418/">Nken v. Holder</a> (2009), the Supreme Court held that a party seeking shadow docket relief must do more than simply show they are likely to prevail if the Court hears their case on the merits. Among other things, they must also show that they “will be irreparably injured” if the justices do not immediately block the lower court’s decision.
But, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in a pair of opinions dissenting from two shadow docket orders, the Republican justices seem to have decided that <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/416073/supreme-court-justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-shadow-docket-trump">the Trump administration is exempt from Nken</a>, as they often grant shadow docket relief to Trump even when he cannot show irreparable injury. In <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a1063_6j37.pdf">Social Security Administration v. AFSCME</a>, a case about whether DOGE may access highly sensitive Social Security data, Trump’s lawyers didn’t even make an argument that his administration would experience irreparable harm without Supreme Court intervention. Yet the Republican justices intervened anyway.
As law professor Steven Vladeck has pointed out, the Court granted, at least in part, “<a href="https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/163-a-new-kind-of-judicial-supremacy">each of the last 14 [shadow docket] applications filed by the Department of Justice</a>.”
The federal government’s exemption from Nken, moreover, <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/416073/supreme-court-justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-shadow-docket-trump">only appears to be in effect when a Republican occupies the White House</a>. In one dissenting opinion, Jackson pointed to several Biden-era cases where the Justice Department sought shadow docket relief from lower court orders. In some of those cases, the Court left the lower court’s injunction in place for as much as a year, before finally concluding that the injunction was illegal after the case went through the much slower, traditional appeals process.
The Republican justices, in other words, are <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/12/29/23530842/supreme-court-arizona-mayorkas-title-42-mexican-border-immigration">manipulating the Court’s calendar to benefit Trump</a>. When ordinary litigants — or a Democratic administration — seek shadow docket relief, the justices often apply the traditional rules and norms that prevent them from granting those requests. But when Trump asks the Supreme Court to do him a favor, the Republican justices swiftly oblige.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Republican justices did abandon some fights pushed by business and fiscal conservatives</h2>
While the cultural right was one of the biggest winners in the Court’s recent term, the Republican Party’s traditional business constituency fared less well. On the final decision day of the term, the Court handed down a ruling <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-316_869d.pdf">upholding provisions of Obamacare</a> that require health insurers to cover certain treatments, as well as a decision rejecting an aggressive attempt to <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-354_0861.pdf">limit federal agencies’ power to regulate business</a>. Earlier in the term, a unanimous Court also <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1038_2d93.pdf">rejected a suit challenging the FDA’s decision</a> to pull many nicotine vaping devices off the market.
The Court’s Obamacare decision, known as <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-316_869d.pdf">Kennedy v. Braidwood Management</a>, aligns with broader trends within the Republican Party. During Trump’s first term, the GOP famously <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/28/16058488/mccain-skinny-repeal-vote-no-explain-statement">tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act</a> in its entirety. Eight years later, the party has a more modest health care agenda, at least when compared to their ideas from 2017. Congressional Republicans are <a href="https://www.vox.com/health/417639/trump-medicaid-health-insurance-big-beautiful-bill">likely to enact deep cuts to Medicaid</a>, but they are not pushing for full repeal of Obamacare.
Decisions like Braidwood and Medina, in other words, closely track the Republican Party’s agenda in Congress. Like their counterparts in Congress, the Republican justices voted to drastically cut back on Medicaid in Medina. But many of them voted to uphold key provisions of Obamacare in Braidwood.
One common element in the Braidwood, the agency power case (<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-354_0861.pdf">FCC v. Consumer’s Research)</a>, and in the vaping case, (<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-1038_2d93.pdf">FDA v. Wages & White Lion Investments)</a>, is that they all arose out of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/12/27/23496264/supreme-court-fifth-circuit-trump-court-immigration-housing-sexual-harrassment">court dominated by MAGA-aligned judges</a> who routinely hand down decisions that are too extreme even for this Supreme Court.
In recent years, the Fifth Circuit has done everything from <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/24158216/supreme-court-cfpb-clarence-thomas-community-financial">declaring entire federal agencies unconstitutional</a> to attempting to <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/8/16/23834926/supreme-court-abortion-mifepristone-fifth-circuit-alliance-hippocratic-medicine-fda">pull a popular abortion drug from the market</a>. It once ruled that <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/9/19/23361050/supreme-court-texas-twitter-facebook-youtube-social-media-fifth-circuit-netchoice-paxton">Texas Republicans may seize control over content moderation</a> at all of the major social media platforms. Many of the Fifth Circuit’s judges have taken positions that, if they were embraced by the Supreme Court, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22106497/supreme-court-collins-mnuchin-124-billion-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-unitary-executive-housing">risk triggering a second Great Depression</a>.
