Eliminating tax on silencers. Taxing remittances. A garden of heroes. Congress could have done better.
“The bill’s toplines are understandably seizing much attention. It will remake the social safety net, potentially taking away food assistance from 5 million of the neediest Americans and kicking at least 17 million people off of their health insurance — resulting in premature deaths for at least 100,000 of them, according to estimates. It will increase the national debt by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, raising the cost of borrowing for the government — and U.S. households, which will pay thousands more each year in interest on their mortgages.”
President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill moved through Congress so quickly that members who voted for the legislation have registered surprise about what it contains. Because the Senate-approved bill that the House passed on Thursday is 887 pages long, it’s easy to see why it’s hard to track all that is in there.
The bill’s toplines are understandably seizing much attention.
It will remake the social safety net, potentially taking away food assistance from 5 million of the neediest Americans and kicking at least 17 million people off of their health insurance — resulting in premature deaths for at least 100,000 of them, according to estimates. It will increase the national debt by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, raising the cost of borrowing for the government — and U.S. households, which will pay thousands more each year in interest on their mortgages.
But buried in those 887 pages are changes that you likely haven’t heard as much about. Here are some that stuck out to me:
- Some guns and silencers will be cheaper: The bill eliminates the tax on gun silencers and certain types of rifles and shotguns, weakening the National Firearms Act that was passed a century ago. That means silencers, which have been deployed in recent mass shootings, will be less expensive. In a country that ranks No. 1 by a significant margin for gun violence, it is hard to see why making silencers more accessible is good policy.
- States whose food stamp programs are less accurate will be rewarded: Republicans plan to cut $186 billion over the next decade in federal funding for food stamps. The professed logic was to shift funding to states that administer these programs to ensure they have “skin in the game” and will do so carefully. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) ultimately agreed to vote for the bill but only if her state was exempted from the skin. So, lawmakers delayed federal cuts for states such as Alaska that had previously registered high rates of erroneous payments. It is incomprehensible why the states with the most error-ridden food stamp programs should see the lowest funding cuts.
- Student borrowers who have been defrauded are more vulnerable: The bill delays regulations aimed at helping students who borrowed to fund an education they ultimately did not receive because their school misled them or closed while they were enrolled. (The regulations had been on hold because of ongoing litigation.) The basic idea behind these provisions was that some students take out high-cost loans because schools advertise certain benefits of their programs, such as likely job prospects. These regulations would protect borrowers who didn’t get the education they were promised from bearing the cost of those loans. Delaying these regulations is a mistake. We should not continue to saddle students who are unable to benefit from the education that they were advertised with debt that will loom over them.
- (Some) remittances will be taxed: Often immigrants in the United States send money home to their families. In 2022, more than $20 billion was sent from the U.S. to India alone. These funds are most important to poorer countries such as Lebanon and Nicaragua, where they total about 30 percent of gross domestic product. The Senate-passed bill aims to discourage remittances by taxing them. But it exempts certain types of payments: for example, those made through banks (which lobbied aggressively against the proposal) and those made with digital assets. The purported rationale for the remittance tax is to encourage self-deportation by making it more costly to ship money abroad. It is problematic in the complexity it introduces to the tax code because the applicability of the tax is dependent on how money is sent abroad. The bill gives certain financial intermediaries, such as banks, advantages over others.
- The tax code got less fair: Tax experts believe in “horizontal equity” in the code — or the idea that taxpayers with similar resources should face similar tax burdens. This bill delivers horizontal inequity. It includes new tax breaks for tipped and overtime workers, seniors and people who borrow to buy cars that result in similarly situated people of different ages or in different industries facing dramatically different tax rates. This is bad policy because people will spend energy on tax avoidance to earn income in the most tax-advantaged way.
- We’re building that garden of heroes: As one of Trump’s final acts before leaving office in his first term, he affirmed his commitment to building a statue garden of American heroes — ranging from George Washington to Julia Child to Kobe Bryant — by July 2026. Upon returning to office, he picked those plans up, calling for the construction of the garden “as expeditiously as possible.” The Senate bill moves the garden closer to reality by allocating $40 million for its construction.
There’s a lot more in these 887 pages. We are planning on going to Mars, ending unemployment benefits for millionaires and starting new — and highly complex — Trump-branded savings accounts for children born in the next few years.
What are perhaps even more revelatory than the legislative text are the testimonies we’ve seen from the lawmakers who drafted it. Sen. Jim Justice (R-West Virginia) voted for it but said “I wish to goodness” the Medicaid cuts that will hit low-income families had been excised. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), also a yes, said he would plan to spend the coming years trying to pass legislation to reverse those cuts. Murkowski, who was the deciding vote in the Senate, voted for it even though she thinks it is “not good enough.”
It is hard to disagree. The House-passed bill spends more than $3 trillion to make the tax code more complex and vulnerable Americans less healthy. Instead of curbing fraud, the legislation encourages it. In every regard, it is a mistake: It grows deficits but shrinks the economy, makes gun silencers more available but healthy food less so. What is so baffling is that Congress had months to land on a better bill before the expiration of the Trump tax provisions that has pushed this debate to the fore. Lawmakers should have taken the time they needed to craft legislation they could have read, debated and, ultimately, taken pride in — not a bill they voted for begrudgingly while trying to disown.
(Natasha Sarin, a Washington Post contributing columnist, is a professor of law at Yale Law School with a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management in the Finance Department. Previously, she served as deputy assistant secretary for economic policy and later as a counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Follow on XNatashaRSarin)
