Georgians React to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill

When Congress passed President Donald Trump’s controversial budget bill July 3, Republicans and Democrats went to their corners to portray it either as the largest tax cut in U.S. history or a devastating gutting of the nation’s safety net.

But beyond the politics, Georgia health-care and clean-energy advocates warned that cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and food stamps, as well as the phasing out of clean-energy tax credits will hurt low- and middle-income Georgians in exchange for easing the tax burden on the wealthy who don’t need such government largesse.

“It’s the largest cut ever, and it moves us in the wrong direction,” said Monte Veazey, president and CEO of the Georgia Alliance of Community Hospitals. “It’s a moral failure that hurts everyone who depends on our health-care system.”

The bill’s cuts to health care will kick about 93,000 Georgians off of Medicaid and raise health-insurance premiums for more than 1.2 million Georgians, according to numbers released by U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga. More than 120,000 Georgia children will lose some or all food assistance, according to Warnock.

Veazey said rural Georgia will be hit particularly hard, with 16 cash-strapped rural hospitals facing potential closure and others being forced to reduce services they offer that lose money.

“For every Medicaid patient we serve, we lose about 17 cents on the dollar,” he said. “This is going to grow that number. It’s going to be difficult for people to access the health-care system.”

Advocates for low-income Georgians and children said the federal cuts will shift the cost of paying for health insurance and food to states.

Georgia will have a couple of choices, they said: dig into its own treasury to fill the void or cut services.

State cutbacks to the ACA, Medicaid and SNAP (the food stamps program) could be achieved by introducing more administrative requirements, they said, something the federal government is already imposing.

Identity “proofing” challenges with ACA “mean that many folks just won’t enroll because of administrative burdens,” said Whitney Griggs, director of health policy for Georgians for a Healthy Future.

Work requirements and direct cuts will cost Georgia $10 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade, said Leah Chan, director of health justice for the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute.

SNAP cuts will also hit the state, said Ife Finch Floyd, the Georgia Budget & Policy Institute’s director of economic justice.

The federal government historically has covered the full cost of SNAP, but the new budget bill changed that by requiring states to pay a percentage of their cost if they have an unacceptable payment “error rate,” meaning inaccurate eligibility roles, Chan said.

“This is unprecedented, and this is a fundamental change in the structure of the SNAP program,” she said.

In a few years, states with an error rate of 6% or more will have to pay 5% to 15% of their program benefit costs, Chan said, noting that in Georgia, 5% is equal to $162 million.

It also will become harder for Georgians to qualify for SNAP with the new federal work requirements. Currently, people ages 18-54 without children or a qualifying disability must prove they are working 80 hours a month to receive benefits. The federal cuts extend that to age 64 and will require parents of kids ages 14-17 to hold a job.

The phasing out of clean-energy tax credits will do tremendous damage to fast-growing renewable energy and electric vehicle operations across Georgia, said Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga. The massive EV plant Hyundai opened in March west of Savannah in Bryan County is the largest economic development project in the state’s history.

“The renewable sector, solar manufacturing, battery production, electric vehicle manufacturing will all be hurt,” Ossoff said. “This bill is a direct attack on the industry that is driving Georgia’s economic development, job creation, and wealth creation.”

The same goes for the state’s solar energy industry, added Hannah Shultz, program director at the nonprofit Georgia Interfaith Power and Light.

“Solar tax incentives have allowed over a dozen faith communities in the last several years to build resilience, reduce their electric costs, and reinvest savings into vital mission and ministry initiatives in service to their communities,” she said. “It is incredibly disheartening to see partisan politics take precedence over real impacts to people and our planet.”

While most of the reaction to the budget bill has come from critics decrying the various spending cuts, one group that stands to benefit from the legislation is farmers.

Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Tyler Harper said prices of farm inputs have increased by 30% in the last half dozen years. Nationally, the bill invests an additional $60 billion in farm programs.

“It helps agriculture across the board,” Harper said. “Investment in farm programs … is a success for all farms regardless of size.”

Even taxpayer advocates are criticizing the bill because of its impact on the nation’s growing debt. Nearly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts nationwide are projected to add a net $3.24 trillion to the red ink.

“Congress has officially lost its mind when it comes to fiscal responsibility,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is a really ugly, scary, ticking debt bomb.”

But Kyle Wingfield, president and CEO of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, said the bill’s tax cuts simply make permanent the lower tax rates Congress enacted early in Trump’s first term in the White House. Without the bill, those 2017 tax cuts would have expired, leading to a major tax increase, Wingfield said.

Wingfield disputed claims by opponents that the measure only benefits the wealthy.

“It’s all the brackets all the way up and down,” he said. “The bulk of the tax money that gets cut goes to the middle class because there are so many middle-class taxpayers.”

The work requirement in the bill for Medicaid recipients has been widely criticized since many face significant barriers to employment including health problems and child-care duties.

But Wingfield said the legislation could give able-bodied recipients the incentive they need to find a job.

“Far from being a punitive or harmful policy, this could end up helping people be in a better position,” he said.