The Supreme Court frequently balks at the Fifth Circuit’s decisions, but it does not do so all of the time. Just last week, for example, in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/free-speech-coalition-inc-v-paxton/">Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton</a>, the Court upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify that their users are over age 18, despite a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=5352124576782659763&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr">21-year-old Supreme Court decision</a> that struck down a nearly identical law. The Court took up the Free Speech Coalition case after the Fifth Circuit <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/391248/porn-supreme-court-free-speech-coalition-paxton-first-amendment">decided it wasn’t bound by that two-decade-old decision</a>.
The best lesson to draw from cases like Braidwood, White Lion, and Consumer’s Research, in other words, is that no matter how partisan or ideological the Supreme Court may be, there will likely be other voices within the judiciary pushing the justices to go harder. These voices will even sometimes succeed, as they did in the Free Speech Coalition case.
If Trump gets to replace any members of the current Court, moreover, he could potentially replace relatively moderate justices with the kinds of judges who dominate the Fifth Circuit. No matter how bad the Supreme Court gets, it can always get worse.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Dylan Scott</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Republicans now own America’s broken health care system]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/health-care/418431/big-beautiful-bill-lose-medicaid-trump" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418431</id>
<updated>2025-07-01T20:48:33-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-01T16:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Congress" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health Care" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Trump Administration" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Senate Republicans have passed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing a work requirement for the first time and restricting states’ ability to finance their share of the program’s costs. If the bill ultimately becomes law after passing the House and receiving Trump’s signature — […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Trump" data-caption="President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has big Medicaid cuts. | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/07/GettyImages-2221323284.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has big Medicaid cuts. | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
Senate Republicans have passed <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418314/big-beautiful-bill-trump-republicans-congress">President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,”</a> a move that will make major changes to Medicaid through establishing <a href="https://www.vox.com/health/414045/big-beautiful-bill-congress-trump-medicaid-cuts">a work requirement</a> for the first time and <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/5-key-facts-about-medicaid-and-provider-taxes/">restricting states’ ability to finance</a> their share of the program’s costs. If the bill ultimately becomes law after passing the House and receiving Trump’s signature — which could all happen before Friday — American health care is never going to be the same.
The consequences will be dire. 
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the legislation would <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/us/politics/trump-policy-bill-health-insurance-cuts.html">slash Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion</a> and that nearly 12 million people would lose their health insurance. Republicans added a <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/07/01/congress/gop-boosts-rural-hospital-fund-00435147">last-minute infusion of funding for rural hospitals</a> to assuage moderates skittish about the Medicaid cuts, but hospitals <a href="https://www.aha.org/press-releases/2025-07-01-aha-statement-senate-passage-one-big-beautiful-bill-act">say</a> the legislation will still be devastating to their business and their patients.
When combined with the expiration of Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year, which were not addressed in the budget bill, and the other regulatory changes being made by the Trump administration, the Republican policy agenda could lead to an estimated <a href="https://www.kff.org/quick-take/about-17-million-more-people-could-be-uninsured-due-to-the-big-beautiful-bill-and-other-policy-changes/">17 million Americans losing health coverage</a> over the next decade, according to the health policy think tank KFF.
Fewer people with health insurance is going to mean fewer people getting medical services, which means more illness and <a href="https://www.vox.com/health/417639/trump-medicaid-health-insurance-big-beautiful-bill">ultimately more deaths</a>. 
One recent analysis by a group of Harvard-affiliated researchers of the House Republicans’ version of the budget bill (which included the same general outline, though some of the provisions have been tweaked in the Senate) concluded that <a href="https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-00716">700,000 fewer Americans</a> would have a regular place to get medical care as a result of the bill. Upward of 200,000 fewer people would get their blood cholesterol or blood sugar checked; 139,000 fewer women would get their recommended mammograms. Overall, the authors project that between 8,200 and 24,600 additional Americans would die every year under the Republican plan. Other <a href="https://x.com/YaleSPH/status/1930386347908370779">analyses</a> came to the same conclusion: Millions of Americans will lose health insurance and thousands will die.
After a painful legislative debate in which some of their own members <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/josh-hawley-dont-cut-medicaid.html">warned them not to cut Medicaid too deeply</a>, Republicans succeeded in taking a big chunk out of the program to help cover the costs of their bill’s tax cuts. They have, eight years after failing to repeal Obamacare entirely, managed to strike blows to some of its important provisions.
