President Donald Trump on July 4 signed into law an omnibus reconciliation bill, branded in MAGA propaganda (and much of corporate media) as the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The legislation scraped up just enough votes to narrowly pass in both chambers of the Republican-controlled Congress, with 51 to 50 votes in the Senate and 218 to 214 in the House.

The focal point of the bill is a $4.5 trillion tax cut, partly paid for by unprecedented slashes in funding for healthcare and food assistance. The wealthiest 10% will gain $12,000 a year from the legislation, while it will cost the lowest-earning 10% of families $1,600 annually. Media addressed the fiscal aspects of the bill, though more often through a fixation on the federal debt rather than looking at the effect of the budget on inequality (FAIR.org, 7/17/25).

But it’s not just a question of money. Many of the bill’s key provisions—including Medicaid, SNAP and clean energy cuts, as well as handouts to the fossil fuel, military and detention industries—will be literally deadly for people in the US and abroad, in both the near and long term.

FAIR’s Belén Fernandez (7/9/25) closely examined the dramatic lack of coverage of the vast expansion of the government’s anti-immigrant capacities. But the deadly consequences of the other aspects of the bill were also remarkably underexplained to the public.

To see how major media explained the contents and consequences of the reconciliation bill to the public before its enactment, FAIR surveyed New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR news coverage from the Senate’s passage of the final version of the bill on July 1 through July 4, the day Trump signed the bill into law. This time frame, when the actual contents of the bill were known and the House was deliberating on giving it an up or down vote, was arguably the moment when media attention was most critical to the democratic process.

‘We all are going to die’

This USA Today article (7/1/25) was one of the more informative in detailing the impact of the bill, but it still fell short of detailing the projected cost in human lives.

While corporate media reported that the finalized bill with the Senate’s revisions would significantly cut healthcare funding to subsidize the tax breaks, they rarely explained the social consequences of such cuts. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the bill will reduce $1.04 trillion in funding for Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program over the next decade. This will strip health insurance from 11.8 million people.

The New York Times (7/1/25), acknowledging these statistics, quoted Democrats who opposed the bill due to “the harmful impact it will have on Medicaid,” and who noted that people will soon “see the damage that is done as hospitals close, as people are laid off, as costs go up, as the debt increases.”

But the outlets in our sample, at this crucial time of heightened attention, failed to mention the most significant consequence of cutting Medicaid: death.

These outlets (New York Times, 5/30/25; NPR, 5/31/25; CNN, 5/31/25;  Washington Post, 6/1/25) had all earlier acknowledged what the Times called Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-IA) “morbid” response to her constituents’ concerns about deaths from Medicaid cuts: “Well, we all are going to die.”

But as the House deliberated on whether these cuts would become law, these outlets failed to reference credible research that projected that the large-scale loss of health insurance envisioned by the bill would have an annual death toll in the tens of thousands. One USA Today piece (7/1/25) did headline that “Trump’s Tax Bill Could Cut Medicaid for Millions of Americans,” but didn’t spell out the potential cost in human lives.

Before the Senate’s revisions, researchers from Yale’s School of Public Health and UPenn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (Penn LDI, 6/3/25) projected that such massive cuts to healthcare would result in 51,000 deaths annually. That number is expected to be even higher now, as the calculation was based on an earlier CBO estimate of 7.7 million people losing coverage over the next decade (CBO, 5/11/25).

‘Harms to healthcare’—not to people

CNN (7/4/25) euphemized life-threatening withdrawal of care as “harm to the healthcare system.”

CNN (7/4/25), in a piece on “Who Stands to Gain From the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill.’ And Who May Struggle,” similarly failed to spell out the dire consequences of the Medicaid cuts. It wrote that low-income Americans would be “worse off” thanks to those cuts, yet it extensively described only the fiscal impacts, as opposed to the costs in life and health, on lower- and middle-class families.

Hospitals would also be “worse off” due to the bill, as it would “leave them with more uncompensated care costs for treating uninsured patients.” This rhetorically rendered the patient, made uninsured by legislation, a burden.

The article quoted American Hospital Association CEO Rick Pollack, who said that

the real-life consequences…will result in irreparable harm to our healthcare system, reducing access to care for all Americans and severely undermining the ability of hospitals and health systems to care for our most vulnerable patients.