So, for better or worse, they own the health care system now, a system that is a continued source of <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/390111/united-healthcare-ceo-shot-insurance-hospitals-doctors">frustration for most Americans</a> — frustrations that the Republican plan won’t relieve. The next time health care comes up for serious debate in Congress, lawmakers will need to repair the damage that the GOP is doing with its so-called big, beautiful bill.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How the Republican budget bill will drive up health care costs for everyone</h2>
The effects of the budget bill won’t be limited only to the people on Medicaid and the people whose private insurance costs will increase because of the Obamacare funding cuts. Everyone will experience the consequences of millions of Americans losing health coverage.
When a person loses their health insurance, they are more likely to skip regular medical checkups, which makes it more likely they go to a hospital emergency room when a serious medical problem has gotten so bad that they can’t ignore it any longer. The <a href="https://www.cms.gov/medicare/regulations-guidance/legislation/emergency-medical-treatment-labor-act">hospital is obligated by federal law</a> to take care of them even if they can’t pay for their care.
Those costs are then passed on to other patients. When health care providers negotiate with insurance companies over next year’s rates, they account for the uncompensated care they have to provide. And the fewer people covered by Medicaid, the more uncompensated care hospitals have to cover, the <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/house-republicans-big-beautiful-bill-would-make-health-care-more-expensive-for-americans-with-medicare-and-other-insurance/#:~:text=Last%20month%2C%20House%20Republicans%20passed,people%20with%20job%2Dbased%20coverage.">more costs are going to increase for even people who do have health insurance</a>. Republicans included funding in the bill to try to protect hospitals from the adverse consequences, an acknowledgement of the risk they were taking, but the <a href="https://www.aha.org/press-releases/2025-07-01-aha-statement-senate-passage-one-big-beautiful-bill-act">hospitals themselves are warning</a> that the funding patches are insufficient. If hospitals and doctors’ offices close because their bottom lines are squeezed by this bill, that will <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/23753724/physician-doctor-shortage-primary-care-medicare-medicaid-rural-health-care-access">make it harder for people to access health care</a>, even if they have an insurance card.
The effects of the Republican budget bill are going to filter through the rest of the health care system and increase costs for everyone. In that sense, the legislation passage marks a new era for US health policy. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Democrats have primarily been held responsible for the state of the health care system. Sometimes this has been a <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/04/12/healthcare-vote-doomed-13-democrats-in-2010-elections">drag on their political goals</a>. But over time, as the ACA’s benefits became more ingrained, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/7/18070152/midterm-elections-2018-results-trump-obamacare-repeal">health care became a political boon to Democrats</a>.
Going forward, having made these enormous changes, Republicans are going to own the American health care system and all of its problems — the ones they created and the ones that have existed for years.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The BBB’s passage sets the stage for another fight on the future of American health care </h2>
For the past decade-plus, US health care politics have tended to follow a “you break it, you buy it” rule. Democrats discovered this in 2010: Though the Affordable Care Act’s major provisions did not take effect for several years, they saw their popularity plummet quickly as Republicans successfully blamed annual premium increases that would’ve occurred with or without the law on the Democrats and their new health care bill. Voters were persuaded by those arguments, and Democrats lost Congress in the 2010 midterms.
But years later, Americans began to change their perception. As of 2024, <a href="https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/press-release/affordable-care-act-marketplace-and-medicaid-expansion-enrollment-reached-a-combined-44-million-in-2024/">44 million Americans</a> were covered through the 2010 health care law and two-thirds of the country say they have a <a href="https://www.kff.org/interactive/kff-health-tracking-poll-the-publics-views-on-the-aca/#?response=Favorable--Unfavorable&aRange=twoYear">favorable view of the ACA</a>. After the GOP’s failed attempt to repeal the law in 2017, the politics of the issue flipped: Democrats scored major wins in the 2018 midterms after successfully campaigning against the GOP’s failed plan to repeal the ACA. Even in the disastrous 2024 election cycle for Democrats, health care policy was still an issue where voters <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx">trusted Kamala Harris more than Trump</a>.
Trump’s <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/01/trump-big-beautiful-bill-polling">One Big Beautiful Bill is already unpopular</a>. <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-public-views-on-potential-changes-to-medicaid/">Medicaid cuts specifically do not poll well</a> with the public, and the program itself is enjoying <a href="https://perryundem.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Post-Election-Health-Care-Poll-Toplines-Results-ONLINE.pdf">the most popularity</a> ever since it was first created in 1965. Those are the ingredients for a serious backlash, especially with <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/28/politics/republican-plans-to-overhaul-medicaid-already-shaking-up-2026-midterms#:~:text=%E2%80%9CEveryone%20is%20going%20to%20be,put%20themselves%20into%20a%20box.%E2%80%9D">government officials</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5451401/republicans-big-bill-could-hit-rural-hospitals-hard">hospitals in red states</a> railing hard against the bill.