But CNN refused to spell out to readers what that “harm to the healthcare system” would mean: beyond “reducing access,” it would cause people to die preventable deaths.

Outlets often seemed more concerned with the impact of the bill on lawmakers’ political survival than its impact on their low-income constituents’ actual survival. The Washington Post (7/4/25), though acknowledging that their poll revealed that “two-thirds [of Americans] said they had heard either little or nothing about [the bill],” made little or no effort to contribute to an informed public. Instead, it focused on analyzing the “Six Ways Trump’s Tax Bill Could Shape the Battle for Control of Congress.”

The New York Times (7/1/25) similarly observed that the Senate Republicans’ “hard-fought legislative win came at considerable risk to their party’s political futures and fiscal legacy.” In another article (7/1/25), they noticed that it was the “more moderate and politically vulnerable Republicans” who “repeated their opposition to [the bill’s] cuts to Medicaid.”

‘Winners and losers’

“Opponents of the bill say the proposed cuts will leave millions of adults and children hungry”; the New York Times (7/1/25) apparently doesn’t know whether that’s true or not.

The Medicaid cuts aren’t the only part of the bill that will result in unnecessary deaths. The bill will cut $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a program that helps low-income individuals and families buy food. CBO (5/22/25) estimated that 3.2 million people under the age of 65 will lose food assistance. This contraction is expected to be even more deadly than the healthcare cutbacks: The same researchers from UPenn (7/2/25), along with NYU Langone Health, projected that losing SNAP benefits will result in 93,000 premature deaths between now and 2039.

SNAP cuts were mostly only mentioned alongside Medicaid, if at all (Washington Post, 7/3/25; New York Times, 7/3/25; CNN, 7/4/25). And when they did decide to dedicate a whole article to the singular provision, they rarely ventured beyond the fiscal impacts of such cuts into real, tangible consequences, such as food insecurity, hunger and death. The New York Times (7/1/25) asked “how many people will be affected,” but didn’t bother to ask “how will people be affected?”

What’s more, according to the Center for American Progress (7/7/25), the bill’s repeal of incentives for energy efficiency and improved air quality “will likely lead to 430 avoidable deaths every year by 2030 and 930 by 2035.”

The New York Times (7/3/25), however, analyzed this outcome as a changing landscape with “energy winners and losers.” It described how the bill will eliminate tax credits that have encouraged the electrification of homes and alleviated energy costs for millions of families. Somehow, the “loser” here (and all throughout the article) is the abstract concept of “energy efficiency” and private companies, not actual US families.

Another little-discussed provision in the bill is the funding for the Golden Dome, an anti-missile system named for and modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome. The bill set aside $25 billion for its development, along with another $128 billion for military initiatives like expanding the naval fleet and nuclear arsenal.

Media, though, did little more than report these numbers, when they weren’t ignored entirely (CBS, 7/4/25; CNN, 7/4/25). The New York Times (7/1/25) characterized these measures to strengthen the military/industrial complex as “the least controversial in the legislative package”; they were “meant to entice Republicans to vote for it.” In utterly failing to challenge $153 billion in spending on a military that is currently being deployed to bomb other countries in wars of aggression and to suppress protests against authoritarianism at home, the media manufacture consent for militarism as a necessity and an inevitability.

Ignorance a journalistic fail

The Washington Post’s headline and article (7/3/25) perfectly exemplified the paradox with today’s media—calling out how “The Big Problem With Trump’s Bill [Is That] Many Voters Don’t Know What’s in It.” Yet it tosses in an unsubstantial explanation about how “it deals with tax policy, border security, restocking the military/industrial complex, slashing spending on health and food programs for the poor—as well as many, many other programs.”

By reducing sweeping legislative consequences to vague generalities and by positioning ignorance as a voter issue rather than journalistic failure, media outlets maintain a veneer of critique while sidestepping accountability.

Featured image: PBS  depiction (7/30/25) of President Donald Trump signing the reconciliation bill. (photo: Alex Brandon/Pool via Reuters.)

This post was originally published on FAIR.

President Donald Trump has just signed into law what will go down as perhaps the most significant legislative achievement of his second term in office. Dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the legislation is set to extend most of the tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term, while making deep cuts to social programs and gutting Biden-era climate provisions, among other sweeping changes (FAIR.org, 7/9/25).

The bill will have a remarkably regressive distributional impact. While top incomes will balloon by thousands of dollars, lower-income Americans will actually see their incomes decline. One analysis from before the bill’s final passage found that its major provisions would reduce incomes for the bottom 20% by about 2%.

Tax cuts, after all, are only one part of the bill. More relevant to lower-income Americans is that this bill will deliver the largest cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in US history.

Such a historic weakening of the safety net—the programs that support the finances of lower-income Americans—should warrant not only major attention, but significant scrutiny from national media outlets. And yet, at the New York Times, the approach has been to distract and obscure above all else.

‘Defined by staggering debt’

As Trump slashed $1 trillion from healthcare, the New York Times (6/27/25) stressed the importance of reducing the deficit. 

One manifestation of this approach has been the Times’ insistence on elevating the bill’s effect on the debt as a foremost concern. In the week or so leading up to the bill’s passage, in fact, both an editorial (6/27/25) and an episode of the Times’ flagship podcast the Daily (7/2/25) were dedicated entirely to a discussion of the national debt.

The Daily episode went as far as claiming, “The legislation is defined by the staggering amount of debt that it’s creating.” It then warned of the potential for a debt “doom loop,” whereby rising debt raises borrowing costs and forces the government to issue more debt in order to pay for its existing debt load.

Meanwhile, the Times editorial board opted to focus more heavily on the costs already being imposed by high federal debt. In a piece titled “The National Debt Is Already Causing Bigger Problems Than People Realize,” the board highlighted the “staggering amount of money” the government puts towards interest payments each year. The board’s solution:

The government needs to raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, and it needs to make long-term changes in Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of spending growth.

In other words, at a time when the Republican Party is gutting the safety net in epic fashion, the New York Times is coyly hinting that Social Security and Medicare will need to be cut.

‘Enough to repair every bridge’

The New York Times‘ own chart (6/27/25) indicates that Trump’s budget bill will have only a modest impact on US interest payments. What did cause interest costs to soar was the political decision to fight inflation through higher interest rates, a decision the Times applauded  (FAIR.org, 1/25/23, 6/27/23).

Across both the editorial and the podcast episode, the primary reason put forward by the Times for concern over the national debt was the borrowing costs associated with it. But is the bill’s effect on borrowing costs—the amount of money the federal government will have to spend to pay off the interest on its debts—genuinely that significant of a concern?

The Times editorial board seems to think so. Warning of the ill effects of increasing borrowing costs, the board observed:

The House version of Mr. Trump’s bill, already approved by that chamber, would increase interest payments on the debt by an average of $55 billion a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The increase alone is enough money to fully repair every bridge in the United States.

This comparison is useful to a degree. It exposes the priorities of the Trump administration, which seems to value tax cuts for the wealthy above delivering basic public goods.

But the comparison ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. The reality is that $55 billion is a relatively small sum for the US government. It represents only about 0.8% of the 2024 federal budget, and 0.2% of US GDP.

High cost of high interest rates

The interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bills has risen from 0.6% in 2020 to 4.5% today (chart: CNBC).

The total amount the federal government pays in interest—the amount it pays in excess of what it borrowed when it pays back loans—is of course much larger: The Times relays that interest payments are on pace to surpass $1 trillion this year, representing around 15% of last year’s federal budget. As the editorial board notes, this level of spending on interest payments crowds out other, more useful spending by the government. In other words, it does impose a not-insignificant cost.

What the board de-emphasizes or ignores, however, is that high interest payments are really just a symptom of other more fundamental policy choices.

On the one hand, they reflect the political decision to rely on the blunt instrument of interest rates to combat the pandemic-era spike in inflation. The result has been a rise in interest rates on ten-year government bonds, from under 1% in 2020 to above 4% today.

This was not an inevitable development. Other methods exist for combating inflation. But these methods were sidelined in favor of a regressive, debt-inflating approach. Would you know this by reading the Times editorial? Absolutely not.