Democrats have more work to do on explaining to the public what the bill does and how its implications will be felt by millions of people. Recent polling suggests that <a href="https://x.com/samstein/status/1939710251311255897">many Americans don’t understand the specifics</a>. A contentious debate among Republicans, with several solitary members warning against the consequences of Medicaid cuts, have given politicians on the other side of the aisle good material to work with in making that case: Democrats can pull up <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94bzp-xfdA">clips of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC)</a> on the Senate floor, explaining how devastating the bill’s Medicaid provisions would be to conservative voters in Republican-controlled states.
Republicans will try to sell the bill on its tax cuts. But <a href="https://x.com/CoreyHusak/status/1940050104636862791">multiple</a> <a href="https://x.com/riccoja/status/1940057668422660113">analyses</a> have shown the vast majority of the benefits are going to be reserved for people in higher-income brackets. Middle-class and working-class voters will see only marginal tax relief — and if their health care costs increase either because they lose their insurance or because their premiums go up after other people lose insurance, then that relief could quickly be wiped out by increased costs elsewhere. That is the story Democrats will need to tell in the coming campaigns.
Medicaid has served as a safety net for tens of millions of Americans during both the Great Recession of 2008 and since the pandemic recession of 2020. At one point, around <a href="https://www.macpac.gov/news/macpac-releases-2022-edition-of-macstats-medicaid-and-chip-data-book/">90 million Americans</a> — about one in four — were covered by Medicaid. People have become much more familiar with the program and it has <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-public-views-on-potential-changes-to-medicaid/">either directly benefited them or helped somebody that they know</a> at a difficult time.
And difficult times may be coming. Economists have their eyes on <a href="https://www.vox.com/economy/408873/us-recession-trump-tariffs-economist-projection">concerning economic indicators</a> that the world may be heading toward a recession. When a recession hits — that is, after all, inevitable; it’s just the normal cycle of the economy — people will lose their jobs and many of them will also lose their employer-sponsored health insurance. But now, the safety net is far flimsier than it was in previous crises.
Republicans are going to own those consequences. They took a program that had become an essential lifeline for millions of Americans and having schemed to gut the law ever since the Democrats expanded Medicaid through the ACA more than a decade ago, have finally succeeded. This Republican plan was a reaction to their opponent’s most recent policy overhaul; the next Democratic health care plan will need to repair the harms precipitated by the GOP budget bill.
In the meantime, the impetus is on Democrats and truth tellers in the media to help Americans understand what has happened, why it has happened, and what the fallout is going to be. 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Vox Staff</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Everything you need to know about Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418325/trump-big-beautiful-bill-gop-medicaid-tax-cuts-explained" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?post_type=vm_stream&p=418325</id>
<updated>2025-07-02T17:24:38-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-01T11:22:40-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Donald Trump" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Economy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Money" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Trump Administration" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and the stakes are high. The bill has four major pillars: renewing his 2017 tax cuts, implementing new tax cuts, spending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the military, and increasing the debt ceiling. The bill itself […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="A photo of Trump speaking" data-caption="President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Andrew Harnik/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/gettyimages-2215542700.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>
President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
President Donald Trump’s “<a href="https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/415825/trump-big-beautiful-bill-congress-deficit-tax-cuts">big, beautiful bill</a>” is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and the stakes are high.
The bill has four major pillars: renewing his 2017 tax cuts, implementing new tax cuts, spending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the military, and increasing the debt ceiling. The bill itself is a smorgasbord of policy and could also affect clean energy programs, student loans, and food assistance, but perhaps <a href="https://www.vox.com/health/417639/trump-medicaid-health-insurance-big-beautiful-bill">the most consequential changes will be to Medicaid</a>.
The bill was approved by the House in May and passed a key Senate vote on Saturday. Republicans are divided over competing priorities; some want to extend Trump’s tax cuts and boost immigration and defense spending, while others worry about the $2.6 trillion cost and cuts to Medicaid. Republican lawmakers aim to pass the bill by Friday using budget reconciliation, but it’s unclear if all 53 Republican senators will agree.