The incredibly low tax rate

The United States has one of the lowest effective tax rates among wealthy countries (chart: Tax Policy Center).

On the other hand, high interest payments also reflect the political decision to run up the US debt load through tax cuts for the wealthy. This history of tax cuts is discussed by the editorial board, but it is framed as more of a secondary issue. Little would readers know that the crowding-out effect imposed by high interest payments, which the Times depicts climbing above the cost of Social Security in coming years, is dwarfed by the crowding-out effect of low tax revenue.

For such a rich country, the US collects incredibly little in taxes. Its tax revenue registers a meager 29% of GDP, compared to 42% in Canada, 52% in France and 62% in Norway.

Meanwhile, interest payments as a percentage of GDP are set to double over the next 30 years, reaching about 6% of GDP in the 2050s. That’s not even half the revenue deficit the US faces versus Canada—and Canada’s a low-tax country compared to France and Norway!

The Times nonetheless has run no editorial in recent months decrying the US for being such a low-tax country. Even in its editorial about interest payments, a breakdown of the pitiful state of US tax collection by international standards is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get a muddled denunciation of the bill’s irresponsible contribution to burdensome borrowing costs.

But, again, the bill’s contribution is tiny. Yes, interest payments are projected to reach 6% of GDP by the 2050s, but they will hit 5% even in the absence of this bill. With this single percentage of GDP boost in borrowing costs, the bill imposes a cost in 30 years that is a fraction of the cost of our tax deficit versus Canada today.

‘People benefit from working’

In its one editorial (5/23/25) on the reconciliation bill’s cuts to the safety net, the New York Times endorsed the idea “that some government benefits should be tied to employment.”

This is not to say that the Big Beautiful Bill will not impose Major Gratuitous Pain. But it is to say that such pain will not be found in an analysis of its impact on borrowing costs.

Rather, where we should look to see clear evidence of negative effects is the savings side of the bill, where Republicans have enacted brutal cuts to the social safety net, cuts that the economist James Galbraith calls “the direct result of bipartisan scaremongering over deficits and debt.”

The Times editorial board has run one editorial (5/23/25) on the bill’s cuts to the safety net. Published over a month before the bill’s passage, the piece was headlined “Republicans Can’t Hide Medicaid Cuts in a ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill.” As it pointed out, the Republican bill would reverse the progress that has been made over the past decade or so in expanding health insurance access to more Americans.

Oddly, however, the editorial extended an olive branch to the GOP, conceding:

We are sympathetic to the idea that some government benefits should be tied to employment. People benefit from working, and society benefits when more people are working.

Explaining the decision to insert this concession into the piece, editorial director David Leonhardt (New York Times, 7/1/25) has since elaborated:

I actually understand why, at a top-line way, people would want to put work requirements on a federal program, and actually I do think there are federal programs that should have work requirements. I’m a pretty big skeptic of universal basic income, of the idea that we’re just going to have the federal government give people lots of money outright. I don’t think it’s worked very well. I think it’s hugely expensive.

This is a baffling explanation. As worded in the editorial, it appears that the board is expressing sympathy for work requirements for some existing government benefits, and justifying them with reference to the value of work, despite work requirements’ long history of doing nothing to increase employment. Yet Leonhardt gives no example of a current government program that should be saddled with a work requirement. Instead, he merely expresses his opposition to universal basic income, using conservative arguments against the policy in doing so. This level of clarity, however, may be all we can expect from the Times.

Unnoted cutbacks

At least as notable as the contents of the editorials published by the Times on the Big Beautiful Bill is what the Times has failed to highlight about the legislation. After all, the paper has run just two editorials on what is probably the most regressive major piece of legislation in at least a generation. What have these missed? A lot.

For one, the largest cuts to food stamps in history are entirely absent from the Times editorial board’s critiques of the bill. That millions would lose access to food stamps and tens of millions would see their benefits cut is apparently an afterthought for the board. It evidently does not warrant the denunciation that somewhat higher borrowing costs require.

Decimation of clean energy provisions and heavy new restrictions on student loans likewise appear a grand total of zero times in the Times’ editorials on the bill. This is the sort of resistance that the most prominent establishment newspaper in the country has to offer.

‘Big ugly battle’

The situation at the Daily has been better, though it had only a rather low bar to clear. Through the day the bill was signed into law, the show published three episodes on the legislation. The first (6/5/25), titled “The Big Ugly Battle Over the Big Beautiful Bill,” touched on the bill’s attacks on climate provisions in its first half, and devoted its second half to a conversation about cuts to Medicaid.

Food stamps, by contrast, were mentioned in just two sentences. And student loans didn’t make a single appearance.

The following episode (7/2/25), discussed above, centered on the debt, but the third episode (7/4/25) dedicated additional airtime to cuts to the safety net, again including a discussion of Medicaid cuts in the second half of the episode. Its first half also centered the serious negative impacts of the legislation, mostly focusing on the array of tax cuts in the bill, but framing the overall impact as wildly regressive:

The most important thing to know about this package is that it delivers its greatest benefits to the wealthy, and it extracts its greatest cuts on the poor.

The largest cuts to food stamps in American history, however, garnered no airtime. Same goes for the massive pullback in student loans.

A ripple in a tsunami

We found only two New York Times headlines like this one (6/5/25)—out of nearly 800 in its US politics section—that straightforwardly conveyed the impact of the budget bill’s cuts.

Unfortunately, this poor coverage is not limited to Times editorials and the Daily. As it turns out, the news section of the Times has been similarly lacking in serious coverage.

The paper’s US Politics section is case in point. From the start of June through July 4, when Trump signed his bill into law, this section of the Times featured a total of seven articles that mentioned “food stamp(s),” “SNAP” or “food aid” in either their headline or subhead. For “Medicaid,” “health cuts” and “Obamacare,” the number was ten.

But few of these articles bore headlines straightforwardly reporting the facts of what’s projected to happen to millions of Americans as a result of cuts to food stamps and healthcare spending. In total, only two headlines, both about healthcare, really fit this description:

• “GOP Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, CBO Says” (6/29/25)
• “Millions Would Lose Their Obamacare Coverage Under Trump’s Bill” (6/5/25)

Other headlines mentioned cuts, but some didn’t even reference that information. For instance, one headline (6/3/25) read, “Trump Administration Backs Off Effort to Collect Data on Food Stamp Recipients.”

Amazingly, at least in the US Politics section of the paper, zero headlines included the phrase “student loans,” despite substantial retrenchment in student loan policy. The term “safety net” appeared in the headline or subhead of only six articles.

With around 800 articles appearing in the Times’ US Politics section during this timeframe, coverage of historic cuts to crucial safety net programs resembled a ripple in a tsunami.

‘Fair to criticize Democrats’

The type sizes conveys the relative importance the New York Times (7/1/25) places on prices paid by politicians vs. those paid by the public.

Nonetheless, when Times editorial director David Leonhardt was asked whether he thinks “Americans who will be impacted by these cuts understand what’s happening,” given the lack of public outcry so far, he gave credit to Republicans for succeeding in minimizing public opposition, and blamed Democrats for failing to make a bigger deal out of the bill:

I also think it’s fair to criticize the Democratic Party and activists who are aligned with the Democratic Party for not figuring out ways to make a bigger deal out of these cuts. To some extent, they’ve allowed the Republican cynical strategy of staying away from town halls to work better than it might have.

The role of corporate media, and more particularly of the New York Times, may never have even crossed Leonhardt’s mind. But, of course, the Times is a critical player in US politics. With around 12 million subscribers and millions of daily listeners to the Daily, the outlet has incredible reach. If it wanted to, the Times could play a significant role in raising public awareness of this bill. The problem is that it seems completely uninterested in adopting this role.

I would argue, therefore, that the paltry public outcry is fundamentally a result of editorial decisions, not least those made at the Times. By refusing to cover cuts to the social safety net with more than minimal urgency, the Times has done a good deal to deprive the Democratic Party and other opponents of the legislation of the sort of informational environment in which public opposition to harmful policies can be effectively mobilized.

Through inaction, through poor coverage, the Times is making a political choice to undermine opposition to some of the Trump administration’s most damaging policies.

This post was originally published on FAIR.