This is a developing story. Follow along here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/climate/418563/trump-big-beautiful-bill-clean-energy-fossil-climate">Trump’s plan to replace clean energy with fossil fuels has some major problems</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/418380/big-beautiful-bill-ai-data-center">The One Big Beautiful Bill is one big disaster for AI</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/health-care/418431/big-beautiful-bill-lose-medicaid-trump">Republicans now own America’s broken health care system</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418314/big-beautiful-bill-trump-republicans-congress">The Republican tax bill, explained in 500 words</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/417995/trump-big-beautiful-bill-abortion-planned-parenthood-reproductive">The Republican spending bill is a disaster for reproductive rights</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/418187/big-beautiful-bill-senate-trump-tax-cut-ai-wind-solar">The most surprising victim of Trump’s terrible tax agenda</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/health/417639/trump-medicaid-health-insurance-big-beautiful-bill">The devastating impact of Trump’s big, beautiful bill, in one chart</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/416350/oren-cass-right-wing-economic-populism-theory-trumpism">The economic theory behind Trumpism</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/415825/trump-big-beautiful-bill-congress-deficit-tax-cuts">Trump’s big, beautiful bill, explained in 5 charts</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/415793/big-beautiful-bill-student-loans-pell-grants">The big, beautiful bill is bad news for student loans</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy/414874/bond-market-treasuries-tax-big-beautiful-bill-trump">The big, bad bond market could derail Trump’s big, beautiful bill</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/414154/trump-house-republicans-bill-tax-cuts-debt-limit-medicare">Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” briefly explained</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/413370/trump-house-big-beautiful-bill-megabill-explained">The ugly truth about Trump’s big, beautiful bill</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/393593/trump-congress-budget-reconciliation-tax-energy-immigration">Trump wants “one big, beautiful bill.” Can he get it?</a>
</li>
</ul>
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Vox Communications</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Vox Announces Christina Vallice Joins as Head of Video]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/press-room/418190/vox-announces-christina-vallice-joins-as-head-of-video" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=418190</id>
<updated>2025-06-30T16:35:11-04:00</updated>
<published>2025-07-01T10:00:00-04:00</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Vox Press Room" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma and vice president of development Nisha Chittal announced today that veteran video journalist Christina Vallice has joined the brand as head of video. She begins her new role on July 7.  “I’m thrilled to welcome Christina to Vox. She is an exceptionally talented video journalist and newsroom leader who will be […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="" data-caption="Christina Vallice." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/06/ChristinaVallice_VoxHeadshot.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,62.948151425058" />
<figcaption>
Christina Vallice. </figcaption>
</figure>
Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma and vice president of development Nisha Chittal announced today that veteran video journalist Christina Vallice has joined the brand as head of video. She begins her new role on July 7. 
“I’m thrilled to welcome Christina to Vox. She is an exceptionally talented video journalist and newsroom leader who will be instrumental in shaping the next chapter of Vox video,” Chittal said. “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and understands how to break down complex topics in an accessible way. I can’t wait to see how she will take Vox’s explanatory video journalism to new heights.” 
In her role, Vallice will oversee Vox’s award-winning video department, continuing the brand’s signature explainer videos as well as leading expansion and experimentation with new formats in vertical shortform video and podcast video. She will oversee video strategy and publishing across all of Vox’s platforms, including Vox’s flagship YouTube channel with over 12 million subscribers, Instagram, TikTok, and website and owned platforms. 
Vallice joins Vox after serving in leadership roles at the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, and Vice, following more than a decade producing at NBC News. 
Most recently, Vallice was the director of video series and events at Yahoo Finance. There she led a team to deliver in-depth, original reporting on the investments that are leading to advancements in tech, science, and AI, newsmaker interviews with prominent CEOs and business leaders, and spearheaded the cross-newsroom coordination for major coverage events. 
At the Wall Street Journal, Vallice served as the senior executive producer of news and specials, directing a global team spanning New York, London, and Singapore to produce daily news videos, in-depth explainers, international features, video investigations and documentaries across various platforms. Under Vallice, the Journal earned two national Emmy nominations for its first feature-length documentary and its first video investigation.
Before her time at Yahoo Finance and the Journal, Vallice was a supervising producer at Vice, and helped launch the award-winning HBO broadcast, Vice News Tonight. Prior to that, Vallice spent 11 years at NBC Nightly News, delivering fast-turn stories under tight deadlines both in edit and in the field, producing coverage on a wide variety of major news stories.
Vallice received her master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications after earning her undergraduate degree at Binghamton University. 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
</feed>

If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:

Download the "valid Atom 1.0" banner.
Upload the image to your own server. (This step is important. Please do not link directly to the image on this server.)
Add this HTML to your page (change the image src attribute if necessary):

<a href="http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=https%3A//www.vox.com/rss/index.xml"><img src="valid-atom.png" alt="[Valid Atom 1.0]" title="Validate my Atom 1.0 feed" /></a>

If you would like to create a text link instead, here is the URL you can use:

http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=https%3A//www.vox.com/rss/index.xml

Home · About · News · Docs · Terms